Last week, I noted that the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq’s reconstruction. I’ve now read the text in full. It’s a detailed set of proposals, built on a strong case that most current European funding to Iraq might as well go down a drain, and it gets 60% of the way to a strategic alternative. Here’s a summary:
- The EU should move from supporting reconstruction to governance: the bulk of European money earmarked for Iraq is currently committed to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI), which is jointly managed by the World Bank and UN. The MEPs think this is poorly managed, isn’t transparent and (sin of sins) doesn’t give the EU “visibility”. They skip over the fact that many EU members have basically ignored the fund – France has donated a whopping $31,800 to it since 2003 – but they’re probably on the money overall. Except, as they point out, nobody’s quite sure where the money is. The alternative is to shift towards “projects focussed on technical assistance and capacity-building in the fields of rule of law, financial management, democratic governance and human rights.”
- Link the money to missions: although the MEPs may not like the way IRFFI’s been managed, they’re happy for a lot of governance work to be run through UN agencies. But they also seem to like the idea of getting EU personnel to assist in police reform and “large-scale disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration”. They support greater European involvement in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq – the US currently has 25 PRTs around the country, although they focus on infrastructure rather than all that governance jazz. In addition, the British and Italians lead one each already, but this is one area on which the MEPs are coy about what to do. More European personnel in U.S.-led units? Stand-alone Euro-PRTs?
- Fly the flag: what the MEPs really seem to want is that elusive “visibility” though. EU members that don’t have diplomatic missions in Baghdad should set them up. Security allowing, current European offices in provincial cities like Erbil should raise their profile, and so forth.
It’s this flying the flag dimension that worries me a bit. I like the idea of targeting money on governance, and there’s a case for deploying smallish EU missions to handle issues like police reform. To date, the only EU-flagged mission “to” Iraq is a justice reform program largely based in, erm, Brussels organizing training courses and (ah the romance) work experience for Iraqis in Europe. Slightly closer-range support should be an option – although the MEPs have doubts, and argue that the EU should look at how to use Private Security Companies to deliver missions.
But wherever the personnel are found, “visibility” is not a strategy. And here the MEPs mix realism (for the time being, it’s the U.S. that provides the strategic framework for EU engagement) with optimism (over time, the UN should take on that role). They rightly note that the UN has adopted a greater role in Iraq in recent months, and they urge the EU to support its efforts to promote political reconciliation. But they avoid the question of what happens after the U.S. elections, and how the EU’s members should react to the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal – or, if McCain wins, a whole lot more counter-insurgency.
So I give the report an A+ for its basic instinct (the EU can’t desert Iraq); an A for its overall logic (the EU needs to use its money better); and a B+ for its tactical proposals (reduced from a B++ due to over-use of “visibility”). But the pupil doesn’t really want to study strategy, so I can’t really offer a mark for that.
