Baghdad, Iraq – Facing growing pressure from the Bush administration to step down, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on Wednesday vigorously asserted his right to stay in office and warned the Americans against undue interference in Iraq’s political process.
Al-Jaafari also defended his recent political alliance with radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, now the prime minister’s most powerful backer, saying al-Sadr and his thousands-strong militia were a fact of life in Iraq and need to be accepted into mainstream politics.
Al-Jaafari said he would work to fold the country’s myriad militias into the official security forces and ensure that recruits and top security ministers abandon their ethnic or sectarian loyalties.
The existence of militias has emerged as the greatest source of contention between American officials and Shiite leaders such as al-Jaafari, with the American ambassador arguing that militias are killing more people than the Sunni Arab-led insurgency.
Dozens of bodies, garroted or executed with gunshots to the head, turn up almost daily in Baghdad, fueling sectarian tensions that are pushing Iraq closer to full-scale civil war.
“There was a stand from both the American government and President Bush to promote a democratic policy and protect its interests,” al-Jaafari said. “But now there’s concern among the Iraqi people that the democratic process is being threatened.
“The source of this is that some American figures have made statements that interfere with the results of the democratic process,” he added. “These reservations began when the biggest bloc in parliament chose its candidate for prime minister.”
The bookish, soft-spoken Jaafari is at the center of the deadlock in talks over forming a new government, with the main Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular blocs in the 275-member parliament staunchly opposing the Shiite bloc’s nomination of al-Jaafari for prime minister.
Senior Shiite politicians said Monday that the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had weighed in over the weekend, telling the leader of the Shiite bloc that President Bush did not want al-Jaafari as prime minister. That was the first time the Americans had openly expressed a preference for the post, the politicians said, and it showed the Bush administration’s acute impatience over the stagnant political process.
Relations between Shiite leaders and the Americans have been fraying for months, and reached a crisis point after a bloody assault on a Shiite mosque compound Sunday night by U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Al-Jaafari said in an interview that Ambassador Khalilzad had visited him Tuesday morning but had not indicated that Jaafari should abandon his job. The two had spoken about forming the government, he said.
American reactions to the political process can be seen as either supporting or interfering in Iraqi decisions, said al-Jaafari, the head of the Islamic Dawa Party and a former exile in Iran and London. “When it takes the form of interference, it makes the Iraqi people worried,” he added.
According to the constitution, the largest bloc in parliament, in this case the religious Shiites, has the right to nominate a prime minister. Al-Jaafari won that nomination in a secret ballot last month among the 130 Shiite members of parliament.
But his victory was narrow – he came out on top by only one vote after getting the support of al-Sadr, who controls 32 seats.
That alliance has ignited concern among the Americans that al-Jaafari will do little to rein in Sadr, who led two fierce rebellions against the American military in 2004.
Al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, went rampaging in Baghdad after the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra and after a series of car-bomb explosions on March 12 in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood.
The violence left hundreds dead and Sunni mosques burned to the ground.
Al-Jaafari did not say what deals he had cut with al-Sadr but asserted that engagement with the cleric’s movement was needed for the stability of Iraq. He said he had disagreed with L. Paul Bremer, the former American proconsul, when Bremer barred al-Sadr and some Sunni Arab groups from the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.
“The delay in getting them to join led to the situation of them becoming violent elements,” he said.
“I look at them as part of Iraq’s de facto reality, whether some of the individual people are negative or positive,” he said. “Anyone who’s part of the Iraqi reality should be part of the Iraqi house.”