[Peace-discuss] Republican withdrawal

[C. G. Estabrook]

[By the November elections, the Republicans will be "conducting an 
orderly withdrawal from Iraq," while the Democrats -- to the right of 
the Republicans as they often are -- while be calling for "keeping our 
commitment."  --CGE]
	
	
US plays a double game
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Caught between the need to explore a possible diplomatic 
way out of an otherwise hopeless mess in Iraq and the domestic political 
need to keep the Democrats on the defensive, US President George W Bush 
and Vice President Dick Cheney are playing a double game on the issue of 
a timetable for withdrawal.

For many months, the Bush White House has been attacking some Democrats 
in Congress for calling for a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq. 
Cheney condemned such proposals in a CNN interview June 22 as "the worst 
possible thing we could do", and portrayed them as "validating the 
theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight".

But for the past six months, the Bush administration has been
secretly pursuing peace negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, in which 
it has explicitly accepted the principle that an eventual peace 
agreement will include a timetable for US withdrawal.

The double game began when US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced last 
November that he was prepared to open negotiations with the Sunni 
insurgents, to whom he referred as "nationalists". That was just a few 
days after the spokesman for the US military command in Iraq said its 
objective was no longer to "defeat" the insurgents, as distinct from 
foreign terrorist groups.

About six weeks later, Khalilzad began meeting with leaders of the 
insurgent groups, according to an insurgent leader interviewed by the 
London-based Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. In the interview, published on 
May 3, the insurgent leader revealed that representatives of more than 
10 armed organizations met with Khalilzad on seven occasions between 
January 16 and the end of February.

The focus of the talks, according to the insurgent leader's account, was 
US withdrawal from Iraq. He said the insurgents gave Khalilzad a draft 
memorandum of understanding on a settlement. He did not reveal the 
contents of the document, but the Associated Press, citing insurgent and 
government officials, reported on June 28 that 11 insurgent groups had 
offered to halt all attacks in return for a two-year timetable for US 
troop withdrawal.

Khalilzad promised to get back to them with a US response before the new 
government had been formed, according to the insurgent's account, but 
the Sunnis never heard from him again, and informed the US Embassy on 
April 20 that they were breaking off the talks.

Khalilzad's failure to respond suggests the White House was not yet 
prepared to have the administration take direct responsibility for a 
settlement involving a timetable for withdrawal. But that did not mean 
it was unwilling to participate in a process under which the Iraqi 
government would officially take responsibility for such a settlement.

Some time in early 2006, according to an aide to Iraqi President Jalal 
Talabani, seven Sunni insurgent groups - all of which had been among the 
organizations that met with Khalilzad - began meeting with the 
president, a Kurd who had indicated his willingness to negotiate with 
the insurgents the previous November. Beginning some time in April, the 
US Embassy joined in the meetings with the insurgency, as Talabani 
revealed and the US Embassy confirmed to the media on May 1.

The central issue in these negotiations was a timetable for US 
withdrawal, according to a representative of one of the seven groups, 
the Islamic National Front for Liberation of Iraq. The negotiations made 
significant progress. Talabani told The Times of London on June 23 that 
the insurgent groups had communicated through an intermediary that they 
were prepared to finalize an agreement with the United States and Iraq.

This is where the "national reconciliation plan" of Iraqi Prime Minister 
Nuri al-Maliki entered the picture. The first draft of the plan, which 
was circulated to members of the Iraqi parliament in the week of June 
18, incorporated the central elements of the peace settlement that had 
been discussed in the three-way negotiations. Among these was agreement 
on an explicit timetable for troop withdrawal that would take into 
account the completion of the process of training Iraqi security forces.

The Times, which obtained a copy of that first draft, reported on June 
23 that it said, "We must agree on a time schedule to pull out the 
troops from Iraq, while at the same time building up the Iraqi forces 
that will guarantee Iraqi security, and this must be supported by a 
United Nations Security Council decision."

The sentence about the need for a withdrawal timetable was removed from 
the final version of the document made public on June 25, or watered 
down beyond recognition - reportedly because of opposition by militant 
Shi'ite party leaders.

Nevertheless, senior US officials in Baghdad were dropping clear hints 
that the United States would support negotiation of a peace agreement 
based on the points that had been dropped from the original draft.

Khalilzad revealed in an interview with Washington Post columnist David 
Ignatius published on June 28 that General George Casey, the US military 
commander in Iraq, was about to meet with Maliki to form a joint 
US-Iraqi committee to decide on "the withdrawal of US forces and the 
conditions related to a road map for an ultimate withdrawal of US troops".

Khalilzad told Ignatius that there was no "automatic timetable for 
withdrawal" - an artfully ambiguous formula that should be interpreted 
in light of the interview which another senior US official gave to 
Newsweek and The Times on June 24 on condition that he be identified as 
a "senior coalition military official".

The official refused to rule out the idea of timetable for withdrawal, 
suggesting that "a date" was "the sort of assurance that [the Sunnis] 
are looking for". He went on to state that, "if men of good will sit 
down together and exchange ideas [about withdrawal], which might be 
defined either by a timetable or by ... sets of conditions, there must 
be a capacity to find common ground".

The language in Maliki's first draft, which US officials themselves 
helped negotiate, appears to be just the kind of common ground Khalilzad 
and the "senior coalition military official" - almost certainly Casey 
himself - had in mind.

It may be that Khalilzad and Casey are merely aiming to keep the 
insurgents interested in a peace agreement while keeping such an 
agreement just out of reach. But the evidence suggests that Bush has 
agreed to position the administration for an eventual peace agreement 
with the insurgents if that turns out to be necessary to avoid a 
disaster in Iraq.

Whatever the calculation behind the diplomatic acceptance of a 
withdrawal timetable, Bush and Cheney are clearly determined to continue 
their attack on Democrats who call for a timetable for withdrawal as 
playing into the hands of the terrorists - especially with the 
congressional election approaching.

Bush's double game has worked because the Democrats have failed to make 
the key point that a withdrawal timetable is indispensable to a peace 
settlement with the Sunnis, and that Bush has been acting on the basis 
of that reality, even as he argues the exact opposite when the Democrats 
support it.

The reason for that signal failure is that the Democrats' foreign-policy 
leaders have not made the necessity for a diplomatic solution to the war 
central to their position. That turns out to be a serious weakness not 
only on substantive policy but on the politics of national security as well.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His 
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War 
in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.