The Bush administration is considering a request to the United Nations for a new resolution on Iraq which would encourage other countries to provide peace-keeping troops to relieve American and British forces, Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
This follows major setbacks in the last week when Russia and India dashed US hopes of putting together a truly international peacekeeping force. Both countries announced they would not provide troops without a new UN mandate.
The Pentagon had been confident that India would provide 17,000 troops, making it the second-largest military presence, but New Delhi turned the US down last week.
The urgency has increased with exhausted US troops subject to ever more deadly attacks each week and the cost of the low-level war running to $4 billion a month, twice what Washington previously estimated.
Pressure from Democrats is mounting for the Bush administration to get over its problems with the UN and admit that the "coalition of the willing" put together by the Pentagon is not sufficient to conduct peace-keeping operations in Iraq. Hungary, for example, offered to send a truck battalion to Iraq but without trucks.
Senator Joseph Biden said yesterday that it was "childishness" not to ask countries like France and Germany for troops despite the pre-war disagreements over invading Iraq. France has said it is willing to provide military aid under a UN mandate.
The British ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said at the weekend: "We've got to get around the problem that we are the occupying power and people don't want to join the occupying powers."
The UN's representative in Iraq, Mr Sergio de Mello, will report to the UN Security Council tomorrow. Representatives from the new Governing Council of Iraqi leaders will take Iraq's UN seat and also address the council.
The UN is not seeking to take over post- war security in Iraq, the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, makes clear in a report to council members. Mr Annan instead is calling on the US and Britain to publish a timetable for the end of US military occupation so Iraqis could see when their sovereignty would be restored.
While welcoming the new US-sponsored Iraqi body, he warned that many Iraqi leaders had complained to Mr de Mello that democracy could not be imposed from outside and that reconstruction was moving too slowly.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said Security Council resolution 1483, which recognises the US as the occupying power, should give enough "cover" for countries to claim UN endorsement, but he conceded that more was needed.
"There are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations and I am in conversations with some ministers about this, as well as with the secretary general of the United Nations," he said.
The US dilemma is compounded by the urgent need for replacement troops in Iraq. The US army with just 10 active duty divisions is seriously stretched around the world and faces the prospect of providing 5,000 troops in Liberia.
The Pentagon is planning to establish a one-year tour of duty in Iraq so that troops who won the war can be sent home, particularly from the 15,000- strong 3rd Mechanised Infantry Division which led US forces into Iraq.
The US has 147,000 troops in the country. Before the war, the Pentagon had predicted that troops levels would be reduced to well below 100,000 by now but the army has become engaged in fighting a guerrilla insurgency.
Mr Biden pointed out yesterday that a soldier had been killed guarding a bank which, he said, was work for a police force, not the US army.
An Iraqi driver for the UN was killed and a foreign member of staff injured yesterday when their vehicle crashed into a bus after being hit by gunfire south of Baghdad. Mr Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for the UN special representative in Iraq, said the attack on the two-car convoy was the first time UN vehicles had been fired on since international staff returned to Iraq since the war ended.The injuries were caused by the collision rather than the gunshots. - (Reuters)