Agence France Presse February 26, 2006
Iraq violence clouds US exit strategy
A burst of communal mayhem, growing political tensions and a still-raging insurgency have left US officials struggling to keep their vision for an exit strategy from Iraq in focus.
Washington insists Iraq is making progress on the security, political and economic fronts progress despite the violence sweeping the battered country nearly three years after the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
But the Americans showed signs of increasing impatience after last week's bombing of a holy Shiite shrine unleashed clashes that left at least 119 people dead since Wednesday and fueled fears of a Shiite-Sunni civil war.
President George W. Bush telephoned Saturday several Iraqi leaders of various religious and ethnic groups and "encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq's communities," said Frederick Jones, spokesman for the National Security Council.
Bush said Friday Iraq faced "a moment of choosing" between sectarian bloodshed and democracy, and stepped up his appeal to the Iraqis to form a government of national unity.
His ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had earlier gone further, creating headlines with hints of a possible cutoff of US security aid if the Iraqis did not shape up.
The US administration denied furiously the wheels were coming off an Iraq policy that was already unpopular among a US public eager to see a timetable for the return of the 136,000 American troops there.
James Jeffrey, the State Department coordinator on Iraq, pointed the finger at Al-Qaeda for the latest violence. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of "outsiders" stoking tensions -- usually a code word for Iran and Syria.
Yet the tone of official statements was clearly more worried than three months ago, when the White House unveiled its "national strategy for victory in Iraq" and Bush renewed his pledge to stay the course.
Bush predicted "intense" days ahead. Rice, heading home Friday from a Middle East swing, called the sectarian clashes "a blow" and said Iraqis were going through "an extremely hard and extremely delicate moment."
Rice expressed confidence the Iraqis would return to the process of forming a national unity government bringing in the minority Sunnis, the ruling elite under Saddam and now a major element of the insurgency.
But the main Sunni political party, the National Concord Front, declared Thursday a boycott of talks with the Shiites to protest reprisal attacks after the bombing of the Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra.
With the US death toll in Iraq nearing 2,300, polls show 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's Iraq policies, which will likely be a major issue in the November legislative elections.
Still, the US administration says it is making great strides in mustering an Iraqi security force, which is key to Washington's hopes for an eventual withdrawal of American troops.
A Pentagon progress report Friday said US-led forces had trained and equipped 230,000 Iraqis and formed 98 Iraqi army and 27 police battalions that were engaged in counter-insurgency operations.
Yet many analysts say the insurgency is still growing. Experts and officials are also alarmed by the strength of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish militias in Iraq and fret the police force itself is largely broken down into sectarian units.
A senior State Department official, who asked not to be named, said the Iraqis were working toward less factionally based institutions, but gave a blunt assessment of how long it might take.
"They'll make progress towards that; it'll never be in the next 10 to 15 years, I would guess, at a minimum," he said. "It's not going to look like a country that's being governed democratically for 20 or 25 years."
Critics say US officials have yet to demonstrate to the American people they are on top of Iraq's daunting problems in rebuilding itself after decades of misrule, UN sanctions and the US occupation.
"Theres a growing unease with the course of reconstruction, (that) in a sense, we dont really know what were doing," Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East specialist with the Brookings Institution think tank, wrote this month.
Pollack, who calls 2006 a "make-or-break year" for the Americans in Iraq, suggested they rethink their military strategy and provide security for people in central and southern Iraq rather than chase insurgents in the West.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org which specializes on defense issues, said that if the US public was still behind keeping troops in Iraq for now, they likely would not want them in the middle of a civil war.
But Pike did not see what options the United States had other than urging all communities in Iraq to show restraint.
"I don't think that there's a whole lot more that they can do at this point," he told AFP. "But I think they have been doing a lot and whether it's going to prove adequate to this challenge is hard to say."
© Copyright 2006, Agence France Presse
