Middle East

Dec 15, 2006

Page 2 of 2
Soured Sunni deal ends one US option
By Gareth Porter

Saddam's military among other conditions for negotiations with the US, according to a senior Ba'aathist representative quoted by the Sunday Times.

On January 17 the three Sunni commanders met with Khalilzad for the first time in Allawi's villa in Amman, Jordan, according to their account to The Sunday Times. They recalled that they expressed concern at that meeting about Iran's emergence as a

new regional power, suggesting that the commonality of interest with the US on that point represented the framework within which the talks continued.

A series of meetings were held over the next two months in Allawi's home in Baghdad, according to their account, including some that stretched over two days. The earlier Sunni account of the talks published in Asharq al-Awsat said there were seven sets of meetings in all.

One of the Sunni resistance leaders told the Sunday Times they demanded the US agree to a "timetable for withdrawal", but also said it would be "linked to the time scale necessary to rebuild Iraq's armed forces and security services". Thus the Sunnis were in no hurry to see the US forces leave, provided that they were supporting a Sunni reintegration into the military.

The Sunni leaders demanded amnesty for insurgents and a reversal of the "de-Ba'athification" policy that the Shi'ite parties were pushing strongly. Khalilzad expressed sympathy for those demands in the talks, they recalled. The Sunni proposal put particular emphasis on the need to put non-sectarian officials in charge of the Ministries of Interior and Defense, so that Sunnis could occupy upper echelons in a reconstituted army and police force.

The Sunni leaders finally broke off the negotiations with Khalilzad in late April after he failed to respond to a "memorandum of understanding" they had given him nearly two months earlier.

But the US Embassy participated in peace talks between representatives of the 1920 Revolution Brigade and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani beginning in April. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's "national reconciliation plan" included as one its key points language apparently agreed in those talks for "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 ..."

However, despite these repeated attempts by the Sunni resistance organizations to negotiate a settlement with the US and the Iraqi government, the much anticipated Iraq Study Group report released last week dismissed the option of an agreement with the Sunnis to end the resistance based on a time schedule for withdrawal.

Gareth Porter is an 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.

(Inter Press Service)

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