Amidst the ongoing US quest for stabilization in Iraq, the United States requested India to assist it with some troops. India refused. India stated that it would participate only in a force legitimized by the UN. When the United States responded that the purpose of stabilization supplies its own legitimacy, India appeared to reconsider. The US offered further incentives like some contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq, greater assistance in updation of military hi-tech weaponry and so on, when India insisted that its costs (estimated manpower losses, wear and tear of materiel, etc.), would be disproportionately greater than the accruable benefits. To assuage residual Indian concerns about ‘legitimacy’ for whatever it was still worth, the US offered to sponsor a UN Security Council Resolution at the earliest about troop participation for stabilization in Iraq. India now declared that its public opinion did not yet favour such a decision.

What strikes one most about this rather tenuous and irksome diplomatic debate between the two democracies is the utter absurdity that played itself out various stages of the dialogue. This was, however, entirely in keeping with the pattern of relations between them. Each knows that the other is in pursuit of its national interest behind the elaborate façade of idealism and principle and knows that the other too knows this well, but nevertheless persists in expecting the other to meet its requirements. These are two democracies that have lost their idealism, the US more so than India.. Nevertheless, they are given to unseemly (and unlikely) posturing in their relations with each other. The tragedy is that they are apparently inclined towards never realizing the combined force of their several commonalities and complementarities. What accentuates the tragedy is that the two do not have a single vital point of difference and yet have agreed to disagree with each other on several important issues for over fifty years and from the way they are going on now, they appear destined to do so for a longer time to come.

 If India were really committed towards UN-sponsored participation, it would neither have queried the Pentagon regarding the chain of command and control for its troops (once in Iraq) nor have assessed the contracts the US was offering to Indian companies. Clearly, idealism had nothing to do with it. Consider also the fact that India has lost more men in mobilizing for war (Operation Parakram) than the US lost while conquering Iraq. Perhaps losing some more men in an alien country for a good cause would have added to its lustre as a reliable ‘peace-keeper’, besides also giving its men a unique opportunity to fraternize with American combat troops at various levels. The United States, in spite of its isolation on the Iraqi crisis, strangely never offered to sponsor the expenses of the Indian army for the operations. The contracts that the United States offered India which at least seriously considered deputing troops to Iraq, were of such a negligible nature, that they were more in the character of an insult rather than the incentive that it was intended to be.. India expected the US to drastically revise its Pakistan policy in return for troop assistance. What the US did not think it prudent and/or necessary to do in the traumatic aftermath of 9/11, it could hardly do so now, when such a thing was even less warranted by its own requirements.. India too, by finally saying public opinion did not favour this venture, was hardly doing its diplomatic credibility any good.

Indian integrity was more dented in this diplomatic charade than that of the United States.. India, by seriously considering the proposal to send troops to Iraq, was seen by the Islamic countries to be a natural ideological partner of the United States and by other nations as a cynical nation that refrained from cooperating with the United States only because the material incentives offered in return were not enough. In short, the legitimacy argument of India has no takers anywhere. And insofar as the United States is concerned, the Indian position is expensively redundant for it is the same as that of Pakistan: participation only under UN aegis. The United States and India remain as they have always been: estranged democracies, elusive friends.