Iraqi leaders railed against the Iraq Study Group on Sunday amid mounting alarm that a change in US policy risks forcing the dominant Shia and Kurds into concessions towards the Sunni Arabs.
But the pressure also appears to be spurring the Iraqi government into action. Officials announced progress on national reconciliation, including a conference to be held in Baghdad later this month.
Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and a top Kurdish leader, said in Baghdad the report – which sharply criticised the government and recommended that US support be made conditional on specific progress targets – was “not fair and not just”. It contained “dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and its constitution,” he said.
Claiming it sought to bring back the Ba’athists to the political scene, he took specific aim at James Baker. He said the former US secretary of state and co-head of the group was influenced by a vision of the region that dates back to the early 1990s.
“We smell in this report the attitude of James Baker in the aftermath of the (Iraq) war in Kuwait.” he said.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser and a Shia politician, told a regional security conference in Manama, Bahrain, that some of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations were “half-baked.”
“We’d like to ask who is responsible for security in Iraq? It’s the coalition. So how can you hold someone responsible for something they’re not authorised to do?,” he said at the conference organised by London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Iraqi officials are clearly hoping to influence the White House at a time when President George W.Bush is expected to pick and choose from the Iraq Study Group and other internal assessments before delivering a pre-Christmas speech.
The Iraqis’ concerns centre on Iraq Study Group provisions that the Sunni Arab minority, which dominates the insurgency, has been seeking but the Shia and Kurds have been resisting.
These include involving the UN in a review of the constitution, which the Sunni voted against in last year’s referendum, and seeking international arbitration over the status of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk that the Kurds want to integrate into their northern region.
Iraqi officials appear worried that the provisions will be most palatable for the Bush administration because they echo what US officials have been pressing them to do to foster national reconciliation and undermine support for the insurgency among Sunni Arabs.
Shia and Kurds are also wary of calls for direct US engagement with Iran and Syria over the Iraq conflict, and of the formation of a regional support group that they fear will dictate how the country should be governed.
Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, told the Manama conference that help from Tehran and Damascus which the US accuses of meddling in Iraq would come at a price that Washington was unlikely to pay. “No country will come and offer you good services free of charge,” he said. “Are you willing to pay the price?”
President Bush has ruled out talks with Iran before it suspends its uranium enrichment programme and US officials say talks with Syria are unlikely to be embraced.
Hoping to counter the Iraq Study Group’s assessment of their performance, Iraqi government officials insisted on the weekend that they could deliver on promises of national reconciliation.
They were close to agreeing on a hydrocarbons law that would fairly distribute oil revenues, seriously consider an amnesty for insurgents and launching a plan to bolster regional support.
Mr Rubaie said that a conference bringing officials and Ba’athists together had been held recently while another broader conference bringing all political leaders together would take place in Baghdad later this month.
Separately, Jawad al-Bulani, the interior minister, told the FT that measures have been taken to hold
accountable rogue elements in the police, an institution that has been infiltrated by Shia militias. “Anyone who doesn’t act in an area where there’s an attack or a kidnapping is being put in jail,” he said.
