American Envoy Khalilzad Aims to Forge Political Peace Among Sectarian Groups
By Yochi J. Dreazen
The Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2006
WASHINGTON -- He isn't a candidate, but U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has a lot riding on Iraq's recent elections.
In the run-up to the Dec. 15 elections for a permanent government, Mr. Khalilzad and his aides worked to bring Iraq's disaffected Sunni Arab minority into the political process, frequently clashing with the Shiite-dominated government. When Sunnis threatened to reject the country's new constitution in an October referendum, Mr. Khalilzad persuaded Shiite and Kurdish leaders to amend the document to address Sunni concerns. When evidence surfaced that Shiite-dominated security forces had tortured and in some cases assassinated Sunni leaders, Mr. Khalilzad publicly criticized the abuses and demanded that interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his government take steps to curb them.
Finally, he and his team pressured election workers to announce results quickly and held pre-emptive talks with the main political parties to avert the months of drift that followed Iraq's elections for an interim government in January 2005.
Today, those initiatives still have a ways to go. Shiite groups have held protests, denouncing Mr. Khalilzad by name for restraining their security forces and demanding that security personnel be allowed to take a harder line against the insurgents, who are predominantly Sunnis. Iraq's most powerful Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has said he opposes making any significant amendments to the constitution. And the good feeling engendered by the recent elections has been clouded by Sunni complaints that their vote totals were suppressed by ballot shortages, voter intimidation and other irregularities. With the Sunni complaints and similar ones from secular Shiites, final results have yet to be announced more than a month after the election.
Mr. Khalilzad is widely seen as the most competent U.S. representative yet to serve in Baghdad. An Afghan-American who forged relationships with a number of prominent Republicans, he served on President Bush's National Security Council and was ambassador to Afghanistan until 2005, when he was named to the Baghdad post.
The problems facing his initiatives highlight an emerging shift. Nearly three years after U.S. forces toppled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, American influence in the country is diminishing as the Bush administration crafts an exit strategy and Iraq's Shiite majority flexes its muscles. The two trends suggest that, in the coming year, Washington and Baghdad may diverge in their approaches to curbing Iraq's violence and building a political accord among sectarian groups.
"There's a tension that didn't exist in the recent past, because the people who have been empowered on the Shiite side have goals and aspirations that will be hard to square with the U.S. vision of a nonsectarian Iraq where power and resources are shared equitably," says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and former adviser to the American occupation authority in Iraq. "When you look down the road, the U.S. capacity to shape Iraq and induce major players to honor their promises is clearly diminishing."
Mr. Diamond says Shiite leaders complain that U.S. officials favor the Sunnis, citing recent disclosures that U.S. officials are holding talks with insurgents tied to attacks that have killed thousands of mostly Shiite security personnel. Many Shiite leaders also say the U.S. is preventing them from using security forces to stem the insurgency or from using provisions in the Iraq constitution to create a semi-independent, oil-rich ministate in southern Iraq, Mr. Diamond says.
The American Embassy in Baghdad declined to make Mr. Khalilzad available for an interview, but a senior U.S. official says it is too early to conclude that relations between the U.S. and the next Iraqi government will be rocky. The official says leaders like Mr. Hakim could be staking out aggressive positions to score political points ahead of what are certain to be difficult negotiations over choosing the country's next prime minister. Shiites aren't monolithic, he notes, adding that, while Mr. Hakim was outlining anti-U.S. stances, other Shiite leaders were behaving more moderately and continuing to reach out to Sunni groups.
The senior U.S. official also says Mr. Khalilzad is committed to seeing amendments made to the constitution on issues such as federalism and the division of natural resources, primarily oil. "No one here is ready to throw in the towel on any of this," he says. For now, the U.S. is prodding Iraqi political leaders to create a broad government that would feature Sunnis in positions of authority, such as at the helm of the Interior or Defense ministries, he and other American officials say.
Senior U.S. officials in Baghdad are mediating talks between the political parties but aren't suggesting candidates for cabinet posts, officials say. The officials also say the U.S. won't signal a preference for either of the two main contenders to be prime minister, Mr. Jaafari and Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mehdi, despite widespread feeling in Washington and Baghdad that Mr. Jaafari has been a disappointment.
Still, it is unclear how much the U.S. will be able to steer Iraq's political transition. Iraq's leaders know that the White House is allowing the funds for its Iraq reconstruction program to run out and that the administration has acknowledged plans to begin a military withdrawal this year amid plunging public support for the war.
Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and former State Department policy-planning official, says the U.S. retains significant influence in Iraq because of the massive American military there. But with the U.S. presence in Iraq likely to begin winding down in coming months, he says that Iraq's largely Shiite rulers might be more willing to buck the U.S. and pursue their own interests.
"Everything you see in the Shiite public discourse suggests that they think they won the elections and now own the country," he says. "The balance has clearly shifted."
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Citation: Yochi J. Dreazen. "After Iraqi Voting, U.S. Challenge Persists," The Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2006.
Original URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113763405073250395.html
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