[ppi] [ppiindia] A Political Path Out of Iraq

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/30/AR2006053001180.html?referrer=email

A Political Path Out of Iraq

By Fareed Zakaria
Wednesday, May 31, 2006; Page A19 


I'm glad that the president has finally admitted to some mistakes in Iraq. But 
what worries me is that he seems to be persisting in one important error. At 
his news conference last week, the only concrete plan he outlined to move 
forward -- on a path out of Iraq -- was a better-functioning Iraqi army and 
police force. In this respect Bush is hardly alone. Many who criticize him on 
the right and left say that the training of Iraqi troops is happening too 
slowly, or that we need more American troops, or that we should flood the city 
of Baghdad with forces to stabilize it. But all these solutions are 
technocratic and military, while the problem in Iraq is fundamentally 
political. Until we fully recognize this, doing more of the same will 
accomplish little.

Initially the Sunnis thought they could use military power -- through the 
insurgency -- to get their way. Now many Shiites think they can use military 
power -- through the government's security services and militias -- to get 
their way. For our part, despite the denials, we believed that what we needed 
was more troops, Iraqi troops. Except that 260,000 Iraqi soldiers and police 
are "standing up" and it hasn't led to any significant withdrawal of Americans. 
The reality is that only an effective political bargain will bring about order. 
There needs to be a deal that gives all three communities strong incentives to 
cooperate rather than be spoilers.

While the United States can push hard in this direction, forging this bargain 
falls largely on the shoulders of the new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. I 
met Maliki a year ago in a small safe house in Baghdad. He was then a Dawa 
party official, with no position in the government. He is a big, strapping man 
and came across as straightforward and confident. He also came across as a 
hard-line Shiite, unyielding in his religious views and extremely punitive 
toward the Sunnis. He did not strike me as a man who wanted national 
reconciliation in Iraq.

But many Iraqi and U.S. officials who have spoken to him since he became prime 
minister believe that he understands his new role. If so, he will have to 
tackle quickly the two big political challenges Iraq faces: weakening the 
insurgency and disbanding sectarian militias. Neither can be done purely 
militarily.

Co-opting the majority of the Sunnis is the simplest way Maliki can cripple the 
insurgency. So far he has said some encouraging things about national unity. On 
the other hand, he has given Sunnis only 11 percent of cabinet posts, though 
they are 20 percent of the country. Tariq al-Hashimi, the new Sunni vice 
president, complains that when he details violence by death squads, Iraq's 
leaders remain highly unresponsive. "Even if you have complete evidence, they 
are not open-minded. It's really phenomenal," he says.

Maliki will have to stake out national positions on the proposed amendments to 
the constitution, the sharing of oil revenue and other such matters. But even 
sooner he will have to address the core Sunni demand: an end to the 
de-Baathification process, which has thrown tens of thousands of Sunnis out of 
jobs and barred them from new ones. Iraq's deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, 
a Kurd, told me that "the time has come for us to be courageous enough to admit 
that there were massive mistakes in de-Baathification." The American ambassador 
to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, argued similarly, saying that "de-Baathification has 
to evolve into reconciliation with accountability." Khalilzad added that Prime 
Minister Maliki supported the notion that de-Baathification "has to focus on 
individuals who are charged with specific crimes, not whole classes and groups 
of people." If so, it would mark a major and positive shift in policy.

Maliki's second challenge is with his own. The Shiite militias now run rampant 
throughout non-Kurdish Iraq. Khalilzad believes that they will have to be 
largely disbanded -- "perhaps 5 percent of them can be integrated into the 
national army and security services, but most have to be given civilian jobs." 
The greatest challenge here comes from the large and growing Mahdi Army of 
Moqtada al-Sadr. This renegade cleric is mounting a frontal challenge to the 
United States and to the authority of the new Iraqi government (even while he 
takes charge of some of its ministries).

Maliki will have to handle Sadr politically as well as militarily, enlisting 
Ayatollah Ali Sistani's help. If Maliki cannot handle him, Moqtada al-Sadr will 
become the most powerful man in Iraq. And Nouri al-Maliki will not be the first 
elected prime minister of a new Iraq, but the last prime minister of an 
experiment that failed. Iraq will continue down its slide into violence, ethnic 
cleansing and Balkanization. In places such as Baghdad, with mixed populations, 
this will mean the city will be carved up into warring neighborhoods, with 
gangs providing a mafia-style system of law and order, and constant guerrilla 
attacks. It will be Lebanon in the 1980s, except that 130,000 American troops 
will be in the middle of it all.

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