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Divisions impede progress for Iraq

Friction among U.S. officials and outbreaks of sectarian violence hamper policy-setting efforts, experts say

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS | Newsday Washington Bureau Chief

April 16, 2006

WASHINGTON - Three years after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. policy for the increasingly ravaged country is in a shambles, with no one clearly in charge. Infighting in Washington and intrigue in Baghdad are said to be crippling U.S. efforts.

That is the picture provided by interviews with Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as foreign policy and military experts on the region - including ardent supporters of the war.

"I don't see any recognition here in Washington that a fundamental reassessment, a hard look at where we're going wrong, is in the offing," said Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who until recently was one of the administration's most outspoken supporters here on Iraq. "I keep hearing we're doing great.

"The bottom line is that we don't have any policy" toward Iraq, said Pletka, who said she still supports the U.S. invasion.

Inside Iraq the situation could not be more dire. The supposedly peaceful south last week boiled in unprecedented sectarian violence, while in the north insurgents were able to mount a brazen, full-scale attack on a convoy carrying 80 Iraqi policemen. Each week looks more like a civil war and brings the country closer to collapse.

In the four months since elections, Iraqi leaders have dithered over who should be prime minister. Public efforts by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to derail the renomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in favor of Deputy President Adel Abdul Mahdi backfired, making Mahdi's situation more difficult, according to a source close to him.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been bickering publicly with Rice over a comment she made acknowledging "thousands" of tactical U.S. mistakes in Iraq. For five months the Pentagon refused to budge over State Department pleas for soldiers to protect diplomats, who would be placed in all 18 Iraqi provinces, State's biggest Iraq initiative.

Government sources say there have been some improvements in military tactics, with U.S. officers more attuned to the counterinsurgency. But in the past two months the problem has shifted to sectarian violence, which can be solved only through political means.

The State Department and Pentagon are not cooperating on Iraq policy in Washington despite the elevation of Bush administration team player Rice to the top diplomatic job. Asked who in Washington was in charge of Iraq policy, a senior Pentagon officer helping to formulate that policy said, "It's not clear." He said the Pentagon and State have each created 6,000-mile "stovepipes" to Iraq that do not intersect. "We fight a lot between ourselves over who is responsible for what, more than we talk to the Iraqis," the officer said.

Even within the two departments, infighting is taking place over Middle East policy. At State, officials say Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney and the No. 2 official in the Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs, often operates independently, creating a kind of shadow Middle East policy. The man she supposedly reports to, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, a highly respected career foreign service officer and former ambassador to Egypt, is often eclipsed by Cheney, a lawyer who has been at State for three years.

The tensions within the bureau have led to the departure of several senior Middle East experts at a critical juncture for the Middle East with ongoing crises over Iraq, Iran and the Palestinians, according to foreign policy experts.

At the Pentagon, six retired senior generals involved in Iraq have called for Rumsfeld's resignation over his stewardship of the war and his management style.

The administration has a very different view of its Iraq policy and what has been accomplished, and its chief spokesman on the issue is the president himself. "We have learned from our mistakes," he insisted at Johns Hopkins University's Washington campus Monday. "We've adjusted our approach ... " He said U.S. troops have "brought freedom to Iraq" and "security to our country."

As for the squabbling in Washington, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said recently that "all of us - the president, Secretary Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld - have been talking about the lessons that we have learned and how we've ... adjusted to circumstances on the ground."

Even the critics agree that Khalilzad, the Afghanistan-born U.S. ambassador to Iraq since last June, has been the first fully effective person in that post since the invasion.

But Shia sources complain bitterly that he has pressed too hard for inclusion of Sunni politicians in the government and dismantling of Shia militias. Now Sunni leaders praise him, but the Shia - who will be the leaders of the new government - mention darkly that he is of Sunni origin himself and has lost his credibility.

"This is what happens when you are in the middle of an incipient civil war," said Edward Walker, a former top State Department officer for the Middle East. "I think he has been in some ways discredited." If that proves true, the United States will have lost its last major influence over Iraqi politics.

Administration insiders say the militia issue that helped bring about the ambassador's problems might have been avoided if Rice had not downplayed the problem, dropping for a time the call for militias to disband.

Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and before that a colonel with 31 years' experience in the Army, agreed recently that military tactics have improved. "They have finally stumbled on tactics that are working, but they have made so many mistakes they can't make up the time. They abused too many Iraqis," he said last week. With increasing sectarian violence, "Iraq is truly going to be a mess."