Wary Americans Hope New Cabinet Will Help Stabilize Iraq
By John F. Burns
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 20 — As Iraq's new government was announced Saturday, some senior American military and civilian officials watched from the sidelines, apprehensive that they were witnessing what might be the last chance to save the American enterprise in Iraq from a descent into chaos and civil war.
While others took a less bleak view, the common feeling among a wide range of officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday's events was that the formation of the first full-term government since the toppling of Saddam Hussein marked a critical juncture for Iraq, and for the American stake in its future.
The 36 men and women appointed to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's cabinet — in an ominous sign of continuing divisions, three key ministries were left vacant — took over from a transitional government that has been widely viewed as a miserable failure. In his year in office, the departing prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, presided over a rising wave of sectarian violence. Basic government services, especially health and electricity, slipped deeper into the chaos that enveloped Iraq in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion three years ago.
This time, American officials played a muscular role in vetting and negotiating over the new cabinet. Dismayed at what they have described as the Jaafari government's incompetence, American officials reversed the hands-off approach that characterized American policy as Mr. Jaafari formed his cabinet in early 2005.
Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President Bush's first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of national intelligence, was to respect Iraq's standing as a sovereign state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government's formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.
During these negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer, Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki, the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries, and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign them up to the American vision of a national unity government.
How far Mr. Khalilzad succeeded was uncertain as the new ministers were confirmed by Parliament on Saturday. The failure to win the agreement of top Sunni and Shiite party leaders on the interior, defense and national security posts was an embarrassing blow, emphasizing the gulf between Iraq's two main communities on the crucial issues of sectarian bloodletting and the Sunni-led insurgency.
The walkout of key members of the Sunni parliamentary bloc, including hard-liners with links to the insurgency, boded ill for hopes that the new government could draw some elements of the insurgency into talks and an eventual cease-fire.
Every milestone in the American political road map for Iraq has been accompanied by severe political turbulence, and American officials have been forced at each stage to resort to last-minute expedients that kept the momentum going, but only at the cost of setting aside key issues that will have to be resolved if the new Iraqi state is to survive. In effect, the Americans have been forced to agree to punt on a wide range of issues, just as they were when the rival Iraqi parties failed to agree on the security posts on Saturday.
When the interim Constitution was set for signing in the spring of 2004, Shiite holdouts refused to sign at the last minute, leaving live television coverage to focus on an platform empty of signatories. Last summer, deadlock on the permanent Constitution was broken only after Mr. Khalilzad suggested a face-saving formula. The Aug. 15 referendum narrowly approving the document went ahead, but only on condition that the entire document would be put to a four-month review by the new, full-term Parliament that approved Mr. Maliki's cabinet nominees on Saturday.
Most of the main party leaders seemed confident that disagreements over the security posts could be brokered, perhaps within days. But far deeper divisions, potentially destabilizing to the new government, will come into play when the Parliament appoints the Constitutional review committee.
Then, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds will battle over issues that have divided them from the moment of Mr. Hussein's overthrow, including the role of religion in the new state, favored by Shiite religious parties but resisted by many Sunnis and Kurds, as well as disputes over how decentralized the new state will be and how oil revenues will be distributed.
On Saturday, at least, those concerns receded, if only briefly, as American officials privately hailed the transition of power from Mr. Jaafari to Mr. Maliki. While the two men have similar political pedigrees — both are members of a Shiite religious party, Dawa, which was an early opponent of Mr. Hussein, and both fled Iraq in the early 1980's to escape a murderous purge of Dawa loyalists — American officials who have dealt with both men expect Mr. Maliki to bring to the post a level of competence, decisiveness and straightforwardness they say was painfully lacking in Mr. Jaafari.
One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr. Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari, who remains the new prime minister's political superior as Dawa's leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.
But American military commanders and diplomats say the first weeks of dealing with Mr. Maliki have been a major improvement. "He's got his own mind, but what I particularly like about him is that if he doesn't agree with you, he'll tell you," one senior American officer said.
Part of the American effort in helping to form the new government has been bent on making sure that the 56-year-old Mr. Maliki has overall authority over the government, something Mr. Jaafari lacked after key members of his ministry were effectively imposed on him by rival political parties.
This time, Mr. Khalilzad and other American diplomats worked to ensure that Mr. Maliki played a central role in choosing ministers, in the expectation they will be loyal to him, as well as to their parties.
Under Mr. Jaafari, cabinet ministers often acted autonomously, using their offices as personal political vehicles, and dispensing multimillion-dollar budgets as though they were private funds. For weeks before the cabinet announcement, American officials were involved in helping Mr. Maliki choose staff for his own office inside the heavily fortified Green Zone compound.
The government record Mr. Maliki inherits is a woeful one. At the Interior Ministry, the departing minister, Bayan Jabr, acknowledged in a recent interview that he had little idea what many of the 230,000 armed men under his control were doing, nor the degree of their involvement in Shiite death squads that have killed hundreds of Sunnis in revenge for Sunni insurgent attacks.
Among those failures has been plunging electricity production, down to little more than 4,000 megawatts, lower than it was when Mr. Hussein was toppled, and a sharp drop from the 5,300 megawatts achieved as the Jaafari government took office, despite a multibillion American investment in generating capacity. American efforts to build the new Iraqi security forces have been hampered by Iraqi ministries' failure to develop supply lines, especially in getting fuel to the Iraqi Army.
Much of the American effort has gone into attempting to ensure that capable ministers take over at what the Americans call the "sovereign ministries" of oil, electricity, finance, justice, foreign affairs, and, crucially, interior and defense. American officials temper their criticism of the Jaafari government with an acknowledgment that the Bush administration, with its early hostility to "nation building" after the 2003 invasion, paid scant attention to the need to help develop governmental competence, and say that the past three years were largely squandered as a result.
In recent months, new efforts have been made to assign American advisers to key ministries, and American commanders have scoured their own ranks for officers with appropriate skills, seconding them to the ministries. But the common view in the American military and civilian hierarchy here is that success or failure of the new government will depend on its own ability to rally 25 million exhausted Iraqis behind it — and against the insurgency — with a level of competence and honesty that has so far been elusive.
One high-ranking American officer put it bluntly. "The crucial question is what they've learned from the experience of the Jaafari government," he said. "So far, the Shia have not demonstrated that they can govern, and they have to demonstrate that now."By John F. Burns
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 20 — As Iraq's new government was announced Saturday, some senior American military and civilian officials watched from the sidelines, apprehensive that they were witnessing what might be the last chance to save the American enterprise in Iraq from a descent into chaos and civil war.
While others took a less bleak view, the common feeling among a wide range of officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday's events was that the formation of the first full-term government since the toppling of Saddam Hussein marked a critical juncture for Iraq, and for the American stake in its future.
The 36 men and women appointed to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's cabinet — in an ominous sign of continuing divisions, three key ministries were left vacant — took over from a transitional government that has been widely viewed as a miserable failure. In his year in office, the departing prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, presided over a rising wave of sectarian violence. Basic government services, especially health and electricity, slipped deeper into the chaos that enveloped Iraq in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion three years ago.
This time, American officials played a muscular role in vetting and negotiating over the new cabinet. Dismayed at what they have described as the Jaafari government's incompetence, American officials reversed the hands-off approach that characterized American policy as Mr. Jaafari formed his cabinet in early 2005.
Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President Bush's first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of national intelligence, was to respect Iraq's standing as a sovereign state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government's formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.
During these negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer, Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki, the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries, and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign them up to the American vision of a national unity government.
How far Mr. Khalilzad succeeded was uncertain as the new ministers were confirmed by Parliament on Saturday. The failure to win the agreement of top Sunni and Shiite party leaders on the interior, defense and national security posts was an embarrassing blow, emphasizing the gulf between Iraq's two main communities on the crucial issues of sectarian bloodletting and the Sunni-led insurgency.
The walkout of key members of the Sunni parliamentary bloc, including hard-liners with links to the insurgency, boded ill for hopes that the new government could draw some elements of the insurgency into talks and an eventual cease-fire.
Every milestone in the American political road map for Iraq has been accompanied by severe political turbulence, and American officials have been forced at each stage to resort to last-minute expedients that kept the momentum going, but only at the cost of setting aside key issues that will have to be resolved if the new Iraqi state is to survive. In effect, the Americans have been forced to agree to punt on a wide range of issues, just as they were when the rival Iraqi parties failed to agree on the security posts on Saturday.
When the interim Constitution was set for signing in the spring of 2004, Shiite holdouts refused to sign at the last minute, leaving live television coverage to focus on an platform empty of signatories. Last summer, deadlock on the permanent Constitution was broken only after Mr. Khalilzad suggested a face-saving formula. The Aug. 15 referendum narrowly approving the document went ahead, but only on condition that the entire document would be put to a four-month review by the new, full-term Parliament that approved Mr. Maliki's cabinet nominees on Saturday.
Most of the main party leaders seemed confident that disagreements over the security posts could be brokered, perhaps within days. But far deeper divisions, potentially destabilizing to the new government, will come into play when the Parliament appoints the Constitutional review committee.
Then, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds will battle over issues that have divided them from the moment of Mr. Hussein's overthrow, including the role of religion in the new state, favored by Shiite religious parties but resisted by many Sunnis and Kurds, as well as disputes over how decentralized the new state will be and how oil revenues will be distributed.
On Saturday, at least, those concerns receded, if only briefly, as American officials privately hailed the transition of power from Mr. Jaafari to Mr. Maliki. While the two men have similar political pedigrees — both are members of a Shiite religious party, Dawa, which was an early opponent of Mr. Hussein, and both fled Iraq in the early 1980's to escape a murderous purge of Dawa loyalists — American officials who have dealt with both men expect Mr. Maliki to bring to the post a level of competence, decisiveness and straightforwardness they say was painfully lacking in Mr. Jaafari.
One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr. Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari, who remains the new prime minister's political superior as Dawa's leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.
But American military commanders and diplomats say the first weeks of dealing with Mr. Maliki have been a major improvement. "He's got his own mind, but what I particularly like about him is that if he doesn't agree with you, he'll tell you," one senior American officer said.
Part of the American effort in helping to form the new government has been bent on making sure that the 56-year-old Mr. Maliki has overall authority over the government, something Mr. Jaafari lacked after key members of his ministry were effectively imposed on him by rival political parties.
This time, Mr. Khalilzad and other American diplomats worked to ensure that Mr. Maliki played a central role in choosing ministers, in the expectation they will be loyal to him, as well as to their parties.
Under Mr. Jaafari, cabinet ministers often acted autonomously, using their offices as personal political vehicles, and dispensing multimillion-dollar budgets as though they were private funds. For weeks before the cabinet announcement, American officials were involved in helping Mr. Maliki choose staff for his own office inside the heavily fortified Green Zone compound.
The government record Mr. Maliki inherits is a woeful one. At the Interior Ministry, the departing minister, Bayan Jabr, acknowledged in a recent interview that he had little idea what many of the 230,000 armed men under his control were doing, nor the degree of their involvement in Shiite death squads that have killed hundreds of Sunnis in revenge for Sunni insurgent attacks.
Among those failures has been plunging electricity production, down to little more than 4,000 megawatts, lower than it was when Mr. Hussein was toppled, and a sharp drop from the 5,300 megawatts achieved as the Jaafari government took office, despite a multibillion American investment in generating capacity. American efforts to build the new Iraqi security forces have been hampered by Iraqi ministries' failure to develop supply lines, especially in getting fuel to the Iraqi Army.
Much of the American effort has gone into attempting to ensure that capable ministers take over at what the Americans call the "sovereign ministries" of oil, electricity, finance, justice, foreign affairs, and, crucially, interior and defense. American officials temper their criticism of the Jaafari government with an acknowledgment that the Bush administration, with its early hostility to "nation building" after the 2003 invasion, paid scant attention to the need to help develop governmental competence, and say that the past three years were largely squandered as a result.
In recent months, new efforts have been made to assign American advisers to key ministries, and American commanders have scoured their own ranks for officers with appropriate skills, seconding them to the ministries. But the common view in the American military and civilian hierarchy here is that success or failure of the new government will depend on its own ability to rally 25 million exhausted Iraqis behind it — and against the insurgency — with a level of competence and honesty that has so far been elusive.
One high-ranking American officer put it bluntly. "The crucial question is what they've learned from the experience of the Jaafari government," he said. "So far, the Shia have not demonstrated that they can govern, and they have to demonstrate that now."
