Help Wanted

(2 of 2)
Second, the Security Council must pass a new resolution that explicitly authorizes other countries to send peacekeepers. Russia and India and others say they would contribute only under such a resolution. Foreign peacekeepers could relieve U.S. forces of such static and technologically simple duties as guarding fixed facilities. There is no reason why American soldiers should be standing guard duty at a children's hospital (where three G.I.s were killed in a grenade attack in July). That can be done by others and would free up the U.S. military to do what it does best: hunt down the remnants of the Baathist regime and confront their foreign terrorist allies.

Which brings us to the third point, the hardball. If the world will not help us in Iraq, we should ostentatiously announce a global reconsideration of all U.S. military commitments in humanitarian ventures. Why are thousands of U.S. troops sitting in the Balkans, doing a job the French and Germans and others who won't lift a finger for us in Iraq can very well do themselves?

Our soldiers in Iraq are tired. They need relief. That relief can come from newly trained Iraqi forces, who would be helped by international recognition of the provisional government working with us. Relief can come from other countries' troops, hence a U.N. resolution explicitly granting such authorization. And relief can come from rotating to Iraq U.S. soldiers on social-work duty elsewhere--hence the threat to withdraw from those commitments if the world will not help us otherwise.

If the world wants us to play God, especially in godforsaken places, it had better help. We cannot tend to every sparrow in the forest. Not even God does.