LONDON – Why do military occupations rarely succeed? A study published in a recent edition of Harvard University’s “International Security” reveals that out of 24 military occupations examined only seven were a success and six of those came in the wake of World War 2 as the Cold War was emerging and concentrating minds.

The Germans and the Japanese were war weary. Moreover, the allies were well prepared. During the war the U.S. had established Civil Affairs Training Schools which provided training in military administration, language and cultural knowledge of the countries they expected officers to work in.

By now it is very clear that the U.S./British occupation of Iraq has hit insurmountable obstacles. Most of the unrest is actively provoked by their presence. Without the American and British forces there might well be violence, but it would not be constantly fuelled by the presence of foreign occupiers. It is doubtful if whole towns like Falluja would be leveled and it is doubtful that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, would find the traction he does today.

Once the election is over and a new government is in position it should ask the American and the British soldiers to leave. Their engineers, doctors and other crucial civilians should be invited to stay. A three-month timetable for the transition should be sufficient. 

Will the roof fall in? It may. But it may not. The Sunni militants have done their best to provoke the Shia with assassinations of close associates of the principal Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani but his firm leadership has kept revenge and bitterness in check. Likewise among the Sunnis there are many who abjure violence and understand the electoral arithmetic means that it is unlikely they can win power in the foreseeable future and that energy should be concentrated on making the best possible deal with the majority. Without al-Zarqawi being able to use the Americans as his foil progress should be possible.

But if the roof only half falls in and some extra security is needed what is so bad about going to the UN and asking for help?

Since the killing of the UN’s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN presence has been tightly limited to giving election expertise from the safe haven of Jordan, giving civilian aid ranging from power engineers to sanitation experts and, at Washington’s request, deploying its best negotiator, the Algerian, Lakhdar Brahimi, to help compose the membership of the present interim government. But the election over, and the Americans and British on the way out, the UN could send in peacekeepers if the main Iraqi groupings – Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds – all agreed that was the way to go.

In the early 1990s the UN had a string of successes, now almost forgotten – in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique, all countries that had been torn asunder by fratricidal civil war far worse than what is occurring in Iraq. The UN not only helped keep the peace but set in motion reasonably free and fair elections. Even in the more difficult situations of peace enforcement – in Eastern Slavonia in 1996 and in East Timor in 1999 – the UN won through. According to a recent RAND study the reasons for UN success are when the mission is well resourced, the troops well trained, contains a core of First World troops and has unambiguous backing from the Security Council. Indeed, if Bosnia’s UN troops had been as well resourced as the NATO troops that replaced them the UN might have had success there too.

At the moment the UN has over 60,000 troops deployed in 17 countries. This may be modest compared with American deployments but it is far more than that of any other single nation or indeed any combination of nations.

But even now, as the UN Congo operation has shown up starkly, the number of troops is often not enough. Too many of them come from nations that do not have the funds or the historical experience that enable their troops to be trained to be both disciplined and effective. No one who has read the book “We Did Nothing” by Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist, about the UN operations in Somalia and the Congo will have few illusions left about the either the saintly qualities or the effectiveness of many UN brigades. (Although according to her the Zambians were exceptional heroic in the Congo, which goes to show that a good local commander can make all the difference.)

There could be a workable UN peacekeeping operation in Iraq, but first the Iraqis have to badly want it and second, the richer nations of the world have to properly fund it and man a good portion of it.