Baghdad, Iraq – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice invited Sunni Arabs to speak their minds in new voting in Iraq, arguing during a surprise visit today that “differences can be a strength.”
Sectarian and ethnic rivalries fuel the daily violence and bloodshed in Iraq, and have threatened to derail a U.S.-backed roadmap for establishing democracy. Elections Dec. 15 for a permanent government are the latest test of Iraq’s new representative system, and another marker toward the day when U.S. forces and advisers may be able to quit the country.
“We do support the principles of democracy and support efforts to bridge the differences among Iraqis,” Rice said following a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Divisions “may be differences of history or tradition, culture or ethnicity, but in a democratic process these differences can be a strength rather than a handicap,” she said.
Rice sounded cool to a proposed reconciliation conference organized by the Arab League. Politicians from Iraq’s Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni and other factions are invited to a preparatory meeting in Cairo on Nov. 19 and a larger conference sometime later.
Some Shiites have said they will boycott if members of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime or political base are included, and there are other controversies about who should attend Rice said such overtures should be Iraq’s to make.
“I would hope that those who participate in the Arab League conference would recognize they are participating with an Iraqi government that has been elected,” she said. “The lead on this really ought to be the Iraqi government.” The secretary arrived on her unannounced visit earlier at a military airport and rode by helicopter to U.S. base, flying over sheep grazing next to the roofless shells of bombed-out buildings and houses.
Rice’s trip’s was her second to Iraq as secretary of state. It comes five weeks before elections for a permanent Iraqi government.
Like initial elections last January and a constitution-writing exercise this summer, the new round of voting is a marker of Iraq’s political development. The Bush administration also hopes it is a step closer to the day when U.S. forces can leave the country.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Iraqi forces as “very, very capable. I’m very optimistic about what I’m seeing in the Iraqi armed forces right now.” “We need to hand over to the Iraqi people and the Iraqi armed forces their country as they are trained and ready to do so,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today. “This is very much an evolutionary process,” he said.
Rice met with the provisional governor, Duraid Kashmoula, a Sunni, whose cousin and predecessor was killed by insurgents last year.
She was also helping launch an experiment in the fight to clear insurgents from Iraqi cities and keep them at bay. She reviewed three combined civilian-military units known as provisional reconstruction teams, which are rapid response units meant to move into violent areas once insurgents are gone and quickly establish order.
“If Iraq does not succeed and should Iraq become a place of despair, generations of Americans would also be condemned to fear,” Rice said at a ceremony for the first of the teams. “So our fates and our futures are very much linked.” Units in Mosul, Hillah and Kirkuk are the first of 16 planned.
Sunnis, stripped of their former political primacy under Saddam, first boycotted U.S.-backed efforts to establish a new representative government in Iraq, and then last month voted in large numbers against a national constitution many saw as sealing their fate as a minority stripped of any power. The constitution passed, and Rice framed the voting as a success because Sunnis turned out at all.
In the province of Nineveh, which includes Mosul, the vote was 55 percent against the referendum and 45 percent for it.
Political progress has been offset in Mosul and elsewhere by pernicious violence, including the deaths last month in Mosul of four U.S. Embassy employees killed by a roadside bomb.
Rice flew to Iraq the day after a suicide bomber killed 35 people at a Baghdad restaurant favored by police, and a car bomb killed seven at an Iraqi army recruiting center to the north. More than 30 people were wounded in the attacks.
As of today, at least 2,059 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Rice’s trip, scheduled before Wednesday’s bombings, included a stop in Bahrain for meetings on development and democratic progress in the Middle East. She will also visit Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West Bank.
Rice also expressed hope that a deal could be reached with Iran regarding its nuclear program. But she would not confirm that the United States would back a deal with Europe, described by senior officials and diplomats, to accept expanded Iranian nuclear activities if uranium enrichment is done in Russia.