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By Lachlan Carmichael, Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON: Facing a new day of reckoning in
Iraq next week, the soon-to-depart Bush administration appears stuck
in a rut trying to isolate pivotal player Iran, analysts say.
Iran wielded its influence in intra-Shiite
fighting in Iraq last week, but Washington shows no sign it can or
will engage Tehran in a complex long-term political solution for
Iraq, they argue.
A key test will come when the top US military
and civilian leaders in Baghdad, General David Petraeus and
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, testify to Congress in Washington next week
about the next steps in Iraq.
“There is a pragmatic strategic interest on
the part of the US in engaging with the Iranians because they are an
inevitable part of both the problem and the solution in Iraq,”
analyst Suzanne Maloney told AFP.
“But I can’t predict that that’s exactly
how it’s going to play out in the hearings next week,” said
Maloney, an Iran expert who helped shape Iraq policy at the US State
Department until May last year.
She doubted it was “politically palatable”
for lawmakers in an election year to suggest “talking to a
government that has denied the Holocaust, threatened to eradicate
Israel,” and challenged US interests and values abroad.
Senator Joseph Biden, who will chair the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee hearings, was concerned Tuesday about
Iran’s role in the latest events but did not mention it by name
when he recommended a new approach.
The Democratic lawmaker doubted President George
W. Bush’s claim that the crackdown by the US-backed government of
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Shiite militiamen marked a
“defining moment” in Iraq’s history.
When reporters asked whether the United States
or Iran was the ultimate winner, he cited media reports that Iran
brokered the ceasefire between forces led by Maliki, a Shiite, and
Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-American Mahdi Army.
“If that’s true, I’m not sure how the
president views that as such a defining moment,” Biden said.
He also wondered whether the administration had
a plan for stabilizing Iraq over the next four years and what it
will do with the 30,000 extra troops sent as part of a surge Bush
announced 15 months ago.
He recalled that when they testified here last
September, Petraeus and Crocker said the surge would “start to
wind down this spring,” when they would recommend a future course
of action to the president.
“And the first (question) is, what has the
surge accomplished? And the second is, where do we go from here?”
Biden asked.
And he stressed a new approach.
“I just think that we need a diplomatic surge,
we need to engage major—other major powers, Iraq’s neighbors and
the UN in the search for a solution which this administration has
utterly neglected,” Biden said.
In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group, a
high-profile bipartisan panel, recommended, among other things, that
the United States engage Iran and Syria in a solution for Iraq and
withdraw most US combat troops by early 2008.
The Bush administration ignored these
recommendations.
Analysts like Rohan Gunaratna from the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore say Iran is pivotal to a solution.
“Although the president of Iran (Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad) appears very irresponsible . . . , I believe it’s so
important for the United States to speak to Iran,” Gunaratna told
AFP by telephone.
He said Iran is not only key to settling
intra-Shiite rivalries as it had influence with all Shiite groups,
including those backing Maliki, but was needed to bridge the broader
divide among Shiia, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
Analysts and politicians alike lament that the
Iraqi leadership has failed to do more to promote reconciliation
during the reduction in violence partly linked to the troop surge.
Although the United States has had intermittent
low-level talks with Iran, it missed a chance to fully engage with
Tehran when its supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei made an
unprecedented call for talks in 2006, Maloney said.
The United States at the time was focused on
rallying the international community into isolating Iran over its
disputed nuclear program, she said.
Maloney, an analyst with the Brookings
Institution, suspects Iran will now just wait for the next US
administration to consider any move toward real dialogue.
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