Hurrah for the European Parliament. Not a phrase you hear very often, even from this blog’s resident Europhile (me), but those MEPs get it right now and again. They can even be quite bold. A while back I argued on this blog and the ECFR website that the EU needs to get its act together on Iraq and fast, not least because it will be one of the first items on he agenda for discussion with the next U.S. administration. Canvassing colleagues for ideas on what that act might look like was, however, a rather depressing business: the consensus position was “not very much, just look at the Afghan mess.”
But the MEPs – or at least their foreign affairs committee – are made of sterner stuff. In spite the problems created by the Turkish incursion in northern Iraq, they’ve come out with a remarkably expansive proposal for increasing European commitments on the ground:
The European Union has failed to improve the situation in Iraq despite committing more than €800 million (US$1.2 billion) to reconstruction efforts since 2003, a European Parliament report said Wednesday.
The report by the assembly’s foreign affairs committee called for the EU to expand its presence in the country, operate on the ground in the Kurdish region, among others, and boost its operations in Basra and Erbil.
“Europe can do much more and much better, namely by … considerably expanding its presence on the ground and by finding more creative ways to use its resources,” said the report, which will now be discussed by the 785-member EU assembly.
Hear, hear. I’m going to have to take a closer look at this document and report back on the specifics, but at least it’s a challenge to the lack of good thinking on Iraq in the EU right now. Two qualifications, though. Substantively, the EU should be careful about highlighting support to Kurdistan too much – a lot of Iraqi Arab leaders have noted what’s happened in Kosovo, and fear that “EU engagement with Kurds = a promise of secession”. The Turks wouldn’t like that either.
And politically, one has to be honest: MEPs can come up with big ideas like this, but their national counterparts and governments are unlikely to take the same risks. After all, London is bracing itself for more backward-looking recriminations on the war as new documents are released. We still seem to be stuck in 2002/3…
