Envoy to Iraq Predicts U.S. May Need to Stay in Region for Years

The U.S. ambassador here on Monday urged war-weary Americans to dig in for the long haul: a years-long effort to transform Iraq and the surrounding region, now one of the world’s major trouble spots.

“We must perhaps reluctantly accept that we have to help this region become a normal region, the way we helped Europe and Asia in another era,” Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Now it’s this area from Pakistan to Morocco that we should focus on.”

Khalilzad, an Afghan immigrant to the U.S. who has for years advocated an aggressive effort to bring democracy to the Muslim world, predicted that the long-term U.S. effort to “shape the future of this region” would continue regardless of which party controlled the White House, how many troops remained in Iraq and what tactics and strategies were employed.

“The world has gotten smaller and is getting smaller and smaller all the time,” he said in the interview. “Isolationism, fortress America isn’t going to deal with these problems of the kind that we’re facing. Willy-nilly, this is our destiny, given our preponderance in the world, our role in the world and because of our successes.”

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, originally justified as a search for weapons of mass destruction, is now described by some American officials as an attempt to bring democracy to the Middle East. But the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime unleashed a Sunni Arab insurgency that has evolved into a sectarian war between the country’s Shiite majority and Sunni minority.

U.S. officials hope that an efficient new Iraqi government can implement policies to reduce the bloodshed, which included seven car bombs set off in Baghdad on Monday. Jawad Maliki, who was endorsed by Iraq’s new Council of Representatives as prime minister over the weekend, has 30 days to build a government and is negotiating with other blocs to dole out ministerial posts.

Khalilzad said Iraq’s designated prime minister supported the U.S.-backed vision for creating an Iraqi government that could stem the violence. Maliki agrees on the need to rein in militias, soften policies that have excluded large numbers of Hussein’s ruling Baath Party from public life and appoint government ministers not beholden to sectarian groups, Khalilzad said.

“Mr. Maliki has said the right things,” the ambassador said. “We hope and expect he will do the right thing in terms of nominees for those posts.”

Speaking on Iraq’s state-owned television station Monday night, Maliki predicted that the government would be formed within 15 days. In an interview with CNN, the prime minister-designate also attempted to clarify his position on militias, some of which are tied to parties in his coalition.

“We will reject the argument that militias are necessary to protect themselves,” Maliki said in an interview, referring to the political parties. “When the government is able to exercise its control and provide security, then we will be able to work out the mechanism of how we can dissolve these militias.”

Khalilzad also said Maliki would ease up on policies of de-Baathification, which many Sunnis perceive as cover for purging them from Iraq’s government.

Maliki, a member of a radical Shiite political party that was crushed by Hussein and often a vocal firebrand in defense of the Shiite cause, could be the ideal figure to call for a wide-ranging political and social settlement that comes to terms with Iraq’s troubled past, Khalilzad said.

“He could be the right person to do the reconciliation, given his position,” the ambassador said. “If he says this is what the country needs, it would have a lot of credibility.”

Still, Iraqi Sunnis worry that politicians like Maliki -- Shiite activists who fled for their lives into exile in Iran during the 1980s -- might pursue Tehran’s agenda once in power.

Speaking on the Al Iraqiya television network Monday, Maliki said that although Iran embraced Iraqis like himself “when killing machines were given free hand to murder us,” Tehran was expected “not to interfere in our internal affairs.”

U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to hold talks on the Iraqi situation once a new government has been formed here. An Iranian news agency reported Monday that the Iranian charge d’affaires in Baghdad had been promoted to the rank of ambassador, in possible preparation for a meeting with Khalilzad.

Hassan Kazemi-Qomi served as Iran’s top consular official in Herat in western Afghanistan, another place where U.S. military forces also confronted great Iranian political influence -- and a country where Khalilzad formerly served as ambassador.

Khalilzad said elements in Iran had been playing a sometimes destructive role in Iraq, funding anti-American propaganda and exporting weapons and training to armed anti-American groups. “We are satisfied there is a relationship with some of the militia groups,” Khalilzad said.

In the interview, Khalilzad also squashed rumors that he would leave his post once an Iraqi government had been established. “I am not really ready to go; we have some unfinished business. [I] would like to see through some of the programs that I have been working on.”

Meanwhile, at least 29 Iraqis were reported killed in sectarian violence in or near the capital. Seven car bombs, most of them targeting police patrols, killed at least 14 Iraqis and injured 139 on Monday, police and hospital officials said. Iraqi police also recovered 15 bodies in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad. The victims are believed to be recruiters for the country’s security forces.

The explosions, mostly set off by remote control, demonstrated the insurgency’s ability to penetrate the layers of defenses established inside and outside the capital.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, in an interview Monday, said suicide bombings had dropped from 75 a month a year ago to about 25 a month now, which he described as a sign that radical Muslim fighters increasingly had been unable to cross the Syrian border.

“Syria is much less the problem” it has been over the last several years, Lynch said.