NEW YORK — U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte yesterday asked the U.N. Security Council to endorse an expanded multinational force for Iraq, including a unit assigned to protect U.N. personnel.
The request is a concrete sign that the Bush administration wants the international organization to return to Iraq with significant responsibilities, despite indications from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan earlier this week that an ambitious undertaking is unlikely.
The soldiers tasked with protecting U.N. operations would, like all foreign troops now in Iraq, serve under the U.S. command established in a council resolution in October.
Mr. Negroponte, who is favored to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq after the June 30 turnover, also yesterday asked governments to consider sending more troops to the country to assist with the difficult security situation throughout the transition period.
“With the support of the United Nations, the United States has begun to solicit force contributions for the protection of a broad-based U.N. mission whose role will be further defined by Security Council action,” Mr. Negroponte said yesterday.
“I believe that I do not overstate the broad desire within the international community for the United Nations to return to Iraq to play an expansive, robust and vital role, in particular after the June 30 transition.”
The Bush administration has, until recently, largely rejected international demands that the United Nations play a central role in the political development and reconstruction of Iraq. However, as its own transitional plans have failed to jell, Washington has turned to the international organization with increased expectations.
The administration this week appeared to embrace the proposal for a transitional administration sketched earlier this week by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who has just completed a 12-day visit to Iraq. Under that plan, the U.S.-created Iraqi Governing Council would be dissolved, and a caretaker government with appointed leaders and a popular assembly would shepherd Iraq until a government can be properly elected in January 2005.
“Our thinking is very much that he’s got the lead on this issue and that his recommendations will carry a great deal of weight,” Mr. Negroponte told reporters after the long-scheduled council briefing.
Mr. Brahimi, who is expected to spend a week at his home in Paris before returning to New York to discuss his plans with Mr. Annan, the council and other diplomats, stressed that the elections will be very difficult unless the security situation is brought under control.
A new Security Council resolution to support the transitional administration and bolster the multinational force is likely to be adopted by the Security Council before the turnover.
“I’m sure over the next several weeks this is an issue we’re going to have to address,” Mr. Negroponte told reporters after the morning session, noting that no draft has yet been introduced.
He said the resolution would likely deal with “a number of other technicalities … in connection with transferring from an occupation type situation to one of the restoration of the exercise of sovereignty to the government of Iraq.”
The United Nations yesterday announced that a team of electoral experts led by Carina Perelli had left Iraq safely. Ms. Perelli, the director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, said the security situation in Iraq should stabilize before credible elections can be held. She also suggested the Iraqis could form an electoral assistance office.
Mr. Negroponte, in his appeal for more troop contributions, did not attempt to sugarcoat the increasingly tumultuous situation in parts of Iraq.
“The events of recent days demonstrate yet again that there are those who believe that they should decide Iraq’s political future through violence,” he told the council. “We have witnessed ambush and mutilation, riots and attacks. … The violence has been terrible, and the losses great.”
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