To the editor:

Voices in the Bush administration who persuaded President Bush to “go it alone” in attacking Iraq without the approval of the United Nations Security Council are again trying to persuade him to “go it alone” by refusing the United Nations a key role in the governance and reconstruction of postwar Iraq.

President Bush is being urged to establish a Pentagon-led provisional government in Iraq, headed by a former U.S. general and staffed largely by former Iraqi exiles with Americans heading every ministry in the government. This is a prescription for disaster.

It will prove to the Arab world that their worst suspicions about U.S. intentions were well-founded. It will further, perhaps permanently, alienate our former friends and allies in the European Union. It will bankrupt the U.S. economy. And perhaps worst of all, it will be a tragic betrayal of those Iraqis who really did believe that we fought this war in order to free them to form their own government in their own way.

Only a provisional government in postwar Iraq approved and supervised by the United Nations can lay to rest world suspicions that the United States fought Saddam Hussein in order to establish an imperial U.S. beachhead in the Middle East.

Carol Clifford,

Lawrence