The Courage of Gilmour

If you have no concerns about an organization that abetted the perpetuation of the myth of a Jenin massacre, here is a magic solution: Let the able hands of U.N. officials take care of Iraq's politics.

But like wishing Iran's nuclear menace away by reporting it does not exist, such magic may not really solve anything.

Many at the United Nations believe that Iraq is a problem that America got itself into and that therefore America should get no help getting out of it. Others think that Iraq is simply too dangerous an assignment. Secretary-General Ban and America's U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, attempted to change such attitudes with, at best, partial success.

A minority of U.N. officials and employees, however, see Iraq as a challenge worthy of the United Nations, and believe strongly enough to actually ask to be posted in Baghdad. We should salute such men as Andrew Gilmour, recently named political director of the United Nations's Iraq mission, for that kind of courage. Mr. Gilmour's political views, however, have created problems for him, including among some who opposed his Iraq posting in the Bush administration.

A Briton, Mr. Gilmour is a "dedicated man who has served the U.N. in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East, and who has always worked in the interest of promoting peace," a colleague and personal friend of Mr. Gilmour, Stephane Dujarric, told me. He is "high-caliber" and "very professional," Mr. Gilmour's former U.N. superior, Terje Roed-Larsen, added.

But another former colleague put it slightly differently, describing Mr. Gilmour as a "Lawrence of Arabia-type, whose main dream is to be the savior of the Arabs."

Why do we care? The top U.N. man in Baghdad, Stefan de Mistura, wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues at the mission this month, "When I am away from Baghdad, the Officer-in-Charge will normally be Andrew Gilmour." As his job description indicates, Mr. Gilmour will deal with what American politicians see as the area where the United Nations can contribute best: steering Iraq's politics toward becoming a pro-Western democracy and an ally in the war on terror.

So what are Mr. Gilmour's own politics? Early in 2004, he attacked America's ambitions in Iraq in a scathing article in Britain's Spectator, where, as the editors described it, he wrote that, like Britain's colonialist war in South Africa in the early 20th century, the Iraq war is "humbug, jingoism, and hubris."

As a much younger man, the English intellectual born to aristocracy opined in a 1988 review of several books about terrorism — which he wrote together with his father, Sir Ian Gilmour, in the Journal of Palestinian Studies — about "fantasies about the worldwide terrorist conspiracies" prevalent in America, and about a "dangerous process whereby the administration stirs up American public opinion, and public opinion in turn spurs the administration on to further military adventure."

To be fair, as Mr. Dujarric points out, the article was written when Mr. Gilmour was in his early 20s, and at a time when such names as Osama bin Laden were not on anyone's radar.

But speaking of fantasies, it was Mr. Gilmour who, as a Jerusalem-based U.N. official, gave the organization's view to ABC's Nightly News with Peter Jennings in April 2002. The interview took place just as Arab-fueled reports of a large-scale massacre perpetrated by Israel's soldiers in Jenin began to circulate in the press. "We have reports of hundreds of deaths and hundreds of wounded," Mr. Gilmour confirmed to the network. "We have not been able to go in so we cannot verify this, but the reports are persistent, and they are very alarming."

They were so alarming that such reports soon became accepted as truth by the majority of the European and American press, where the massacre story persisted for weeks before the real statistics of a fierce battle emerged: 56 Palestinian Arabs were killed, all but three of whom were armed, and 23 Israeli soldiers died — in one battle of a terror war that included almost daily suicide bombings in Israeli cities.

Mr. Gilmour's anti-Israel views, his friends say, have little to do with his new Baghdad posting. But Iraq, where old feelings about Israel persist even after the liberation, was one of the two Arab countries, alongside Kuwait, that failed to even show up at the recent Annapolis meeting meant to unite the region's "moderates."

In a twist on an old cliché: Can any political problem in the Middle East be solved without first addressing prejudices against Israel?

bavni@nysun.com