Analysis: Blair's hard sell on Iraq

By Paul Reynolds BBC News Online world affairs correspondent

At the very moment when the US-led occupation of Iraq is at its most precarious, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is flying to New York to try to get UN support for the presence of foreign troops in Iraq after the handover on 30 June.

Is UN support on the way for the US-led coalition?

It is going to be a difficult diplomatic mission.

Britain and the United States want a new Security Council resolution to be passed well before the 30 June deadline, ideally in May.

This would give UN blessing to the handover arrangements - which are due to include a request from a new Iraqi interim government that foreign troops, mainly Americans, should stay on.

These would not formally be occupation or coalition forces but would be renamed the "multinational force".

It would not be a UN-run operation, and therefore the troops would not wear blue berets and indeed they would be under the command of a four-star US general, but it would have UN approval.

No rush

However, such is the scale of the problems at the moment that British officials acknowledge that neither Britain nor the US has seriously opened detailed negotiations with members of the Security Council.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself might suggest to Mr Blair when they meet on Thursday that it would be best to wait for a bit to see if things quieten down.

Annan is cautious over a new UN resolution on Iraq

And before a new resolution is put forward, there will have to be an agreement on the make-up of the interim government, negotiations about which are being conducted by the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

Mr Brahimi announced the framework of the interim government in Baghdad on Wednesday. There will be a president, two vice presidents, a prime minister and a consultative assembly.

Getting a new resolution is central to the handover strategy. Failure to achieve Security Council support would represent a major failure by the US and UK. It would also make it difficult to get other countries to send troops to a multinational force.

Mr Blair goes on to see President George Bush in Washington on Friday.

They both need to project what Mr Bush's father used to call "the vision thing".

United?

Not for the first time in Iraq, carefully laid plans are being threatened by events on the ground.

They also have to try to put their gloss on the disengagement plan put forward by the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and broadly accepted by Mr Bush.

Both Washington and London claim that this new approach opens the way to talks with the Palestinians though it is clear that they did not do much to explain this to the Palestinians in advance.

The Sharon plan "jump starts progress on the roadmap," said a senior US official in language which is mirrored by British diplomats.

It was clear that the US was serious about democracy, the Brits less so Michael Rubin, ex Pentagon official

It has generally been a mistake during the whole Iraq crisis to predict that Mr Bush and Mr Blair will diverge in their views, even when President Bush seeks to equate the war in Iraq with the war on terror he declared after 9/11, as he did again in his Tuesday news conference.

The two are unlikely to break ranks at this stage.

Their alliance goes right back to a meeting they had at Camp David in early 2001 shortly after Mr Bush was inaugurated.

They found they hit it off well and this relationship continued strongly in the waging of the war on terror and on into the Iraq war and its aftermath.

Further down the food chain, however, tactical disagreements have been evident and inevitable.

According to a former Pentagon official, Michael Rubin, who has just returned from working with the Coalition Authority in Baghdad, there were tensions between American and British diplomats there about the direction of the occupation.

Pinstripes v neocons

Giving the impression that there had been a battle between radical American neo-conservatives intent on rebuilding Iraq in their image and traditional British diplomats whose folk memory of the Arab world made them more cautious, Mr Rubin told the Daily Telegraph: "Bremer (the US administrator) is following the president's agenda and in general, most British diplomats don't agree with the president's agenda."

He suggested that the British were not too interested in developing democracy in Iraq and appeared to be too interested in developing a link with Iran, allegations which are likely to surprise British officials.

"They (the British) didn't want to talk about democracy. It was clear that the US was serious about democracy, the Brits less so," he said.

Mr Blair would dispute that allegation strongly, having just written an article in The Observer saying that democracy was what Iraq policy was about.

No such disagreements are likely to surface in the Washington talks.