Gates Urges Iraq To Hasten Push To Defuse Sectarianism

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
April 19, 2007
By David S. Cloud
TEL AVIV, April 18 — As a series of deadly bombings rocked Baghdad, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Wednesday for Iraq’s government to make “faster progress” on Sunni-Shiite reconciliation but said the attacks would not derail the administration’s Iraq strategy.
Speaking to reporters after meetings with Israeli officials here, Mr. Gates said the attacks, in mostly Shiite areas of Baghdad, were an attempt to incite reprisals by Shiite militias and derail the Bush administration’s new push to secure Baghdad.
“The insurgency and others would attempt to increase the violence in order to make the plan a failure or to make the people of Iraq believe the plan is a failure,” he said. “We intend to persist to show that it is not.”
Even before the latest bombings, senior American officials said that Iraq’s government had not been moving fast enough on steps it had promised to take as part of the new security strategy, which is aimed at defusing sectarian tensions and lessening Sunni support for the insurgency.
During a stop in Cairo before traveling to Israel, Mr. Gates said, “I believe that faster progress can be made in the political reconciliation process.” His remarks came at a luncheon speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Cairo after he met with Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak.
Though Mr. Gates has avoided direct criticism of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, American officials are increasingly worried about Mr. Maliki’s failure to complete even basic reconciliation measures, some of which the Bush administration has sought for years. They include apportioning oil revenues through legislation, easing laws that excluded former Baath Party members from government positions and holding provincial elections.
The result of the inaction, the officials say, is that bombings like those on Wednesday have even more impact.
In January, administration officials said that in response to President Bush’s decision to send nearly 30,000 American troops to Baghdad, the Iraqi government would have to make progress on reconciliation. Although that threat is no longer being heard, administration officials are privately warning Iraqis not to misread how much time they have, especially with Congress seeking to impose timelines for beginning a troop withdrawal.
In his Cairo speech, Mr. Gates warned that other governments in the region had as much to lose from a collapse of the Iraqi government as the United States did.
The consequences of a failed state in Iraq “will be felt in the capitals and communities of the Middle East well before they are felt in Washington or New York,” Mr. Gates said. “The forces that would be unleashed — of sectarian strife, of an emboldened extremist movement with access to sanctuaries — do not recognize national boundaries.”
Though Mr. Gates has spoken before about the consequences of Iraq instability, his remarks were his starkest warning yet to Sunni-dominated governments that they could face greater security threats from Iraq unless they helped to buttress Iraq’s leadership.
He praised Mr. Mubarak for inviting Mr. Maliki for official talks in Cairo soon but said that Arab governments needed to take other steps to signal acceptance of Iraq’s government, like opening embassies in Baghdad and providing debt relief.
Mr. Gates’s visit to Egypt provided fresh evidence of how the urgency of stabilizing Iraq had reoriented the Bush administration’s priorities. His speech was free of calls for Egypt and other Arab governments to democratize — a theme that as recently as two years ago was a centerpiece of the administration’s foreign policy in the region.
 
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