Baghdad, Iraq – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Iraq on Sunday to urge its new Shiite-dominated government to increase the involvement of Sunni Arabs in writing the Iraqi constitution.
There is growing administration alarm that a chance to draw the dispossessed Sunni minority into Iraq’s new democracy is slipping away.
On a trip that underscored Washington’s urgency, Rice carried a clear message: Shiite political leaders should respond rapidly and effectively to any sign that wavering elements of the Sunni Arab insurgency may be ready to turn to peace.
“The insurgency is very violent,” Rice said, “but you defeat insurgencies not just militarily.”
She also brought a stark warning for neighboring Syria, accusing it of “standing in the way of the Iraqi people’s desire for peace.”
The warning followed a week of fighting by a 1,000-strong Marine battle group along the Syrian border. Commanders said that they had killed at least 125 insurgents but that groups of insurgents had also fled to safe haven in Syria.
“Syria is badly out of step in the region,” Rice said.
The anxious atmosphere surrounding Rice’s journey was compounded Sunday by a further wave of the violence that has shaken the new government, which took office 13 days ago. Iraqi officials announced the discovery of 46 bodies at sites in and near Baghdad.
There also were three suicide bombings across the country and three drive-by shootings in Baghdad; one shooting killed a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the country’s most revered Shiite cleric.
Rice’s journey – on a C-17 military transport aircraft, with shorter hops inside Iraq aboard helicopter gunships – included a stopover in northern Iraq to talk to Massoud Barzani, the powerful Kurdish leader. Kurds are the Shiites’ principal partners in the new government.
From there, she flew on to Baghdad for meetings in the heavily fortified Green Zone command complex that included Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, U.S. military leaders and aides to al-Jaafari, including the deputy prime minister, Ahmad Chalabi, and Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi.
In an interview after the talks, Rice said she had specifically cautioned the Iraqis that “de-Baathification” – the process Shiite hard-liners favor of purging the government and the new armed forces of all who served at senior levels under Saddam Hussein – should not be so severe as to impede the creation of an “inclusive” government.
She said she also made clear that the Bush administration was deeply concerned that the parliamentary committee drafting the new Iraqi constitution had only two Sunni Arabs among its 55 members.
With the 12-hour visit, Rice became the highest-ranking American official to visit Iraq since the January elections. The vote, which drew millions of Iraqis to the polls, was seen as a major boost to the American plan to build a Western-style democracy here.
But that political momentum was largely squandered in the three months of negotiating and maneuvering it took for the new government to emerge, and a brief lull in violence has given way to one of the war’s bloodiest passages, with at least 70 car bombings and nearly 500 people killed over the past two weeks.
In the days before Rice set out on her trip, senior Bush administration officials had signaled a sense of disquiet that al-Jaafari and other senior Shiite leaders might be backing away from pledges to make the new government into an instrument for bridging the country’s deep schisms.
But the Sunni Arabs with links to the Baathist past are the exact people who could help reach out to insurgent leaders, including Sunni tribal chiefs, who, U.S. officials say, have sent preliminary signals that they may be ready to negotiate.
A top official in Washington said Sunday that Rice’s trip was meant to underscore the administration’s concerns. While American officials have privately voiced their apprehensions in recent days, her comments were the most explicit and forceful public comments.