Iraqi Milestone but With Perils

The new government formed Thursday in Iraq is both an important achievement and a serious cause for concern as President Bush pushes his goal of promoting democratic reform in the Middle East.

For Bush and those within his administration who have devoted enormous effort to Iraq and taken huge political risks, the moment was sweet: freely elected Iraqi legislators confirming a multiethnic Middle East government committed to drafting a constitution securing basic human rights and freedoms.

“I believe we’re making really good progress in Iraq because the Iraqi people are beginning to see the benefits of a free society,” Bush said at a White House news conference Thursday. “They saw a government formed today.”

But the weak and fractious nature of the new government, which took three months to come together, makes it unclear just how well the interests of the U.S. will be served.

Analysts who follow developments in Iraq expressed concern about the new government’s stability. They noted that the regime is still missing five important ministers, has already been criticized as unrepresentative by one of its vice presidents, Ghazi Ajil Yawer, and is headed by a prime minister -- Ibrahim Jafari -- whose ability to forge compromises has been placed in question by the lengthy negotiations.

Meanwhile, Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-backed interim prime minister who has served since last summer, was shut out of the new Cabinet. With his party controlling 40 parliamentary seats, Allawi is likely to lead the political opposition. At the same time, the all-important Oil Ministry has, at least temporarily, fallen to Ahmad Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile who helped mislead U.S. officials into believing that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“The new government is a positive step but clearly a qualified one,” said James Dobbins, who served as Bush’s first envoy to Afghanistan and was a key figure in American efforts to rebuild Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. “It’s not as much as might have been hoped for.”

For the Bush administration, the stakes involved in bringing democracy to Iraq extend far beyond the country’s borders. The depth of America’s commitment there means that the outcome of efforts to build a stable democratic state will affect U.S. ability to push political reform elsewhere in the region.

“A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East is an important part of spreading peace,” Bush told reporters.

But after leading an invasion and occupation that have cost tens of billions of dollars and resulted in the deaths of more than 1,570 U.S. troops and untold numbers of Iraqis, the U.S. remained a virtual bystander in the negotiations to form the new government.

That decision, which was unchanged even after it became clear that negotiations had bogged down and insurgent violence had begun to rise, was a serious mistake, some critics said.

Toby Dodge, a Middle East specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said the U.S. should have helped form the government more quickly by using its embassy in Baghdad to quietly steer the bargaining.

“There’s no evidence they tried to involve themselves, even in a private way. That’s not a policy, that’s an abdication of responsibility,” Dodge said.

But other analysts said the U.S. had its hands tied.

Dobbins, director of international security and defense policy at the Rand Corp. in Washington, said intense antiAmerican sentiment in Iraq -- and elsewhere in the Middle East -- made any involvement in the formation of an Iraqi government politically risky and potentially counterproductive.

Bush’s policy of accepting a “let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” kind of democracy is a decision born more of necessity than ideological conviction.

“In Bosnia, in Kosovo and to an extent in Afghanistan, America’s blessing was something positive for a politician because associating with America itself was popular,” he said. “In Iraq, contact would delegitimize anyone we were linked with.”

The administration made its first high-level intervention last week, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney expressed a sense of urgency in separate meetings with Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi. Rice also telephoned Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, with a similar message, according to State Department officials.

The end result, analysts said, is an Iraqi government that gives the Bush administration a credible, but weak, interlocutor with which it can pursue an important element of U.S. strategy: passing more responsibility for security to the Iraqis in preparation for a reduction of America’s military presence there.