WASHINGTON — As the United States struggles to establish law and order in postwar Iraq and recruit other countries to share the burden, some experts say a permanent squad of American peacekeepers and police should be established to keep order in places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Although U.S. forces are involved in such missions around the globe, the Pentagon has long resisted the notion of a permanent force, saying it would detract from its main mission: fighting wars. And many conservatives argue that it is a bad idea to create a new bureaucracy that could draw the U.S. into more peacekeeping operations.
But others say the debacle of looting and lawlessness in Iraq, the slow U.S. response, and the difficulties the Bush administration faces in persuading other countries to offer peacekeepers show the need for a professional police force to keep order after wars or chaos.
"The military's attitude has been that given limited budgets, they would rather have war-fighters than people who are good at dealing with post-conflict situations," said Robert Perito, a former diplomat and veteran of peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Albania, Haiti and elsewhere.
"But the result of that is you have a brilliant military campaign, but as soon as [the war is] over, mobs come out and do more damage to your interests than the combatants did, and you proceed to lose the peace.
"I think that's what's happened in Iraq now. We've won the war and we're busy losing the peace," Perito said.
Administration officials take umbrage at such notions. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that it had been only 51 days since the start of the war in Iraq, but that conditions in most of the country already are better than before the war.
The United States still hopes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- or some of its members -- will send peacekeepers to Iraq. "It's still in formal discussions among ambassadors," a senior U.S. official said last week. A decision is expected within a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the State Department has been trying to recruit other nations to send peacekeepers or police forces to Iraq. A senior official said 45 of the 60 countries that the department had contacted indicated that they might take some military or policing role.
But the same political considerations that kept many nations from joining the Iraq invasion force, as well as concerns about becoming bogged down in hostile territory, have made some nations reluctant to send peacekeepers, according to media reports.
