Posted on: Wednesday, May 28, 2003

EDITORIAL
U.N. vote confirms U.S. authority in Iraq

Deciding to accept reality, France, Germany and Russia, leading opponents of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, have voted with a U.N. Security Council majority to mandate the Americans and British to occupy and rebuild Iraq.

The best part of this resolution is that it gives the United Nations and other international organizations a more substantial, if still ambiguous, role in helping to establish a new government in Baghdad.

The reality is, however, that the resolution, for an open-ended period, makes Iraq a protectorate of the United States and Britain.

It gives international legal standing to American authority over Iraq's political development and its billions of dollars in annual oil revenues.

Washington is right to try to find ways in which other countries, including those that opposed the invasion, can help with the rebuilding effort. The U.S. economy can't afford to do the whole job.

But the fact remains that the U.N. has granted a postwar mandate more sweeping, and with less international control, than ever before in its history.