The United States was at the height of its post-9/11 disdain for internationalist opinion in 2002 when it greeted the creation of an international criminal court with a diktat of its own:

Any nation that joined the ICC had to sign a side deal guaranteeing Americans immu nity from war- crimes prosecu tions or risk losing U.S. military aid. This was not just a White House gambit; Congress enacted a law requiring it.

More than 100 nations signed the "Article 98" deal, but others thumbed their noses at it. Even worse, the dissenters included important allies in the post-9/11 counterterrorist fight, including Mexico, Peru and Bolivia in Latin America, and uranium-rich Niger in Africa, along with former al-Qaida targets Kenya and Tanzania.

Kenya alone lost $13 million in military training, the New York Times reported. Yet this was a nation critical to fighting al-Qaida inroads in Africa, both because it's near terrorist strongholds and failed states sheltering terrorists, including Somalia, and because it's a victim itself.

More than 200 Kenyans died in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy and a 2002 attack on a hotel.

"Kenya is a key partner in our counterterrorism strategy and our goals in Africa," an unnamed Pentagon official told the Times in July. "This hurts us, there's no question about it."

This month, the Bush administration finally showed it agreed, reversing itself on a policy that never made sense.

The memorandum President Bush signed Oct. 2 didn't reinstate all military aid to Kenya and 20 other nations -- U.S. aid for buying weaponry still is prohibited. But it did restore the critical military-training portions of the barred assistance.

The reversal is but the latest sign of a marked U.S. turn back toward the policies that worked best right after 9/11 -- alliance-building to counter the terrorists' worldwide reach, dispersed cells and finances.

To a large extent, these policies reflect a pragmatic rejection of the go-it-alone attitudes that underlay the U.S.-led Iraq attack and that were enunciated by President Bush in 2002 as he laid out the case for war.

"Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" the president demanded of U.N. delegates in September 2002.

"The purposes of the United States should not be doubted," President Bush warned. "The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power."

The threat to undertake a largely unilateral attack couldn't have been clearer.

Yet these days, America is back to cooperating with allies and fellow Security Council members on Iran and North Korea, where it's relying heavily on China to take the lead in making Kim Jong Il see the light. In Afghanistan, the bulk of U.S. forces now serve under a British NATO general.

The needed swing back toward multilateralism isn't complete yet, nor will it be until America internationalizes its quest for an exit strategy in Iraq.

Pragmatism dictates this -- and the increasingly perilous state of the Iraqi nation requires it.

Even terrorist-sponsoring countries like Iran and Syria don't want an explosion of warfare with a disintegrating nation on their doorsteps. Syria is the weak link -- and the one with which America even had an opportunistic intelligence connection right after 9/11. Damascus still shares Washington's fear of radical Islamist takeover.

So do largely Sunni Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states. They'd all prefer to see Iraq remain intact -- even with a Shiite government -- rather than leak its newly honed sectarian violence and terrorist operatives over their borders. U.S. officials and Iraqis must do much more to reach out and coordinate with all in the neighborhood if they want to shore up the possibility of meaningful political compromise in Iraq and counter the religious extremists, warlords, gangsters and beheaders who otherwise threaten to seize control.

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

© 2006 The Plain Dealer

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