Policy convergence between members of the United Nations Security Council and considerable negotiating flexibility by the United States and the United Kingdom have combined to produce a unanimous resolution on how Iraq should be governed when full legal sovereignty is restored to its interim government at the end of the month. This is a significant and welcome achievement. It should help bring greater stability to the country and will lend more political legitimacy to the new regime, notwithstanding the continuing military resistance to the US-led coalition forces which claimed yet more lives yesterday.
Intense political bargaining at the UN has led to this unanimous resolution. As resistance to the coalition forces intensified in recent months, the Bush administration changed its attitude to UN mandating of the new Iraqi government and what powers it should have. France, Germany, Russia, China and other Security Council members rejected the initial US-UK drafts of the resolution because they did not provide for full legal sovereignty - including the ability to veto military action taken by coalition forces, to pass laws and rescind them and to gain control of Iraq's oil and gas resources. The amended resolution addresses these issues; and while the French and Germans have not achieved all they looked for on Iraqi control of coalition military operations, they are satisfied it goes 90 per cent of the way in their direction.
An exchange of letters between the interim government and the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, spells out the relationship between the coalition forces and the new Iraqi authorities. Last minute compromises by the US and UK contain a reference in the resolution to co-operation on "sensitive offensive operations" intended to give the Iraqis the right to influence them through a new joint security committee; in addition the Iraqis will have the right to ask the coalition forces to leave the country and an agreement that their mandate to stay will expire in January 2006. There is more Iraqi control over legal and economic policy. Unfortunately the resolution does not contain explicit guarantees on the coalition's obligations to obey international law on the treatment of detainees.
The desire to overcome political and diplomatic isolation as the conflict in Iraq intensified this year has clearly triumphed over ideological unilateralists in the Bush administration. The US realised it cannot run Iraq alone, while its European and other critics around the world feared the consequences of any precipitate withdrawal for the Middle East.
Hard bargaining between the major powers, informed by a wish to put rancorous disagreements behind them, has improved relations between their leaders. This was seen during the D-Day ceremonies and will be on display at the Group of Eight summit this week and at several more this month, including the US-EU summit in Dromoland Castle on June 26th.