Can Iraqi Pols Make a Deal?
A nervous Bush administration wades deeper into Iraqi politics to try to break a dangerous stalemate
The cigarette smoke in the backrooms of Iraq's political scene has been much, much thicker than usual the past four months. The current effort to form a new government appears to be following what has become the traditional Iraqi script--seemingly interminable rounds of laborious, late-night haggling sessions that somehow eventually end up in a painful compromise. For now, a deal seems maddeningly elusive. Outside the smoke-filled rooms, patience is dwindling dangerously amid the relentless succession of bombings and bullet-riddled corpses dumped on the streets. Insurgents last week detonated a car bomb in Najaf near one of the holiest shrines for Iraq's Shiites, while suicide bombers dressed in women's clothes killed at least 70 people at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad.
The scenes of Iraqis holding up their purple fingers triumphantly after voting last December now seem like a distant memory. The current political stalemate became so acute that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made an unprecedented joint trip to Baghdad for a delicate diplomatic two-step. Their mission: push for an urgent resolution to the deadlock over Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's bid for another term without provoking charges of meddling in Iraqi politics. Their other acrobatic aim was to reach out to alienated Sunni leaders, while simultaneously reassuring Shiites that Washington and London are not ignoring their electoral victory and mandate for the top post.
Quiet shift. Predictably, Rice and Straw's surprise visit drew mixed reviews. But the trip was the first public sign of a quiet shift in U.S. policy away from staying out of Iraq's politics. "We've always tried to pursue the approach that is the legacy of [Secretary of State Colin] Powell's Pottery Barn rules--you broke it, you bought it," says a State Department official. "The idea was that in the political maturation phase, we don't want to break it again. We don't want to take ownership of it." But in the past two weeks, U.S. officials have quietly told Iraq's political leaders that, with Jafari's failure to win support from other political factions, it might be time to look for alternatives. Separately, President Bush sent a similar message through third parties to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite religious leader and most influential power broker. "This is a fundamental philosophical change," the official says. "We were playing chicken with the Iraqis, and then we finally blinked. We decided we needed to bring more pressure to bear."
Behind the scenes, there has been some apparent progress. For one thing, Iraqi leaders do appear to be committed still to the idea of a unity government. "It speaks to an awakening among Shiite and Kurdish leaders who, until this point, were a little more amazed at the possibilities of power than they were at the necessities of enlarging their legitimacy," says a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. Iraqi politicians have agreed on a set of rules for how the new government, once it is formed, would operate, according to U.S. diplomats. One of the four documents they completed is a 32-point political program. Two others set up key security committees that would broaden participation in tackling the insurgency. Iraqis also wrote bylaws for the next cabinet, which would be required to approve most government decisions--unlike the practice for the previous government. "That one was run... by individual ministers who were managing their portfolios as individual fiefdoms," says a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad.
More delays. U.S. officials hope the agreements will make the political horse-trading less of a zero-sum game for the political parties. But so far, there appears to be little progress on the negotiations. Indeed, Rice had barely returned home before Shiite leaders delayed convening the parliament again. Still, the alliance of Shiite religious parties that originally nominated Jafari has been roiled by a growing number of defectors calling for a different candidate. "Anything that reduces the specter of the Shiite community to the Sunni side can be a useful tool, "says a State Department official.
For several weeks, U.S. officials have been warning that the current political vacuum is only aggravating the risk of sectarian conflict and even possibly civil war. But Wayne White, who ran the State Department's Iraq intelligence unit from 2003 to 2005, worries that officials are creating "a false expectation" that a new government will bring stability. "The violence is endemic and related to the sectarian tension in the society rather than the government not being formed," he says. "Under the current circumstances, I cannot imagine finding anyone who can end the violence."
This story appears in the April 17, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.