White House Wants Iraqi Leaders to Reach 'Political Accommodation'

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A06

Having won a two-month reprieve from Congress to demonstrate progress in Iraq, the White House does not intend to give up on trying to forge a grand political bargain among Iraq's sectarian leaders, even though such a deal has proved elusive since the 2003 invasion, administration officials said.

The officials said they hope to develop the framework through which competing factions can sort out their differences and enact a national oil law, pass legislation aimed at bringing ex-Baathists into the government and demonstrate progress on other measures aimed at achieving national reconciliation.

But the officials privately acknowledge that the Iraqi government probably will not fulfill all of those tasks, which are among the political goals Congress is demanding before a Sept. 15 deadline. Asking the Iraqi parliament to move such legislation by September, one senior administration official said, is a bit like asking the U.S. Congress to handle abortion, gun control and other hot-button issues in a matter of months.

Instead, the senior official said, the White House wants to set Iraqi leaders on a path to "political accommodation on some of the major issues" and create "a very sound foundation to build upon." The official, who, along with several others in the administration, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House strategy more candidly. Many outside Iraq experts are deeply skeptical that the administration's initiative will bear fruit, given the divides in Iraqi society and suspicions between Shiites and Sunnis. After all, they point out, such a political bargain has essentially been the goal of U.S. efforts for more than four years, with little to show for it.

U.S. officials "have not recognized that the [Iraqi] government is not the determinative force in the country, but the government is made up of fractured interests, each of whom are pursuing their own objectives," said Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, which has closely followed the politics in Iraq. "They haven't figured out a way to corner them, to bring them into a single negotiating framework."

The White House approach appears dictated in no small part by the necessity of satisfying key Republicans in Congress that the president's political strategy in Iraq has some chance of working.

With congressional Democrats unable to muster enough votes to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops, administration officials appear confident that they will have a free hand in Iraq for at least the next two months. They say they will use that time not just to focus on a larger political settlement inside Iraq but also to continue offensive military operations and to expand regional diplomacy -- while holding out the prospect of modest troop withdrawals sometime after September.

A key focus, they said, is the political situation in Iraq. To obtain more funding for the war last May, President Bush agreed to a series of benchmarks for the Iraqi government, such as parliament passing the oil law, holding provincial elections and protecting the rights of minorities. Even by his own administration's assessment, progress toward meeting these benchmarks has been mixed.

Thus, administration officials have taken in recent days to describing the benchmarks as imperfect indicators, saying a better gauge right now is political reconciliation in local areas. They are also playing up broader Iraqi and U.S. efforts at "top-down" reconciliation, such as strengthening the Presidency Council in Iraq, composed of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, Kurdish president Jalal Talabani and the two vice presidents, one a Shiite and the other a Sunni.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker told Congress on Thursday that the council is meeting weekly to deal with crises, and officials are hoping this will become a forum to develop consensus on broader political issues. Bush has taken to including the two vice presidents -- Adel Abdul Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi -- as well as Talabani in some of his regular video conferences with Maliki.

Crocker and other administration officials said that this new political approach would be accompanied by a new regional diplomatic initiative, which will include trips to the region by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and possibly a second regional conference that could also include key players such as Syria and Iran.

But Democrats seemed unimpressed. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Crocker that he sees "no prospect of building that trust or capacity" from the government in the next several years and that the president's policy is based on a "flawed premise."

"Iraq cannot be governed from the center, absent a dictator or indefinite occupation," Biden said. "I believe we should promote a political settlement that allows the warring factions breathing room in their own regions."