Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, a key ally of the United States, on Sunday delivered a thunderous rejection of the bipartisan US Iraq Study Group, describing its findings as ”dangerous” and saying that its recommendations were ”dead in the water”.
At his heavily fortified residence on the banks of the Tigris, Talabani told the Guardian that the key suggestions of the long-awaited report by James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton were ”the wrong medicine for the wrong diagnosis” and called them an unwarranted interference in Iraq’s internal affairs that undermined the war-torn country’s sovereignty at a crucial time.
”As far as I am concerned it is dead in the water,” he said.
Talabani added that calls for US sanctions against the Iraqi government if it failed to meet a timeline for a series of milestones were ”an insult”.
Launched last week amid much fanfare in the US, the bipartisan report on the next step for the US in Iraq outlined, among other things, the ”grave and deteriorating situation” in the country. It expressed deep concern over the weakness of the national unity government, advocating strong centralised rule.
Talabani’s strident response followed another weekend of sectarian-inspired violence in Baghdad and a surprise farewell visit to US troops in Iraq by outgoing US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of the US-led invasion.
On Sunday, up to 30 armed gunmen killed nine members of two Shi’ite families in the western Jihad neighbourhood, along the route to Baghdad’s airport. The daylight attack came a day after claims that Shi’ite militias raided the mixed suburb of Hurriya, forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee into the neighbouring Amil district.
On his 15th and final trip to Iraq as defence secretary, Rumsfeld addressed troops at a US airbase in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, urging them to continue the fight. ”The consequences of failure are unacceptable,” he was quoted as saying on the Department of Defence website. ”The enemy must be defeated.”
Opposition
The findings of the Iraq Study Group have already met considerable vocal opposition in Iraq, but Talabani’s comments are the loudest so far. The head of the Kurdistan Alliance, Talabani is one of the country’s most influential figures, a broker among the feuding factions in Baghdad.
His vehement opposition to the report could be decisive.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad said: ”To hear such comments from anti-US figures like Moqtada al-Sadr is one thing, but to hear it from President Talabani is something else.”
The Iraqi president said he would send a letter to US President George Bush outlining the government’s thinking about ”the main issues” contained in the Baker-Hamilton document.
The former Kurdish guerrilla leader said he was particularly alarmed by the recommendations for Iraq’s security structures, including the fledgling Iraqi army and the police. The Iraq Study Group suggested withdrawing US troops from a front-line combat role by 2008, and increasing the number of US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army from 3 000 to 4 000 currently to between 10 000 and 20 000.
But a clearly agitated Talabani said: ”They want to embed thousands more US army officers in Iraqi army units from small squadrons to whole divisions. If our army became a tool in the hands of foreign officers, what would that say about Iraqi sovereignty?
”We have many former Iraqi army officers, good patriotic professional army men who were against Saddam Hussein. Why can’t we bring those people to the army, to help train and develop and lead?”
Success rate
He said he was grateful for the removal of Saddam, but the US success rate so far in training the police and army was poor. ”It has gone from failure to failure. Look at the police force they gathered from the street, regardless of their loyalty to the new regime, their capacity, or their ability. These mistakes will be repeated if we allow them inside the army.”
Talabani insisted that decisions on Iraq’s defence strategy and its internal security forces should not be taken by ”outside forces”.
”Iraqis are the ones who daily bear the brunt of the terrorist groups’ activities and we should be the ones who decide how to fight them,” he said. ”We want to achieve this by working as partners while the multinational forces remain in Iraq, and not simply follow their orders. At the moment our hands are crippled in handling the terrorism issue in Iraq.”
Talabani insisted that violence in Baghdad could be stopped if the Iraqi government was free to exercise its proper authority. ”We can smell the attitude of James Baker in 1991 when he liberated Kuwait but left Saddam in power,” he said. — Guardian Unlimited Â