Peace-keeping summit excludes anti-war countries

Britain began assembling an international security force for Iraq yesterday, increasing the deep split in Europe over the US-led war and ruling out any early peace-keeping role for Nato.

Senior military officers from 12 nations, and excluding the main European critics of the war, met in London yesterday for talks on how to turn the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq into a broader coalition.

Without a United Nations resolution on the status of Iraq, Britain seems to have concluded that there was no point in even discussing the issue within the European Union or Nato.

But the decision to bypass international bodies in the quest for peace-keepers is likely to harden opinions by reinforcing the division between "old" and "new" Europe and excluding countries such as France and Germany from discussion on the next steps. It also indicates that Britain and the US have all but given up the prospect of gaining a broader consensus in the near future.

France insists that, while it does not oppose Nato involvement in Iraq in principle, it would need to be sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

While the Ministry of Defence portrayed yesterday's "force generation conference" for Iraq in London as a preliminary meeting, some planning appears to have gone ahead. The UK, which sent 45,000 troops to fight in Iraq, wants to reduce that to between 25,000 and 30,000 within the next two weeks.

Poland and Denmark, two countries that made a small military contribution to the war in Iraq, confirmed they attended the meeting, whose invitation list was kept private. Warsaw said it had been asked to provide 4,000 troops and to command one of the military zones in Iraq.

Janusz Zemke, Poland's Deputy Defence Minister, said the country would seek US funding to pay for the mission before making a commitment. But General Andrzej Tyskiewicz, a former Polish ambassador to Nato, has been earmarked as a potential commander of a multinational peace-keeping unit.

Denmark, which made a small naval deployment, plans to send 380 soldiers. Other nations thought to have attended yesterday's gathering include Italy, which is expected to send a contingent of its paramilitary police to Iraq, and Spain.

The UK is concerned primarily with assembling troops to help relieve the burden in its military sector around Basra, although the meeting is understood to have discussed the whole of the country.

Nato diplomats concede that the alliance is too divided to play an early role in Iraq, but argue that the London meeting does not exclude the possibility of it taking over peace-keeping in the long-term.

Diplomats point out that Nato is due to take over peace-keeping in Afghanistan in August, and see that as a possible precedent for a later Nato role in Iraq. But they also acknowledge that this could be limited to a coalition of the willing from within Nato, rather than the use of the organisation as a whole, spelling a new phase for the organisation, which works by consensus.

UN Sidelined

For the United Nations, the announcement that the war in Iraq has essentially been won should be an occasion for celebration. The will of countless resolutions adopted by the Security Council over 12 years has finally been done.

Yet, feelings in the UN's New York headquarters are far more complicated. The institution's ego has been bruised. When they went to war, the Allies did so without backing from the Council. Now the UN is being squeezed out of a political role in Iraq's reconstruction. There is much diplomatic blood on the floor.

It was asking too much of the UN to resolve the Iraqi issue peaceably. "Most uses of force in the world ... since the founding of the UN have happened without explicit UN authorisation," Lee Feinstein, a former deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, said yesterday.

The squabbling is set to flare up once more. Last month, US President, George Bush, and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, pledged a "vital role" for the UN in post-conflict Iraq at their meeting in Belfast. To most eyes something much less is being offered.

Kofi Annan, UN secretary general, believes that for that pledge to be honoured, it must have a primary role in forging an Iraqi interim administration. He also wants UN weapons inspectors back in the country. But Washington is resisting. Mr Annan this week declined a US request that he send an observer to consultations in Baghdad.

The bloodletting in New York is likely to begin all over again.

David Usborne in New York