Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
March 26, 2007
Pg. 1
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, March 25 — The senior American envoy in Iraq, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, held talks last year with men he believed represented major insurgent groups in a drive to bring militant Sunni Arabs into politics.
“There were discussions with the representatives of various groups in the aftermath of the elections, and during the formation of the government before the Samarra incident, and some discussions afterwards as well,” Mr. Khalilzad said in a farewell interview on Friday at his home inside the fortified Green Zone. He is the first American official to publicly acknowledge holding such talks.
The meetings began in early 2006 and were quite possibly the first attempts at sustained contact between senior American officials here and the Sunni Arab insurgency. Mr. Khalilzad flew to Jordan for some of the talks, which included self-identified representatives of the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, two leading nationalist factions, American and Iraqi officials said. Mr. Khalilzad declined to give details on the meetings, but other officials said the efforts had foundered by the summer, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off waves of sectarian violence.
Mr. Khalilzad’s willingness even to approach rebel groups seemed at odds with the public position of some Bush administration officials that the United States does not negotiate with insurgents. It was not clear whether he had to seek permission from Washington before engaging in these talks. In general, Mr. Khalilzad was given great flexibility in making diplomatic decisions to try to rein in the spiraling violence, and his talks with insurgents reflected the practical view of Iraqi politics that the ambassador adopted throughout his nearly two-year tenure here.
American commanders here have also said it is necessary to woo the less radical insurgent groups away from the true militants. American officials have privately acknowledged there have been some talks with insurgent representatives as early as autumn 2005.
In another sign of pragmatism, the ambassador reiterated in the interview his position that the American and Iraqi governments had to consider granting amnesty to insurgents. “This is something that we and Iraqis, the government, will do together, and there are various types of amnesties,” he said. “But the fundamental point, the goal of bringing the war to an end, the most important tribute we could pay to our soldiers who have lost their lives here would be that the cause they fought for would be embraced and accepted by their former enemies, by those who fought them.”
As Mr. Khalilzad, President Bush’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, leaves Iraq this week, it is clear that his time here will be remembered most for one thing — his attempts to bring disenfranchised Sunni Arabs into the political process, both through empowering Sunni Arab political parties and trying to reach out to insurgents.
The efforts came at the cost of increasing tensions between the Americans and Iraq’s Shiite leaders, some of whom accuse Mr. Khalilzad of a sectarian bias because he is an Afghan Sunni. Moreover, the efforts also have failed to defuse the insurgency. Violence has skyrocketed, prompting President Bush this winter to announce the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Iraq.
“I think that it has not gone as well as one would have clearly liked,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “And I think the complicating factor was the intensification of sectarian violence, particularly in the aftermath of Samarra.”
An American official said it was difficult to determine whether the people Mr. Khalilzad met with really were influential representatives of insurgent groups, as they claimed. In addition, the Sunni insurgency has no umbrella leadership, and the groups have competing ideologies. While the Islamic Army of Iraq and 1920 Revolution Brigades are believed to be led by Iraqis bitter at being ousted from the government and the military, some of the most militant groups are radical Islamists, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who have no interest in being brought into politics. “We were never able to find people who could reduce the violence,” the American official said. “The insurgency itself does not have anything resembling a unified command. Even within different cities and different provinces, the insurgency is very fractured.”
Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who is a friend of Mr. Khalilzad, said the talks fizzled partly because insurgent representatives made untenable demands. They sought a suspension of the Constitution, breakup of Parliament, reinstatement of the old Iraqi Army and establishment of a new government, he said.
Mr. Khalilzad said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq at the time, was also engaged in talks at some point, but the ambassador gave no details. Other officials said they knew of no such engagement by General Casey.
When it came to politics, Mr. Khalilzad heartily engaged in backroom deal making, a sharp departure from the aloof manner of his predecessor, John D. Negroponte. Most notably, he persuaded Sunni Arab leaders to take part in elections for a full-term government even after he pushed through a Constitution that the Sunni Arabs abhor and that has reinforced sectarian tensions.
“I think he did fine, actually, considering the circumstances,” said Ayad al-Samarraie, a prominent Sunni Arab legislator. “He tried his best to be a moderator between different political leaders.”
Mr. Samarraie is from the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc that holds 44 of 275 parliamentary seats and 7 of 38 cabinet positions. Mr. Khalilzad had hoped the bloc’s entry into politics would damp the violence. Yet, a Pentagon assessment released to Congress March 14 said October-December 2006 was the most violent three months since the American invasion.
Mr. Khalilzad’s efforts to woo the Sunni Arabs have infuriated many politicians in the ruling Shiite bloc, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Shiite leaders increasingly see the Americans as trying to check the power of the majority Shiites. That could push them closer to Iran, which is ruled by Shiite Persians.
After the Samarra bombing of February 2006, Mr. Khalilzad began saying that killings largely attributed to Shiite militias were more destabilizing than violence by Sunni insurgents. Displeased with the hard-line Shiite attitude of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, then the prime minister, Mr. Khalilzad helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s ouster, only to see Mr. Jaafari replaced by a party deputy, Mr. Maliki, who is beholden to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Some Shiite leaders began calling Mr. Khalilzad by the Sunni nickname of “Abu Omar.”
“He didn’t transfer real power to the Iraqis,” said Hassan al-Sineid, a Shiite legislator and adviser to Mr. Maliki. “He wasn’t cooperative enough with the Iraqi government in any field.”
Iraqi politicians are divided more than ever along ethnic and sectarian lines, with no viable moderate center. To draw in recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, Mr. Khalilzad said in the interview, the Shiites and Kurds will have to revise the Constitution and roll back the purging of Sunni Arabs from the government. A parliamentary committee is only now starting to review the Constitution, and there has been no decision on four competing proposals to overhaul de-Baathification. An oil law that could help ease sectarian tensions was approved by the cabinet last month but has yet to pass Parliament.
All that leads critics of Mr. Khalilzad to say that he never brokered any lasting solutions to this country’s sectarian squabbles.
“Khalilzad’s policy is based on compromise,” Mr. Sineid said. “He’s like an Arab sheik — he wants to make different groups sit down and compromise. That usually means putting off the hard decisions until the future.”
Mr. Khalilzad, 56, a neoconservative who served as ambassador to Afghanistan until his arrival here in June 2005, is to be succeeded by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, an Arabist now posted in Islamabad.
The most complex legacy of Mr. Khalilzad — and arguably the most divisive — is the Constitution, passed in a national referendum in October 2005. Sunni Arab voters overwhelmingly rejected it, but most Shiites and Kurds, who make up 80 percent of the population, supported it. That paved the way for full-term elections in December 2005.
“He was instrumental in the passage of the Constitution,” said Mr. Chalabi. “He helped the parties negotiate the final compromises for the Constitution. That’s his single biggest contribution.”
Mr. Khalilzad said that of his achievements here, he was most proud of a deal he worked out during the drafting of the Constitution that allowed for any part of it to be revised, appeasing some Sunni Arab leaders. Without that, he and other American officials said, the Constitution might have been defeated by a narrow margin in the popular vote, or Sunni Arabs might not have taken part in the elections. But critics of Mr. Khalilzad say that the painstaking and potentially rancorous review of the Constitution under way would not be needed if the Americans had shepherded a more balanced Constitution, instead of one that gave short shrift to the needs of the Sunni Arabs as it tried to appeal to the Kurds and Shiites.
Mr. Khalilzad and his colleagues, the critics say, were so fixated on meeting the political timetable laid out by the White House that they pushed through a document that may have inflamed the Sunni-led insurgency by enshrining strong regional control. The Constitution reaffirms Sunni Arab beliefs that Shiites and Kurds want oil and territory.
March 26, 2007
Pg. 1
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, March 25 — The senior American envoy in Iraq, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, held talks last year with men he believed represented major insurgent groups in a drive to bring militant Sunni Arabs into politics.
“There were discussions with the representatives of various groups in the aftermath of the elections, and during the formation of the government before the Samarra incident, and some discussions afterwards as well,” Mr. Khalilzad said in a farewell interview on Friday at his home inside the fortified Green Zone. He is the first American official to publicly acknowledge holding such talks.
The meetings began in early 2006 and were quite possibly the first attempts at sustained contact between senior American officials here and the Sunni Arab insurgency. Mr. Khalilzad flew to Jordan for some of the talks, which included self-identified representatives of the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, two leading nationalist factions, American and Iraqi officials said. Mr. Khalilzad declined to give details on the meetings, but other officials said the efforts had foundered by the summer, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off waves of sectarian violence.
Mr. Khalilzad’s willingness even to approach rebel groups seemed at odds with the public position of some Bush administration officials that the United States does not negotiate with insurgents. It was not clear whether he had to seek permission from Washington before engaging in these talks. In general, Mr. Khalilzad was given great flexibility in making diplomatic decisions to try to rein in the spiraling violence, and his talks with insurgents reflected the practical view of Iraqi politics that the ambassador adopted throughout his nearly two-year tenure here.
American commanders here have also said it is necessary to woo the less radical insurgent groups away from the true militants. American officials have privately acknowledged there have been some talks with insurgent representatives as early as autumn 2005.
In another sign of pragmatism, the ambassador reiterated in the interview his position that the American and Iraqi governments had to consider granting amnesty to insurgents. “This is something that we and Iraqis, the government, will do together, and there are various types of amnesties,” he said. “But the fundamental point, the goal of bringing the war to an end, the most important tribute we could pay to our soldiers who have lost their lives here would be that the cause they fought for would be embraced and accepted by their former enemies, by those who fought them.”
As Mr. Khalilzad, President Bush’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, leaves Iraq this week, it is clear that his time here will be remembered most for one thing — his attempts to bring disenfranchised Sunni Arabs into the political process, both through empowering Sunni Arab political parties and trying to reach out to insurgents.
The efforts came at the cost of increasing tensions between the Americans and Iraq’s Shiite leaders, some of whom accuse Mr. Khalilzad of a sectarian bias because he is an Afghan Sunni. Moreover, the efforts also have failed to defuse the insurgency. Violence has skyrocketed, prompting President Bush this winter to announce the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Iraq.
“I think that it has not gone as well as one would have clearly liked,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “And I think the complicating factor was the intensification of sectarian violence, particularly in the aftermath of Samarra.”
An American official said it was difficult to determine whether the people Mr. Khalilzad met with really were influential representatives of insurgent groups, as they claimed. In addition, the Sunni insurgency has no umbrella leadership, and the groups have competing ideologies. While the Islamic Army of Iraq and 1920 Revolution Brigades are believed to be led by Iraqis bitter at being ousted from the government and the military, some of the most militant groups are radical Islamists, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who have no interest in being brought into politics. “We were never able to find people who could reduce the violence,” the American official said. “The insurgency itself does not have anything resembling a unified command. Even within different cities and different provinces, the insurgency is very fractured.”
Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who is a friend of Mr. Khalilzad, said the talks fizzled partly because insurgent representatives made untenable demands. They sought a suspension of the Constitution, breakup of Parliament, reinstatement of the old Iraqi Army and establishment of a new government, he said.
Mr. Khalilzad said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq at the time, was also engaged in talks at some point, but the ambassador gave no details. Other officials said they knew of no such engagement by General Casey.
When it came to politics, Mr. Khalilzad heartily engaged in backroom deal making, a sharp departure from the aloof manner of his predecessor, John D. Negroponte. Most notably, he persuaded Sunni Arab leaders to take part in elections for a full-term government even after he pushed through a Constitution that the Sunni Arabs abhor and that has reinforced sectarian tensions.
“I think he did fine, actually, considering the circumstances,” said Ayad al-Samarraie, a prominent Sunni Arab legislator. “He tried his best to be a moderator between different political leaders.”
Mr. Samarraie is from the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc that holds 44 of 275 parliamentary seats and 7 of 38 cabinet positions. Mr. Khalilzad had hoped the bloc’s entry into politics would damp the violence. Yet, a Pentagon assessment released to Congress March 14 said October-December 2006 was the most violent three months since the American invasion.
Mr. Khalilzad’s efforts to woo the Sunni Arabs have infuriated many politicians in the ruling Shiite bloc, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Shiite leaders increasingly see the Americans as trying to check the power of the majority Shiites. That could push them closer to Iran, which is ruled by Shiite Persians.
After the Samarra bombing of February 2006, Mr. Khalilzad began saying that killings largely attributed to Shiite militias were more destabilizing than violence by Sunni insurgents. Displeased with the hard-line Shiite attitude of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, then the prime minister, Mr. Khalilzad helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s ouster, only to see Mr. Jaafari replaced by a party deputy, Mr. Maliki, who is beholden to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Some Shiite leaders began calling Mr. Khalilzad by the Sunni nickname of “Abu Omar.”
“He didn’t transfer real power to the Iraqis,” said Hassan al-Sineid, a Shiite legislator and adviser to Mr. Maliki. “He wasn’t cooperative enough with the Iraqi government in any field.”
Iraqi politicians are divided more than ever along ethnic and sectarian lines, with no viable moderate center. To draw in recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, Mr. Khalilzad said in the interview, the Shiites and Kurds will have to revise the Constitution and roll back the purging of Sunni Arabs from the government. A parliamentary committee is only now starting to review the Constitution, and there has been no decision on four competing proposals to overhaul de-Baathification. An oil law that could help ease sectarian tensions was approved by the cabinet last month but has yet to pass Parliament.
All that leads critics of Mr. Khalilzad to say that he never brokered any lasting solutions to this country’s sectarian squabbles.
“Khalilzad’s policy is based on compromise,” Mr. Sineid said. “He’s like an Arab sheik — he wants to make different groups sit down and compromise. That usually means putting off the hard decisions until the future.”
Mr. Khalilzad, 56, a neoconservative who served as ambassador to Afghanistan until his arrival here in June 2005, is to be succeeded by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, an Arabist now posted in Islamabad.
The most complex legacy of Mr. Khalilzad — and arguably the most divisive — is the Constitution, passed in a national referendum in October 2005. Sunni Arab voters overwhelmingly rejected it, but most Shiites and Kurds, who make up 80 percent of the population, supported it. That paved the way for full-term elections in December 2005.
“He was instrumental in the passage of the Constitution,” said Mr. Chalabi. “He helped the parties negotiate the final compromises for the Constitution. That’s his single biggest contribution.”
Mr. Khalilzad said that of his achievements here, he was most proud of a deal he worked out during the drafting of the Constitution that allowed for any part of it to be revised, appeasing some Sunni Arab leaders. Without that, he and other American officials said, the Constitution might have been defeated by a narrow margin in the popular vote, or Sunni Arabs might not have taken part in the elections. But critics of Mr. Khalilzad say that the painstaking and potentially rancorous review of the Constitution under way would not be needed if the Americans had shepherded a more balanced Constitution, instead of one that gave short shrift to the needs of the Sunni Arabs as it tried to appeal to the Kurds and Shiites.
Mr. Khalilzad and his colleagues, the critics say, were so fixated on meeting the political timetable laid out by the White House that they pushed through a document that may have inflamed the Sunni-led insurgency by enshrining strong regional control. The Constitution reaffirms Sunni Arab beliefs that Shiites and Kurds want oil and territory.