On Saturday Bernard Kouchner showed why he’s Europe’s Coolest Foreign Minister by swooping into Nasiriya, Iraq, just after a shoot-out to offer reconstruction aid. Part of me thinks “about time” given that (as I pointed in January) French aid to Iraq has been pretty piffling to date. But this gesture provides timely proof of a trend that Daniel and I highlighted in a piece on the ECFR website on Thursday: the emergence of a new consensus in Europe on the need to do more for Iraq.
European diplomats have privately admitted for some time that they could not ignore Iraq forever. But in recent weeks, private talk has given way to public statements. A visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Brussels in April proved a catalyst: the European Commission trumpeted its desire for “an energy security partnership”.
Getting from private to public statements is a step forward. Shifting from rhetoric to real engagement in Iraq will be an even bigger one. What such engagement will look like is uncertain but parts of it are clear. More, better-targeted aid? Yes. Assisting UN mediation? Yes. Support for what Barack Obama calls a “diplomatic surge” across the Middle East? Absolutely. New troops? Not a chance.
Regular readers may faintly recall that I’ve banged on about this whole EU-Iraq thing before, picking up on a February report from the European Parliament that advocated greater engagement. It is actually one of the few issues on which the authors of this blog fundamentally disagree, as evidenced by a somewhat tipsy argument on the topic between Alex and I at Odeon some months ago. Alex thinks (as far as I can recall) that the EU isn’t relevant to Iraq, and shouldn’t try to be. Daniel and I think that it has do more, partially for humanitarian reasons but also to avoid Middle East meltdown and improve post-Bush transatlantic links.
Up until the start of this year, making this case was a rather lonely business (although I should immediately add that there have been people making it far longer than I – Richard Youngs published a great paper on the subject back in 2005, for example). But it is finally getting traction among the commentariat.
Check out Pierre Schori’s piece for ECFR and (as it’s not just people involved with ECFR that believe this stuff) this Guardian online op-ed by Berlin’s Thorsten Benner. And Guido Sternberg of SWP, also in Berlin, has said wise things on the subject for Der Spiegel online. OK, that’s not exactly a flood of commentary in favor of all-out support for Iraq, but it’s a start. I’ll keep you updated as it grows.
UPDATE: our ECFR piece has now received various comments, one of them linking to this interesting online symposium on why Iraq is a European security issue, published late last year. Good stuff.
