http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/world/Viewdet.asp?ID=8770&cat=a
Iraq nurses sovereignty fears ... hits Study report; Shia families killed; Rumsfeld visits BAGHDAD, Iraq (Agencies): The Iraqi president on Sunday harshly criticized the bipartisan report recommending changes to US war policies, saying it contained some "very dangerous" recommendations that would undermine the sovereignty of Iraq. Jalal Talabani said the report "is not fair, is not just and it contains some very dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and the constitution." He singled out the report's call for the approval of a de-Baathification law that could allow thousands of officials from Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath party to return to their jobs. "There is an article to bring back the Baathists to the political scene, which is very dangerous," he said in an interview with reporters at his office in Baghdad. The Kurdish leader also criticized the call for increasing the number of US troops embedded to train Iraqis from 3,000 to 4,000 currently to 10,000 to 20,000. "It is not respecting the desire of the Iraqi people to control its army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government," he said. He said the Iraqi government planned to send a letter to US President George W. Bush "expressing our views about the main issues" in the report, although he would not elaborate. Talabani, sitting at his desk with an Iraqi flag and bookshelves as a backdrop, was the most senior government official to weigh in against the report released Wednesday as criticism of the recommendations mounted among leaders of the governing Shiite and Kurdish parties. An aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday the Iraqi leader had reservations about the report but has yet to form a detailed response. Sunni Arabs said they agree with the assessment of Iraq's problems in the report by a commission headed by former Republican Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, but not the proposals to fix them. Talabani said the Iraqis were not intimidated by the report's threat to reduce political, military or economic support if the government in Baghdad cannot make substantial progress. The report said Iraqi leaders have failed to deliver better security or political compromises that would reduce violence, and it implied that a four-month joint US-Iraqi military campaign to reduce violence in Baghdad is hopeless. "I believe that President George Bush is a brave and committed man and he is adamant to support the Iraqi government until they've reached success," he said. "Setting these conditions we see it as an insult to the people of Iraq." Bush has given the report a lukewarm reception and said he will weigh its recommendations along with other possible courses of action. The recommendations, which are not binding, also have met opposition from some in the United States for the suggestion to withdraw nearly all combat brigades from Iraq by early 2008. Talabani said the date was realistic if the Iraqi government is given more responsibility for the security of the country. "If we can agree with the US government to give us the right of organizing, training, arming our armed forces, it will be possible in 2008 (for US-led forces) to start to leave Iraq and to go back home," he said. "I have said many times that we need only two years." Kurds have been the strongest critics so far of the report and Talabani said he backed a statement by the president of the Kurdish region who objected to recommendations on sharing the oil wealth, reinstating Saddam loyalists in their old government jobs and giving Iraq's neighbors a role in efforts to end the violence. A statement by the governmental De-Baathification Commission also denounced the Baker-Hamilton report as "wrong and untrue" for its assertion that purging the government of Baathists robbed state institutions of professionals, adding that such a view posed a threat to national reconciliation because it adopted the stand of the Baathists themselves. "If you read this report, one would think that it is written for a young, small colony that they are imposing these conditions on," Talabani said. "We are a sovereign country." In one point of agreement, however, Talabani said Iraq already has initiated talks with Syria and Iran on gaining help in tackling the problems facing his country, and he plans to visit Damascus soon. Killed At least 26 people were killed on Sunday in Iraq, including nine Shiites in sectarian attacks on two Baghdad families, a security official said. Another 17 corpses, three of them headless, were recovered by police in nothern Baghdad's Al-Hurriyah neighbourhood, the official added. In the attack on the families, gunmen broke into a home in the southwestern Jihad neighbourhood and killed five Shiite brothers, one of them a policeman, after separating them from their sisters, the official said. The women were unharmed. In another similar attack, gunmen entered a house of another Shiite family in the same area and killed a man and his three sons. "Both were Shiite families," the official said, suggesting the attack was sectarian in nature and carried out by Sunni extremists. The two families were unrelated, the official added, and it was not known whether the gunmen were from the same group. Five people were killed and six wounded in clashes between Shiite militiamen and members of the Sunni Janabat tribe in the nearby Al-Amil neighbourhood on Sunday. The official added that the area had now been secured by Iraqi police. Southwestern Baghdad is a mixture of affluent Sunnis, poor Shiites and then farther to the south, Sunni tribesmen --- resulting in constant clashes between Sunni and Shiite gunmen. In the restive province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, nine people were killed on Sunday, police said. Seven of those, including a policeman, were shot in a series of attacks in the provincial capital of Baquba, while in Abu Saida gunmen killed two children. Five other people, three of them children, were wounded in the Abu Saida attack, police said, adding that they were all in the same car. Police Colonel Yarub Khazal from the security team of former deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi was shot dead by gunmen as he was driving his car in west Baghdad's Yarmuk neighbourhood, the security official added. In the same area a roadside bomb exploded as an Iraqi army patrol passed, wounding three soldiers. In the central city of Tikrit police said gunmen shot dead a security guard from a local hospital while he was on his way to work, while in the northern oil city of Kirkuk gunmen shot dead a barber. The US military said joint US and Iraqi forces launched an operation in Baghdad's restive northern Sunni district of Adhamiyah on Sunday to try to "reduce sectarian violence and insurgency activities." Adhamiyah in eastern Baghdad is a regular site of clashes between insurgents and security forces. Visit Outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise farewell visit to Iraq, urging American troops to stay the course in the face of a critical US report about the conduct of the war. Rumsfeld, who resigned in November in the wake of the Republican Party's defeat in congressional polls that has been largely blamed on US war policy, visited two US bases, according to the Pentagon website on Sunday. "We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three," Rumsfeld told 1,200 soldiers and marines at the al-Asad base in a remote part of Al-Anbar province, the focus of the anti-US insurgency in Iraq. "At the same, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success," Rumsfeld said, according to an American Forces Press Service article on the Pentagon website. "The enemy must be defeated," he said, predicting that the US "war on terror" would be a cold war-like struggle that would take half a century. The defense secretary, who is due to be replaced in eight days time by Robert Gates, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, also spoke to troops at the Balad base 75 kilometers (45 miles) north of Baghdad. Rumsfeld left for Iraq Friday from Washington, but it was not until late Saturday that the Pentagon revealed he had made the trip as a final chance to express appreciation to the troops. US officials in Baghdad on Sunday would still not comment on his trip. The visit coincided with the death of two marines, bringing the toll of US military dead since the March 2003 invasion to 2,927. More than 40 have died in the first week of December alone. Rumsfeld resigned in November, the day after President George W. Bush's Republicans lost control of the US Congress, with voter frustration over the Iraq war dominating the election. He has come under intense criticism at home and abroad over his handling of the Iraq war and US treatment of detained terror suspects. But he defended the American presence in Iraq on Friday in farewell remarks to Pentagon staff. He said an early US withdrawal from Iraq would be a "terrible mistake," which would threaten the stability not only of Iraq but the region. And he urged Americans to show patience with the war in Iraq, saying there would be "dire consequences were we to fail here." Rumsfeld's farewell trip followed the release of a critical report by a high-level US panel, the Iraq Study Group, that described the situation in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating" and urged the US administration to shift course. Headed by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, the panel said most US combat forces could be withdrawn from Iraq by early 2008 while shifting the US military's mission to one of training and advising Iraqis. Rumsfeld, a lightning rod for opponents of the war, also expressed concern about "impatience in the United States and in the Congress." Rumsfeld did not comment on the report directly at his Friday appearance, but he spoke about Iraq as a largely political --- not military --- challenge. Iraq, he said, "is in fact a microcosm of what is taking place in that region: power struggle --- partly religious, partly economic, certainly political, ... but in a very real sense not terribly military in its nature." He said the US military was doing all it could, but the conflict in Iraq could only be "won" by Iraqis through political reconciliation. Total success for the US-led coalition in Iraq is not possible, former US secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger told Britain's Sky News television Sunday. Eagleburger, who was part of the Iraq Study Group headed by his predecessor in the State Department, James Baker, was asked whether he thought victory was possible in the troubled Gulf state. "Victory... it depends on how you talk about it. Victory in the sense of total success on our part? No, it's not possible," he replied. "It would be a victory if most of the (Iraq Study Group) recommendations could be implemented and followed and if they lead to the results we think they will. "Now, if you could define victory, it would be if you could establish a relatively stable Iraqi government in a reasonably stable atmosphere where the other countries in the area will have come together with us and the Iraqis, and we will have been able to sort out the differences and come up with solutions to the various problems there." Eagleburger was secretary of state under president George H.W. Bush between 1992 and 1993. The Iraq Study Group published a hard-hitting report on Wednesday, recommending a strategic change in Iraq to curb escalating violence, including withdrawing most US combat troops and engaging Syria and Iran in the wider push for peace. +++ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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