Next time you hear the Bush Administration boast about the multinational support for its occupation of Iraq, remember the story of the Hungarian truck company. It turns out that the Hungarians, who offered to send a truck company to Iraq, have no trucks, or other equipment commonly associated with a military unit of this type. “They contribute 133 drivers, but no trucks, or mechanics, or anything else,” a Defense Department official said. “Either somebody else is going to donate trucks, or they’re going to be driving ours.”
Maybe Hungary played a small role in the Bush Administration‘s recent change of course. What with the costs of the occupation running $1 billion a week, demoralized US soldiers facing what the military’s new commander in Iraq calls a “classical guerrilla-type” war, and dozens of nations refusing to contribute troops or money without a UN mandate, Administration officials acknowledge they are rethinking their disastrous strategy.
On Saturday, it was reported that after spurning the United Nations in the run-up to war, the Administration may seek a UN resolution that could placate countries like India, Germany–even the reviled France. “The Administration has to give up its arrogant attitude toward foreign policy–it’s my way or the highway–and bring in the international community,” Senator Edward Kennedy said in a televised interview last week.
A shift away from unilateral US control has broad potential support. In a late June Knowledge Network Poll, 64 percent of Americans wanted the UN to take a leadership role in Iraq, up from 50 percent in April. And in a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken in mid-July, 52 percent considered the level of US casualties “unacceptable.” (Several more US soldiers have been killed since.)
Having to return to the United Nations would be a humiliating defeat for the neocon extremists who were determined to wage war without international support. As Joseph Nye, Jr., Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, told the New York Times, “for some of them–in particular those who celebrated that we didn’t use the UN–it will be painful.” We can only hope.
