Bush Administration Credits Diplomacy For Averting Civil War

There is some dispute among various parties about the level of violence in the aftermath of the Samarra mosque bombing and a semantic question of whether a "civil war" is in progress.

Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media...

The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days...

After Wednesday's mosque attack in Samarra, (Moqtada al-)Sadr and other Shiite clerics called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across Iraq.

Clutching rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles, the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge the militias, which are officially outlawed.

Although our allies in the Iraqi security forces may have let down their end of the fight, the U.S. government is crediting our diplomatic officials on the ground with keeping matters from getting even worse.

In the days that followed the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine, Iraq seemed within a hair's breadth of civil war. But an aggressive U.S. and Kurdish diplomatic campaign appears for now to have coaxed the country back from open conflict between Sunni Arabs and Shiites, according to Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats speaking in interviews on Monday.

"Localized difficulties also persist, but I think, at the strategic level, this crisis -- a mosque attack leading to civil war -- is over," Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "It was a serious crisis. I believe that Iraq came to the brink and came back."

The diplomats are credited for bringing the Sunnis back to the table in negotiations over a "unity" government.

(The Sunnis) announced that they would boycott meetings on the formation of a new government. They also refused to attend a lunch meeting of Shiite and Kurdish political factions that Talabani had painstakingly organized, instead presenting a list of 10 demands to be met before they would rejoin talks.

"I would not say that it engendered a warm reaction," said a Western diplomat familiar with the negotiations, who provided a background interview on the condition that he not be named.

Among those most upset by the Sunni boycott threat was Talabani, an ethnic Kurd who was able to take a central role in the negotiations because he was perceived as a neutral party.

Ironically, the Kurds stood to gain the most from a civil conflict. They have long wanted an independent state, and revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 only to be brutally repressed. But Talabani was deeply troubled by the Samarra crisis, said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who was in contact with Talabani throughout the crisis.

"I've known President Jalal Talabani for over 20 years," Galbraith said. "It is the most pessimistic I've seen him, and that includes being in Iraq the night the uprising collapsed and we were fleeing for our lives. Here, he was profoundly disturbed about the future of Iraq."

Mister Danger and his Secretary of State then got involved:

After discussions at the White House and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, President Bush called leaders from each faction to give them the final push toward an accommodation, Khalilzad said.

After the call, the Sunni leaders announced their willingness to rejoin the talks, and later that evening they met with various representatives. At the end of that meeting, just before midnight on Saturday, the Iraqi prime minister, flanked by the leaders of the major political parties, solemnly announced at a news conference that the country would not have a civil war -- a moment of "terrific political symbolism," the Western diplomat said...

Saleh al-Mutlak, a Sunni leader who attended the talks Saturday, put it more bluntly: "I think this is a lesson for the Sunnis," he said. "Next time they will try to buy weapons to face these kinds of developments."

Khalilzad agreed that there would likely be a next time, noting that "efforts to provoke a civil war are likely to continue." But he was hopeful that this crisis would be a key moment in the history of Iraq.

The surge in violence has created debate in the Pentagon about whether the troop pullback from Iraq in time to aid Republicans in the fall elections can be workable.

The violence came at a crucial time for the U.S. military: Top generals must decide within weeks whether to carry out a long-anticipated reduction in American troops this summer. Threats of civil war in the country have raised questions about the wisdom of a troop drawdown in the next few months...

For nearly a year, senior commanders have said that political progress in Baghdad and the development of new Iraqi army units could lead to a substantial U.S. troop reduction this year. They have pointed to mid-2006 as a pivotal period, making the decisions on troop levels a telling indicator of progress...

Defense officials said that Army Gens. John P. Abizaid and George W. Casey, the top commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq, soon would travel to Washington to advise President Bush on future troop levels. Because the moves under consideration will be critical to overall U.S. progress in Iraq this year, officials said Abizaid and Casey would brief the president in person.

That would be an interesting meeting to sit in on.

With the Iraq war likely to be one of the key issues in November's midterm elections, lawmakers are increasing pressure on the administration to show progress by cutting the number of U.S. troops stationed in the country. But Bush has long insisted that decisions about troop levels in Iraq will be based solely on the recommendations of his generals, rather than on any political calculations...

Some outside analysts say the discussion in Washington of a troop drawdown has only emboldened insurgents, leading them to declare victory on jihadist websites and step up their attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.

"The more we talk about withdrawals, the more insurgents assert themselves," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and U.S. advisor in Iraq, now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. "Perhaps now is not the time to be bringing troops home."

Words cannot describe the revulsion any thinking person feels at hearing yet another chickenhawk recommend extending the war for even one day.