[Marxism] NY Times edit of Ukraine decision to get troops out of Iraq

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

www.nytimes.com
January 14, 2005
EDITORIAL
Out of Iraq

kraine became the latest dropout from the "coalition of the willing"
when President Leonid Kuchma formally ordered his generals on Monday to
start pulling his country's roughly 1,600 troops out of Iraq. That was
not a surprise because Ukraine has been heading for the door for some
time. Still, given that Ukraine has been much in the news and that its
contingent was the fifth-largest in Iraq (after the United States,
Britain, Italy and Poland), the exit is worth noting.

It's the end of a cynical marriage of convenience. From the outset,
there was an assumption that President Kuchma joined the coalition
largely to buy slack from Washington over his notoriously corrupt rule.
Then, in the recent brutal elections, the reformist and West-leaning
Viktor Yushchenko, who defeated Mr. Kuchma's candidate, made pulling out
of Iraq one of his issues. Mr. Kuchma, on the verge of leaving office,
evidently saw no point in letting Mr. Yushchenko reap the plaudits from
Ukrainians, who overwhelmingly oppose the war.

Ukraine's withdrawal punches a major and potentially fatal hole in the
much-ballyhooed multinational division that Poland volunteered to lead
in Iraq. Spain was the first to drop out, and Ukraine had the
second-largest contingent after Poland itself. The coalition has also
lost Hungary, the Philippines and Honduras, among others, while Poland
itself, long regarded as second only to Britain in its fealty to the
United States, is talking of cutting back. Several other countries
intend to reduce their participation in the next few months.

Most of these countries provided token forces of a few dozen or less.
But the Bush administration expended considerable political capital to
beg or bully governments into joining the campaign to give it the
semblance of an international operation in the absence of a credible
international endorsement. Washington was especially keen to underscore
the support of young democracies, which were supposed to be better
capable of appreciating the blessings that Iraq was about to reap.

But in Ukraine, neither bad old dictators nor promising new democrats
ever really backed the Iraq war. Like many other coalition members, the
government weighed the potential benefits of making nice to Washington
against the potential costs of not doing so and hoped it would all be
over soon. Now that doesn't look likely, the exodus is on. When you go
for facade, facade is what you get.



Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


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