BAGHDAD, 24 September 2003 — The latest bomb had just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of explosives, but Baghdad’s car bombings, one by one, are reverberating around the world, sending an unmistakable message from America’s enemies to America’s friends — stay away from Iraq.
Monday morning’s blast outside the UN compound came less than 24 hours before US President George W. Bush is to address the United Nations in New York seeking help from allies in rebuilding postwar Iraq, and mere days after a tape believed to be from Saddam Hussein warned UN members to avoid falling into “traps of America’s foreign policy.”
Last month’s devastating bombing at the same site killed 23 people and marked what UN chief Kofi Annan called a “loss of innocence” for the world body. Only last Friday did the shaken, grieving Baghdad staff finally raise their blue UN flag again from half-staff, in hopes of a return to some normality. The second blast blew away even that slim hope.
This time the suicide bomber got no farther than the fringe of the UN complex; the dead numbered only the bomber and a luckless Iraqi policeman. Tightened security seems to have worked. But the repeated attacks may chip away nonetheless at global willingness to come to Iraq and to Washington’s aid — with troops, money and international civil servants.
“People are worried and wondering why this has happened yet again,” one official inside the UN headquarters commented privately. “Their work is civilian and humanitarian. The question on everyone’s mind is `Why?”’
The answer seems clear: Whoever is hammering at the bomb-scarred compound on Baghdad’s northeastern edge wants to deny UN legitimacy to the American military occupation of Iraq.
“If there are plans to involve the United N ations further in the reconstruction of Iraq, attacking the UN constantly, or its people, will give it pause. This is one thing the insurgents want to prevent,” said Ahmed S. Hashim, a Middle East specialist at the US Naval War College.
That UN involvement is under debate behind closed doors in New York, where diplomats — primarily the Americans and French — are trying to fashion a Security Council resolution authorizing international troop contributions to the Iraq security force, in exchange for a greater UN say over a speedier political transition to full Iraqi sovereignty.
Many governments, however, are already reluctant to order soldiers into the Iraqi turmoil.
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, for example, whose Muslim troops would diversify the US-led Western force here, said Sunday he couldn’t send any because of the Pakistani people’s staunch opposition to the idea.
On the American side, Bush expressed his own reluctance Sunday to surrender much of the current US political control over Iraq. “I’m not so sure we have to,” he said in a television interview.
The fugitive ex-president Saddam and his supporters would cheer a breakdown in the UN negotiations. In the tape broadcast last Wednesday, the voice said to be Saddam’s addressed wavering UN states. “We hope that none of the Security Council members fall prey in the traps of America’s foreign policy,” the voice said.
Iraq’s anti-American forces aren’t targeting the United Nations alone in their campaign to isolate the US occupiers. Car bombs have also killed US-trained Iraqi policemen and the leading Shiite Muslim clergyman who had shown a willingness to deal with the Americans.
But the global organization — starting with its traumatized and reduced staff in Baghdad — is the biggest target, its compound now a battered symbol of a test of wills.
As he lay trapped and dying in the ruins of his office after the Aug. 19 bombing, the chief UN representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, told would-be rescuers, “Don’t let them pull the mission out.”
Whether his last words are heeded, whether Iraq moves toward an internationally supervised rebirth, or sinks deeper into an anti-American guerrilla war, remains an open question, as the world watches the debate in New York — and waits to hear the sound of the next Baghdad bomb.
