Coalition of the Willing: Ain’t Too Proud to Beg

About a month ago, during a nationally-televised address, the president touted a broad, multi-national force in Iraq. “To the international community: The success of a free Iraq matters to every civilized nation,” Bush said. “We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq and the many others who are helping that young democracy.”

Now, as it turns out, that number was a little shakier than the president let on, but even if we put that aside, the point of the comment was clear — Bush wants Americans to believe there is a shared international burden in this crisis. The United States is paying an enormous price, but, the argument goes, we aren’t alone.

It’s getting harder and harder to make the transparently dubious claim. England, for example, is cutting its deployment in half next year, meaning that by the time of the next U.S. election, the country with the second largest fighting force in Iraq will have less than 3% of our deployment. For that matter, some of Bush’s 36 countries don’t have standing armies, and one member of the coalition, Iceland, brought home its one troop two weeks ago.

It’s against this backdrop, nearly five years after the initial invasion, that the White House has decided it needs to find some willing allies again. Roger Cohen explains.

A senior Pentagon official has spent this month on a magical mystery tour of little-known European and Eurasian capitals trying to deliver a dribble of troops for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The low-profile trip reads more like a geography test than a geostrategic foray. It has whisked Debra Cagan, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for coalition affairs, from Tirana to Skopje, and on to Chisinau and Astana, among other luminous world metropolises.

In Chisinau — you guessed it; that’s the capital of Moldova — Cagan asked for more sappers in Iraq. Moldova currently has 11 bomb-disposal experts there. Yes, 11.

Am I the only one who finds this utterly humiliating? The Bush administration has taken to trolling through smaller countries begging for a brigade?

Cohen argues that Cagan’s trip “smacks of desperation.”

Keeping many flags flying in Iraq is critical to making talk of a “coalition” credible…. [T]he strange idea of Pentagon brass spending two weeks hop-scotching continents to cajole countries — many economically hard-pressed — into sending a platoon or two looks less outlandish. That’s where we are seven years into the Bush administration: stretched to the limit.

The United States is as isolated in Iraq as a great power can be. A first term spent riding roughshod over friends and vaunting “coalitions of the willing” over alliances has not been righted by a second term of diplomacy rehabilitation. Wounds linger.

And all of this would be embarrassing enough if it were just another U.S. diplomat pleading with Moldova to give us a hand in Iraq, but it gets slightly worse when we consider who the Bush administration sent on this mission.

I don’t know Cagan and she wouldn’t talk to me, but the least that can be said is her reputation is more for Rumsfeldian bluntness than the discretion of his successor as defense secretary, Robert Gates. At a big NATO political-military conference in Brussels on Sept. 19-20, anxiety over her trip ran high.

A Europe-based U.S. NATO official who attended e-mailed me to say American diplomats are looking “for ways to limit the damage she is sure to leave.”

The note portrayed her as “John Bolton on steroids” with a tendency to be brusque with allies.

It was Cagan who told British lawmakers a couple of weeks ago, “I hate all Iranians.”

And she’s our envoy to the world, asking small countries with modest militaries to join us in Iraq? Seriously?