Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Iraq: Bush's Wavering Halts Insurgent Peace Talks

Gareth Porter | 06.05.2006 17:55 | Anti-militarism | World

Of course, weknow that the Bush/PNAC Regime is not interested in peace, because with peace, there is no plausible "justification" for their planned, permanent military presence in Iraq.

Bush's Wavering Halts Insurgent Peace Talks
by Gareth Porter

The United States has backed away from high-level peace negotiations with Sunni insurgent groups after meeting with them regularly over several weeks in January and February, according to an insurgent leader.

Evidence of wavering by the George W. Bush administration over the negotiations came from the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, which reported Tuesday that Sunni resistance organizations had just broken off secret talks with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad because of the U.S. failure to respond to a peace proposal from the insurgents.

The Arab-language newspaper reported that the leader of a Sunni insurgent group had revealed in an interview that representatives of more than 10 prominent Iraqi insurgent organizations had met with Khalilzad seven times starting on Jan. 16.

However, the insurgent leader said that the United States had never responded to a memorandum of understanding presented to Khalilzad around Mar. 1, despite a promise to do so before the formation of a new government. He said the insurgents had decided to end the talks and had delivered a memo to the US Embassy on Apr. 29 informing the United States of the decision.

The story was carried by Associated Press Wednesday with a Dubai dateline. The US Embassy had no immediate comment on the report, which has not yet been published in major international media.

The insurgent leader indicated that the proposal included provisions for a US troop withdrawal, which Pres. Bush has repeatedly rejected in the past. However, Khalilzad was well aware that a timeline for US withdrawal was the centerpiece of the insurgents' negotiating position from previous contacts with the insurgents and proceeded with the talks anyway.

A document posted on a London-based Iraqi exile group's internet site, which was said by Sunni sources with links to the insurgent groups to have reflected a consensus among major armed organizations on a negotiated settlement, calls for dismantling of insurgent units "immediately after the full withdrawal of US and other foreign forces." Both are to be carried out within six months of an agreement.

It seems unlikely that Khalilzad would have met with the insurgents seven times in roughly six weeks if he had not been prepared to consider a peace plan that involved a timeline for US withdrawal. Bush, who approved Khalilzad's talks with the insurgents, also knew that troop withdrawal would be part of any agreement.

A more plausible explanation for the failure to respond to the insurgents' proposal is that military commanders and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balked at the peace proposal given to the ambassador in late February or early March and prevailed on Pres. Bush to back away from the talks.

Khalilzad has been at odds with the military and the Pentagon over the direction of US policy in Iraq for several months. At least since October, Khalilzad has been pursuing a strategy of seeking an accommodation with Sunnis and putting pressure on the Shi'ites to curb the militias.

Just before and after the December parliamentary election in Iraq, Khalilzad, evidently with White House approval, got tough with the militant Shi'ite leaders about the threat of sectarian militias. He also began talking openly about Iran's aspirations for regional hegemony and its influence in Iraq at the same time that reporters were being told that Iran was funneling money to the Shi'ite political parties in the election.

During the period in which Khalilzad was negotiating intensively with the Sunni insurgents, and in the weeks that followed, he was threatening to withdraw US support from the government if the Shi'ites did not give up their control over the all-important interior ministry. In an interview with Knight Ridder on Feb. 20, he said, "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."

After the dramatic increase in sectarian violence following the bombing of the Shi'ite temple in late February, Khalilzad began to argue explicitly that the main problem in Iraq was not the Sunni insurgency but the influence of militant Shi'ites exercized through militias. In March he said, "more Iraqis are dying today from militia violence than from the terrorists."

Clearly identifying sectarian militias as the primary threat in Iraq could be a justification for continuing negotiations aimed at making peace with the insurgents should the White House accept such a policy.

But that line was apparently not supported by Rumsfeld's Pentagon or by most military commanders in Iraq. They were focused on the mission of creating an Iraqi army that could carry on the war against the Sunni insurgents, which they now define as military success in Iraq.

The Pentagon officials and the US command in Iraq had ignored a series of warnings from Iraqi and US Embassy officials about the rapidly growing power of sectarian – primarily Shi'ite – militias in 2004 and 2005. Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reported Apr. 17 that the Iraqi interior minister from June 2004 to April 2005, Falah al-Naquib, said he personally raised the militia problem with Rumsfeld and others, but, "They didn't take us seriously."

The US command's spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch admitted at a briefing last month that the problem of militias "wasn't a problem set we focused on." Adopting a firm policy against Shi'ite militias would have conflicted with the main interest of military command and the Pentagon, because it would have reduced political support for the prosecution of the war against the Sunnis insurgents.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that the policy debate within the administration over the issue of redefining US priorities in Iraq was closely related to the consideration by the White House of the insurgents' peace proposal during the same March-April period.

Khalilzad clearly wanted a decision that the insurgency had now been eclipsed by the problem of sectarian violence. Others in the administration preferred to avoid any clear choice between the two problems. The two positions on that question were almost certainly related to the more immediate issue of what to do about a peace proposal from the insurgents that requires a timeline for US withdrawal. Khalilzad wanted to continue negotiating on the proposal; the military did not.

The struggle over peace negotiations thus provides the political backdrop for an unusual joint statement by Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey, the senior US commander in Iraq, which was published in the Los Angeles Times Apr. 11.

Ostensibly yet another administration exhortation to the public to stay the course in Iraq, that statement contains a carefully worded compromise on the issue of US priorities. It states that "the principle threat to stability is shifting from an insurgency grounded in rejection of the new political order to sectarian violence grounded in mutual fears and recriminations."

The compromise formula of a shift in priorities that is underway but not complete suggests that the Pentagon prevailed on Pres. Bush to pull back from negotiating a ceasefire and eventual troop withdrawal now. Considering that the embassy has not informed the its contacts in the insurgency that there can be no deal, however, that same compromise may mean that Pres. Bush is reluctant to preclude peace negotiations in the future.

 http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8948

Gareth Porter

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech