Not according to the Bush administration. President Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says this is a coalition campaign, made up of 'nearly 50 nations'. 'To put this in perspective', wrote Rice in the Wall Street Journal on 26 March 2003, 'the combined population of coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people…. These countries are from every continent on the globe, representing every major race, religion and ethnicity in the world' (1).

US secretary of state Colin Powell says 'everybody was saying the United States is going it alone politically and militarily', but America is simply 'a nation that is part of [a] great effort to rid Iraq of its weapons'. According to Powell, there are 46 nations in the coalition (2).

Why is the world's only superpower, which is doing the vast majority of the shocking and awing in Iraq, so desperate to talk up a 'coalition of the willing'? Powell's 46 nations include some of the least powerful and desperate states on Earth: Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda. There are nations that some may never have heard of: Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia. In Europe, the war supporters are largely Central and Eastern states, including Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. From Western Europe, the coalition has the support of Britain, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Portugal and the Netherlands.

While there may be 46 apparently willing nations (or 'nearly 50', as Rice put it), only four of them have sent troops to fight in Iraq - America, Britain, Australia and Poland. Bulgaria is still undecided as to whether or not to commit troops, but says that if it does, it will send 100 rather than the 150 discussed with American officials. This coalition of the willing, the not-so-willing and the slightly-desperate is in stark contrast to the Cold War-style coalition of major powers that supported the first Gulf War, when 30 nations, rather than four, sent troops to fight in Iraq.

And as commentators have pointed out, even among the 46, claims of a tightly knit coalition don't stand up to scrutiny. According to Salon, the coalition may be 'No.1 in the administration's talking points', but 'when some countries that the US counts as among the "willing" are continuing to criticise the US military moves against Iraq, [it raises] questions about how willing they really are' (3).

It is not surprising that some are describing this coalition as an American PR exercise, an attempt by the Bush administration to rebut claims that this a unilateral war by 'conning and coercing' other nations into offering support - and no doubt there's some truth to that. In our supposedly humanitarian age, no one wants to look like a selfish warmonger - even George 'we will defend the national interest' Bush.

Submitted by, Joshua