Why do military occupations rarely succeed? A study published in a recent edition of Harvard University's International Security reveals that of 24 military occupations examined, only seven were a success, and six of those came in the wake of the second world war 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 US had established civil affairs 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 US and British occupation of Iraq has hit insurmountable obstacles. Most of the unrest is actively provoked by their presence. Without these 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 Fallujah would be levelled, 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 British soldiers to leave. Their engineers, doctors and other crucial civilians should 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 Shi'ites with assassinations of close associates of the leading Shi'ite Muslim cleric, 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 that 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 only half the roof falls in and some extra security is needed, what is so bad about going to the United Nations and asking for help? Since the killing of the UN's special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, its 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 with the election over, and the Americans and British on their 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 that which 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 study by the Rand Corporation think-tank, the UN succeeds when the mission is well resourced, the troops are well trained, when it contains a core of developed 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. 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. Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist
