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Economist.com | Finally, a new UN resolution

Many American politicians are calling for an expansion of an international presence in Iraq; the UN resolution seems to be a first step toward implementing that strategy.

One firm offer of troops came last week from Turkey. The Turkish government has offered as many as 10,000 troops. But many Iraqis are appalled at the idea: for centuries, Iraq was part of the Turkish-run Ottoman empire and the idea of being reoccupied, even temporarily, by the former colonial ruler has not gone down well. In a possible expression of this disquiet, a suicide bomber blew himself up, injuring ten people, outside the Turkish embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday. That was a day after Iraq's Governing Council reaffirmed its opposition to admitting troops from Turkey: foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said at a summit of Islamic countries that the council was opposed to the presence of forces from any of Iraq's neighbouring countries.

Malaysia, which is hosting the summit of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and will chair the organisation for the next three years, argued that only fellow Muslim nations should have troops in Iraq and that they should operate under the United Nations' control. However, Mr Zebari said that, from his initial contacts with the Muslim countries, he detected no desire by any of them to contribute troops. Pakistan and Bangladesh—two Muslim states on whom America had pinned some hopes—have indicated that they might send troops, but only if they had either a UN mandate or a formal request from Iraq. Pakistan's foreign minister, Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, criticised Malaysia's call, in effect, for American troops to withdraw, calling it "unrealistic".

Howard Dean has also called for an infusion of Muslim and Arab forces to dispel the notion of a Western occupation of Iraq. But what happens when the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council takes a position of opposition to troops from its neighbors, and its neighbors are unwilling to commit the troops? When talks of expanding a nation's role results in an attack on that nation's presence in Iraq?

Iraq has proved to be swiftly degenerating into a "wicked" problem—one that cannot be solved by armchair strategists, and one that may very well echo what followed the American installation of Iran's Shah decades ago. In the meantime, 150,000 American targets are sitting in the desert, waiting to come home, with no sign of hope at the bottom of this Pandora's box.