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| Iraq has hard cash – saved when oil prices were high – but its infrastructure needs an overhaul. Lord Mandelson was accompanied by representatives of more than 20 British construction companies, while President Sarkozy promised there will be “no limits” to French involvement in Iraq's reconstruction.
The potential rewards are huge; last December, Iraq’s government signed a €1.5bn deal with Germany’s Siemens for gas turbines. Baghdad has also offered to supply up to half the gas for the new Nabucco pipeline that is meant to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy supplies.
But the risks remain very significant too. Iraq may have grown safer, but its stability is far from assured. With the U.S. poised to draw down its forces – and Iraq’s own army and police still far from consistently reliable – the country faces continued uncertainty. In Washington, many Middle East experts fear the consequences of Iraq being forgotten, overshadowed by Afghanistan and Pakistan.
If European governments want to develop trade with Iraq, they need to contribute to the country’s security – or their investments may go to waste. A relapse into violence would be very damaging to the EU in other ways, destabilising its relations with Turkey, weakening its diplomacy with Iran and even endangering its policy towards Palestine.
European governments are not unaware of these dangers. This year, Germany set aside €150m for support to Iraq. Yet the last thing the Baghdad government needs is a slew of well-intentioned but poorly-coordinated security initiatives from the West.
The ill effects of under-coordinated aid have already been demonstrated in Afghanistan after the initial defeat of the Taliban. Individual European states adopted specific projects – Germany took on the police, Italy handled the judiciary, Britain attempted to get a grip on drugs – and the result was an unproductive mess.
Something similar has since happened in Iraq, although on a smaller scale. Italy is offering in-country police training, while Germany also offers training, but in Jordan and the Gulf. There has also been a (predictable) gap between support from those countries that backed the U.S. in 2003 and those that refused to do so, reducing the options for EU coordination.
Future European aid to Iraq needs to be applied more strategically. This is especially true because it is necessary to avoid clashing with the work of the U.S., still crucial to all foreign engagement with Baghdad, and the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI). The latter has significantly expanded its activities, taking on assignments the U.S. could not resolve, like mediating internal boundary disputes between Baghdad and the Kurds.
But as Middle East expert Elizabeth Sellwood warned in a recent report for New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, UNAMI’s “capacities are limited and the UN’s reputation in Iraq is still fragile.” There are looming challenges on security sector reform as the Iraqi government attempts to find a modus vivendi with formerly hostile militias previously pacified by U.S. cash.
So there are still gaps for Europeans to fill in Iraq, especially in helping mould the country’s security forces into a credible, accountable whole. To tackle this, European efforts should be channelled through a single framework, to be provided by the EU. Had anyone suggested in 2003 that the EU could play a major coordinating role in Iraq, they would either have been ignored, or mocked. But now, with the disputes that surrounded the war finally fading into history, the European Union it is well-placed to do so.
Gradually and largely unnoticed, the Council of the EU and European Commission have already established themselves as players in Iraq. The Commission has recently enlarged the Baghdad office, it opened in 2005. It has committed nearly €1bn to Iraq since Saddam’s fall. The Council has been involved in building up Iraq’s police and judiciary through EUJUST LEX, an ESDP mission that has in the last four years brought 2,000 Iraqi officials to Europe for training in everything from murder investigations to financial crime.
In March, the Council approved proposals for EUJUST LEX to start in-country training programmes. It is currently expected to remain small-scale: the mission still has just 30 staff, compared to the UN’s 300. Nonetheless, this decision could be one more step towards a much more expansive EU role in coordinating police and justice issues in Iraq.
This role would not centre on training rank-and-file police officers, which has been the priority for the U.S. and its allies in the immediate post-conflict years. Instead, the focus is now to be on developing Iraq’s strategies for fighting smuggling and organised crime, and ensuring democratic oversight of its security services in a fashion acceptable to all communities.
Daniel Serwer, a former U.S. diplomat and post-conflict specialist, stresses that these are strategies that require competent civil servants as well as policemen. The U.S. has struggled to develop Iraq’s Interior Ministry, in part because it still relies heavily on military personnel. The EU could take over, says Serwer, by deploying two hundred Europeans prepared to move into the ministry and give it the close, hands-on attention it needs.”
European officials might be tempted to throw unseemly tantrums at the idea of raising 200 personnel for Iraq. The priorities for Brussels remain Afghanistan and the Balkans, and already the Council has not found it easy to find staff to send to Kosovo and Kabul. But even a lesser number of experts with specialties like border security would make a difference. If EU member states were prepared to hire recently retired police and civil servants on the open market – currently a controversial topic in Brussels – it wouldn’t be hard to find 200 of them.
The EU could maximize its leverage by uniting its security personnel and Commission staff together under a “double-hatted” EU Special Representative (EUSR). The relatively small number of personnel would carry weight because of the aid money behind them. The idea of a EUSR for Iraq has been floated before, with Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt among its advocates. Previously, there was no European consensus in favour, but Bildt could well make use of Sweden’s current stint in the EU presidency to get agreement on creating the position.
The enlarged ESDP mission could also increase its muscle by incorporating the small NATO-run military training mission in Iraq that has been there since 2003. This not only educates senior Iraqi officers but provides “gendarmerie-type” training to the police – in layman’s terms, teaching them how to handle riots and even low-level insurgency. Consolidating these activities under EU command would not only simplify interactions with the police but would relieve NATO of a minor burden as it concentrates it energies on Afghanistan.
And while the Afghan crisis is placing new strains on the transatlantic relationship, an EU effort to cement stability in Iraq would win some gratitude from the Obama Administration. European and U.S. strategists alike also recognise that an effective Western presence in Iraq is needed to widen the containment of threats from Iran.
Although the “EU Three” of Britain, France and Germany have led UN efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Europe has played a very limited role in Gulf security. Its interactions with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the most promising regional partner – have been largely limited to economic matters, not urgent political ones.
An expanded EU presence in Iraq could act as an anchor for enhanced regional efforts. To support the GCC, the EU could launch new initiatives in the region based on the Stability Pact for South-East Europe devised to foster regional cooperation after the Bosnian war. Other issues like maritime security and border disputes could be added to trade-focused talks to build greater trust.
The EU’s menu of options in Iraq – civilian security, good governance and regional coordination – seems almost perfectly tailored to the Union’s own skill-set. After all, ESDP missions have handled similar issues not only in the Balkans but from Aceh to Africa.
But Iraq is Iraq. Reinforcing the EU’s role there will be doubly painful. EU members that supported the U.S.-led invasion, like Britain, are wary of handing any responsibilities to Brussels. And those that did not might still prefer to minimise their public profile in Baghdad. After all, if the EU were to set up a new headquarters in Iraq, it could be a target for terrorists – just as UNAMI’s HQ was an early victim of suicide bombing in 2003.
But if Europeans hope their leading businesses can make profits in Iraq without their governments bearing some of the security costs, they will find themselves in a morally dubious and operationally silly position. The divisions within the EU over Iraq made it look all too foolish in 2003, so now it’s time to get serious. |