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December 11th,
2006 - Talabani Lashes out at ‘Dangerous’ Baker Report on US Role in Iraq |
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Talabani Lashes out at ‘Dangerous’
Baker Report on US Role in Iraq Michael Howard in Baghdad The Guardian Monday December 11, 2006 Iraq's president Jalal
Talabani, a key ally of the US, yesterday delivered a thunderous rejection of
the bipartisan US Iraq Study Group, describing its findings as
"dangerous" and saying that its recommendations were "dead in
the water". At his heavily fortified
residence on the banks of the Tigris, Mr Talabani told the Guardian that the
key suggestions of the long-awaited report by James Baker and Democrat Lee
Hamilton were "the wrong medicine for the wrong diagnosis" and called
them an unwarranted interference in Iraq's internal affairs that undermined
the war-torn country's sovereignty at a crucial time. "As far as I am
concerned it is dead in the water," he said. Mr Talabani added that calls
for US sanctions against the Iraqi government if it failed to meet a timeline
for a series of milestones were "an insult". Launched last week amid much
fanfare in the United States, the bipartisan report on the next step for the
US in Iraq outlined among other things the "grave and deteriorating situation"
in the country. It expressed deep concern over the weakness of the national
unity government, advocating strong centralised rule. Mr Talabani's strident
response followed another weekend of sectarian-inspired violence in Baghdad
and a surprise farewell visit to US troops in Iraq by the outgoing US defence
secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of the US-led
invasion. Yesterday, up to 30 armed
gunmen killed nine members of two Shia families in the western Jihad
neighbourhood, along the route to Baghdad's airport. The daylight attack came
a day after claims that Shia militias raided the mixed suburb of Hurriya,
forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee into the neighbouring Amil district. On his 15th and final trip
to Iraq as defence secretary, Mr Rumsfeld addressed troops at a US airbase in
Anbar province, west of Baghdad, urging them to continue the fight. "The
consequences of failure are unacceptable," he was quoted as saying on
the Department of Defence website. "The enemy must be defeated." The findings of the Iraq
Study Group have already met considerable vocal opposition in Iraq, but Mr
Talabani's comments are the loudest so far. The head of the Kurdistan
Alliance, Mr Talabani is one of the country's most influential figures, a
broker among the feuding factions in Baghdad. His vehement opposition to
the report could be decisive. A western diplomat in
Baghdad said: "To hear such comments from anti-US figures like Moqtada
al-Sadr is one thing, but to hear it from President Talabani is something
else." The Iraqi president said he
would send a letter to President George Bush outlining the government's
thinking about "the main issues" contained in the Baker-Hamilton
document. The former Kurdish guerrilla
leader said he was particularly alarmed by the recommendations for Iraq's
security structures, including the fledgling Iraqi army and the police. The
ISG suggested withdrawing US troops from a frontline combat role by 2008, and
increasing the number of US soldiers embedded with the Iraqi army from
3,000-4,000 currently to 10,000-20,000. But a clearly agitated Mr
Talabani said: "They want to embed thousands more US army officers in
Iraqi army units from small squadrons to whole divisions. If our army became
a tool in the hands of foreign officers, what would that say about Iraqi
sovereignty? "We have many former
Iraqi army officers, good patriotic professional army men who were against
Saddam Hussein. Why can't we bring those people to the army, to help train
and develop and lead?" He said he was grateful for
the removal of Saddam Hussein, but the US success rate so far in training the
police and army was poor. "It has gone from failure to failure. Look at
the police force they gathered from the street, regardless of their loyalty
to the new regime, their capacity, or their ability. These mistakes will be
repeated if we allow them inside the army." Mr Talabani insisted that
decisions on Iraq's defence strategy and its internal security forces should
not be taken by "outside forces". "Iraqis are the ones
who daily bear the brunt of the terrorist groups' activities and we should be
the ones who decide how to fight them," he said. "We want to
achieve this by working as partners while the multinational forces remain in
Iraq, and not simply follow their orders. At the moment our hands are
crippled in handling the terrorism issue in Iraq." Mr Talabani insisted that
violence in Baghdad could be stopped if the Iraqi government was free to
exercise its proper authority. "We can smell the attitude
of James Baker in 1991 when he liberated Kuwait but left Saddam in
power," he said. Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian News and Media Limited 2006 External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1969155,00.html |