On June 30, a temporary, appointed Iraqi government will assume what the Bush administration now calls "limited sovereignty” over a country still policed by troops under foreign command. The six-month period during which that interim caretaker government, outlined Wednesday at the United Nations Security Council by special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, will have nominal control of Iraq may well prove to be the most precarious of the entire Iraqi venture. A weak government that lacks popular legitimacy will attempt to exercise authority over a restive country bristling with militias, all while picking its way through the minefield that will be its relationship with the United States.
If the caretaker government defies U.S. interests and is overruled by presumptive U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, it will betray its powerlessness. If it accedes uniformly to U.S. wishes, particularly on matters of security, it appears to be nothing more than a vehicle for the continuation of the occupation. Its very raison d'être is to defuse Iraqi political frustrations by demonstrating a U.S. commitment to eventual Iraqi self-determination. But, in itself, the interim government doesn't embody much more than a symbolic step down that road -- one whose symbolism could easily turn the other way.
We are in this jam for bad reasons. It would have made more sense, in November or preferably earlier, to have determined the earliest possible date for reasonably free and fair elections and pegged a real transfer of sovereignty to that. Then there would be no interim government. The Coalition Provisional Authority would hand over power to a legitimately representative Iraqi government, whatever its flaws, and that government could invite multinational peacekeepers to fill the security vacuum. Such a plan would have required a lot of hard work and some amount of delay. In order not just to clear the administrative and security obstacles to elections but to allow Iraqis, whose civic life had been crushed for at least 35 years, to organize political parties and campaign for one another's support, the transfer date might have been set for September 2004 at the earliest.
But the Bush administration was determined to take a symbolic step earlier than that -- at least partly, it's commonly believed, in order to have something to show for itself in August at the Republican convention. It would not be possible to extract American troops or to hold elections by then, but the administration wanted to be able to say that it had ceased to administer the country politically.
This calculation most likely produced the November 15, 2003, agreement, which had the Coalition Provisional Authority transferring sovereignty on June 30, 2004, to a transitional assembly selected through regional caucuses. The caucuses provided a means short of elections to broaden political participation beyond the U.S.-appointed, 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. The assembly produced through the caucuses would appoint an interim government and prepare for elections at the end of 2004 or beginning of 2005. But the November 15 agreement was scuttled when the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded direct elections to any sovereign Iraqi government. With June approaching too fast to organize anything but the dirtiest of elections, the options were to delay the transfer or to pursue an even less democratic alternative than the one al-Sistani had nixed: the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, or some expanded version thereof, would assume the mantle of interim government.
The Bush administration, by all appearances, never seriously considered delaying the transfer. It was probably right not to: The United States had painted itself into a corner, where to renege on a promise of sovereignty would cast all kinds of doubts on U.S. intentions and further inflame an already volatile situation. Nonetheless, if popular legitimacy is at issue, there is one thing Iraqi opinion polls demonstrate without exception, and that is overwhelming distrust and distaste for most of the politicians serving on the governing council. The council has every reason to attempt to further entrench itself in power in the months leading to elections. If it were to succeed, it would be hard to imagine that the coalition's armed challengers would lay down their arms.
Brahimi's plan offers a way out of the impasse. The UN is to consult broadly with Iraqis in order to appoint a technocratic government consisting of a president, a prime minister, and two vice presidents. These figures will preferably not be politicians who intend to stand for election in January 2005; nor will the caretaker government assume long-term commitments that will be binding on the future Iraqi government. Rather, it will occupy itself with the daily functions of the state until elections can be held. This caretaker government will be supported by a large consultative body that will have no legislative powers but will provide a forum for a broad-based national dialogue.
This is hardly the direct democracy that al-Sistani called for in December. In fact, it sounds in many ways like a more elite version of what would have been produced through the caucuses envisaged in November. But the Brahimi plan has the advantage of being administered by the United Nations, which may not enjoy unquestioned legitimacy among Iraqis but whose neutrality is open to less question than that of the occupying powers. The UN has the added advantage of owing little or nothing to the Iraqi Governing Council.
Brahimi's plan is the best of bad options. Now the United States owes Brahimi and the UN an honest explanation of what it means by "limited sovereignty," and exactly how far back from the Iraqi political process the United States intends to step. That was the question that shadowed Wednesday's Security Council meetings. One delegate who attended the closed session following Brahimi's briefing said that Brahimi was unable to answer most of the delegates' questions about the extent of the caretaker government's powers, including the crucial question raised by Germany and Pakistan of how military matters would be adjudicated after the transfer of sovereignty. Only the United States can answer that question, and until it does, the UN is being asked to step into a battle zone with one arm tied behind its back. But when the press put the question to Ambassador Negroponte, following the closed session, the response he offered was vague to the point of evasion.
"That's what diplomacy is there for, that's what we have responsible people on the ground for, to sit down and talk about these questions," Negroponte said. "Inevitably there are going to be these kinds of ambiguities or gray areas to be dealt with as they arise ... . But to try to give you an answer about what we're going to do in situation x or y or z and stipulate the circumstances ahead of time I just think is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to do."
Of course, the situation at issue is not "situation x or y or z." It's the situation that currently prevails on the ground in Iraq -- one in which American troops are carrying out a highly unpopular siege of Fallujah while also trying to put down militias in the south. The reporters questioning Negroponte wanted to know how the United States will handle such scenarios in just two months, after it transfers sovereignty to an interim government that will very likely oppose the use of overwhelming U.S. force in places like Fallujah.
That's not an airy hypothetical. It's a more than probable reality. Negroponte seems to be suggesting that the United States expects to confront such a grave and obvious problem the way it has so many others throughout this adventure -- on an ad hoc basis, without a plan, and without a transparent discussion with the very institution on whose goodwill it now depends.
You'd think by now the Bush administration would know better.
Laura Secor is the Prospect's foreign-policy editor.