Iraq unrest may discourage aid

BAGHDAD, Iraq – This time it was just 50 pounds of explosives, but Baghdad’s car bombings, one by one, are reverberating around the world, sending an unmistakable message from America’s enemies in Iraq that its friends should stay away.

Monday morning’s blast outside the U.N. compound came about 24 hours before President Bush, seeking help in postwar Iraq, addresses the United Nations in New York, and mere days after a tape believed to be from Saddam Hussein warned U.N. members to avoid falling into “traps of America’s foreign policy.”

Last month’s devastating bombing at the same site killed 23, including the top U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. This time the suicide bomber got no farther than the fringe of the U.N. complex; the dead numbered only the bomber and a luckless Iraqi policeman.

But the repeated attacks may chip away nonetheless at global willingness to come to Iraq, and to Washington’s aid, with troops, money and international civil servants.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that if the situation continues to deteriorate, U.N. operations in Iraq “will be handicapped considerably.”

“I am shocked and distressed by this latest attack on our premises in Baghdad,” Annan said Monday at the United Nations.

In a televised U.N. speech at 10:30 a.m. PDT today, Bush was expected to seek an expanded U.N. role in rebuilding Iraq, a condition set by many nations for contributing peacekeepers and money to the reconstruction effort. But he also was expected to resist French and German pressures for a quick surrender of U.S. authority to Iraqis, aides to the president said.

“The French plan, which would somehow transfer sovereignty to an unelected group of people, just isn’t workable,” said his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

According to diplomats familiar with early drafts and discussions, a draft Security Council resolution backing a multinational occupation force, circulated by American officials, won’t specifically meet French demands for a timetable on the handover.

It will instead call on the 25-member U.S.-picked Iraqi Governing Council to come up with a timetable of its own – a compromise that may satisfy the French only if a framework for such a timetable is agreed upon privately beforehand.

Annan has said he wants assurances of security for U.N. personnel in Baghdad along with any expanded role.

Many governments, however, are already reluctant to order soldiers into the Iraqi turmoil. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, for example, whose Muslim troops would diversify the U.S.-led Western force here, said Sunday he couldn’t send any unless the Pakistani people end their staunch opposition to the idea.

Also today, Annan is expected to launch plans for “radical reforms” of the United Nations.

Annan will call for the appointment of a panel of international experts to consider the most pressing questions facing the United Nations as an institution and ask that it deliver its recommendations by this time next year, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The latest identifications reported by the military of U.S. soldiers recently killed in Iraq:

Army Staff Sgt. Frederick L. Miller Jr., 27, Hagerstown, Ind.; killed Saturday in Ar Ramadi by an explosive device; assigned to Troop K, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colo.

Army Sgt. Anthony O. Thompson, 26, Orangeburg, S.C.; killed Thursday in Tikrit in an ambush; assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 4th Battalion, 42nd Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas.

Army Spc. Richard Arriaga, 20, Ganado, Texas; killed Thursday in Tikrit in an ambush; assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 4th Battalion, 42nd Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas.