Marriage without the girl's consent

“Great victory for the Iraqi people” was achieved without Iraqis' participation.
George Bush is pleased as the UN Security Council unanimously passed the resolution on settling the crisis in Iraq. All the 15 members of the Security Council approved the draft resolution submitted by the USA, Great Britain and Romania.

George Bush called adopting resolution the “great victory for the Iraqi people”. It is hard to understand what the US President meant by this phrase as the opinion of the Iraqi people was the last thing to be considered while preparing the resolution. However, Washington achieved its primary purpose: the burden of the responsibility for stabilization in Iraq was passed from the USA to the entire world community.

Initially one can think that Iraqi government is gaining so much power that the word “occupation” will be hardly applied to Iraq in the nearest future.

In particular, the amendment proposed by France allows Iraqi government to control the military operations of the multinational troops deployed in the country. However, the French offered to give Iraqi government the right of veto for the coalition troops military operations at first, but this idea was rejected.

According to the resolution, the command of the coalition forces must notify Iraqi government in written form on the plans of military operations. In addition, the final version of the resolution has the point that the occupation troops will leave Iraq if Iraqi government requests this after it has the authority passed.  However, it is known that the coalition forces will stay in Iraq not lees than until the end of 2005.  The new Iraqi government is unlikely to accept responsibility for getting things put in order in the country, it has neither resources no funds for this. Preparing personnel for Iraqi national police and army is another option, but there is the sad example of Afghanistan failing to establish its own army despite NATO’s. In theory, army can be established quickly, but some questions will inevitably arise:

1) How capable will it be?
2) How are the soldiers of this army going to find against combatants – their fellow-Iraqis?

Iraqi government understands this problem and will hardly insist on the coalition troops immediate withdrawal. In addition to providing security, the resolution gives Iraqi government the authority to set the political future of the country and to control all its financial and natural resources.  Iraqi government promises to do its best to establish “democratic Iraq where political rights of people are observed”. However, one question still has no answer: who will urge Iraqi government to follow its obligations if human rights are violated. For example, if Iraq will become an Islamic state like neighboring Iran. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said recently that the USA would accept  any political system in Iraq, but in this case speaking of the Western concept of “human rights” is hardly possible.

Will adopting the resolution change the situation in Iraq for the better?  Today nobody can reply to this question, although all the politicians giving comments on the resolution, said that they hoped for improvement of the situation in Iraq. The only way to understand how long the Iraqi crisis will last is to wait for June 30 and see what will happen after the authority is passed to Iraqi government on this date.