LONDON, May 31 (UPI) -- The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, emphasized the importance of talking to insurgents and engaging them in the country's political process, in an interview with the Times of London published Wednesday.
A Sunni Muslim born and raised in Afghanistan, Khalilzad is charged with the unenviable task of acting as broker between Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, in order to pull the country back from the brink of open sectarian warfare.
The U.S. policy of inclusion is met with some resistance from the Shiite majority, still harboring a deep-seated resentment at years of persecution by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime. But Washington insists that for Iraq to function as a stable and peaceful democracy, the former Sunni elite must retain a stake in the country's governance.
"We have not come here on a sectarian agenda," Khalilzad said. "We understand that for Iraq to work... the three main communities have to agree on a national compact on the fundamentals of this country."
The ambassador hopes that fear of the chaos that could ensue should the United States withdraw and leave the feuding factions to their fate will force them to strike a deal.
The Shiites are under pressure to disband their death squads which target Sunnis, while the Sunnis must end their three-year guerrilla war against the new Iraqi establishment.
Khalilzad has already issued a veiled threat that the price of continued internecine conflict could be Iraq's abandonment by the United States. "They understand that the United States could not be counted on to support a kind of indefinite tribal warfare," he said.
"To the Sunnis, I've said we would not support nostalgia. To the Shiites, we have said we cannot support revenge. And they cannot count on the U.S. if the necessary compromises... are not made."
He admits that his efforts to redraw Iraq's political landscape have dismayed some of the United States' allies among the Shiite majority, including the cleric Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who is widely regarded as the real power behind the newly-formed government.
"They have not always been favorable to our efforts to bring the Sunnis in," he acknowledged.
Although the Shiites recognize the necessity of compromise, he said, they have at times regarded his attempts to bring the Sunnis onboard as "unnecessary pressure on one's friends."
Such tensions are likely to intensify as Khalilzad increasingly focuses on his strategy of talking to insurgents, in an effort to persuade all those who are not -- in his words -- "terrorists" or "Saddamists" to engage with the political process.
"We are in talks... with people who call themselves resistance," he said. "In my judgment, they have to be treated the same as the militias: reintegration in other words."
While the Iraqi government officially endorses the concept of reconciliation, it is questionable whether new prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and al-Hakim will go so far as to reach out to the Sunni insurgents they clearly regard as terrorists.
Speaking alongside British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week, Maliki insisted that the insurgents were not sectarian militia but "groups committing terrorism."
Meanwhile the Shiite powerbroker al-Hakim, in an interview with the Times of London, expressed his view that all insurgents were terrorists.
And despite the outwardly successful formation of a unity government, sectarian tensions continue to strike at the heart of the Iraqi political order. When al-Maliki vowed during his inaugural parliamentary session earlier this month to "fight terrorism," 15 Sunni parliamentarians walked out, some of whom were members of the Iraqi Accordance Front, a party represented in the cabinet with four ministers.
One of the Front's Sunni deputies later held a press conference, questioning the new prime minister's anti-terror agenda on the basis that it did not distinguish between "the resistance, which plays a heroic role for the sake of liberating Iraq, and acts of violence that all reject."
Neither is the U.S. government entirely united behind Khalilzad's engagement agenda.
Earlier this month, the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted the leader of a Sunni insurgent group as reporting that representatives from over 10 prominent insurgent organizations had met with the U.S. ambassador on several occasions, but had broken off talks after Washington failed to respond to a cease-fire proposal. The White House's wavering on the issue suggests rifts within the administration on the wisdom of engaging with the insurgency.
Khalilzad has been at odds with the Pentagon over the direction of U.S. policy in Iraq for several months, having been pushing for greater engagement with Sunni insurgents and increased pressure on Shiite leaders to curb militias since at least October.
In March, amid a wave of brutal sectarian violence prompted by the February attack on the Shiite shrine in Samarra, he began arguing publicly that Shiite militia were a greater threat to Iraqi security than Sunni insurgents. This conflicted with the view of U.S. military commanders, who defined victory in the country as the successful prosecution of a war against Sunni insurgents. At the same time, he began raising the specter of Tehran's aspirations for undue influence in the country through Iranian-aligned Shiite factions.
The U.S. ambassador posits himself as a man who can bridge the divide between East and West, Sunni and Shiite, due to his childhood in Afghanistan, his student years in Lebanon and his command of Farsi, the language of neighboring Iran and Iraq's Shiite leaders.
But he will be able to sustain his position as an even-handed broker is as yet unclear. In February, al-Hakim criticized him publicly for saying that the United States would not continue to support institutions run by sectarian factions, a statement that the Shiite cleric said was partly to blame for the attack on the Samarra shrine. Meanwhile some Sunni politicians complain that his actions on their behalf have been too weak.
"When al-Hakim became angry, he backed down," said Saleh Mutlak, a parliamentarian from the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue. "He is too close to the Kurds and with the Shiites, he doesn't want to challenge them."
