1.

World

Middle East

BLOODY DAY HERALDS BIRTH OF IRAQ'S NEW UNITY GOVERNMENT
By Patrick Cockburn

Independent (UK)
May 21, 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article549523.ece

ARBIL -- Iraq's new unity government was approved by parliament in Baghdad yesterday in what may be the last chance to hold Iraq together as a unitary state.

The new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said his priority was to establish stability and security. But disagreements between the parties making up the new government meant that the ministers of defense and the interior -- probably the two most important posts -- have yet to be chosen.

Underlining how far security has declined since the parliament was elected five months ago, a series of attacks killed 27 people and wounded dozens more yesterday. Police also found the bodies of 21 Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads in and around Baghdad.

During the long months that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish political parties negotiated the shape of a new administration, real control of Iraq has slipped further into the hands of Shia militias and Sunni insurgents. Ethnic and sectarian strife has been killing people at the rate of at least 40 a day.

"If the new government does establish security in Baghdad, they will be heroes," said Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

The new government has some strengths not possessed by its short-term predecessor. It has been chosen by a parliament elected for a full four-year term. It contains Sunni Arab members representing political parties who fought the election on 15 December; the Sunni had boycotted an earlier election in January last year. And Mr. Maliki is said to be more flexible than his predecessor as Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

But the overall security situation in Iraq is far worse than it was a year ago. Baghdad and central Iraq, where Shia, Sunni, and Kurd are mixed, is in the grip of a civil war fought by assassins and death squads. As in Bosnia in 1992, each community is pulling back into enclaves where it is the overwhelming majority and able to defend itself.

The new government will contain some able ministers, such as Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister. The Oil Minister will be Hussein al-Shahristani, a nuclear physicist imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein. A pious Shia, he is close to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and is a highly intelligent man, though he has no experience of the vital oil industry. Iraq earns $3bn a month from oil, but the industry is also notoriously corrupt.

So deep are the divisions in Iraq, however, that it is virtually impossible to create a united administration. Each party and community tends to treat the ministries it has received as fiefdoms to be exploited as a source of patronage, money, and political power.

The need for each party to get a slice of the cake roughly equivalent to their share of the votes in December has led to some strange choices. Former interior minister Bayan Jabr was openly accused by the U.S. of running Shia death squads. He has lost his old job, but has been appointed Finance Minister.

2.

News

U.S. SENDS IN MORE TROOPS TO QUELL BACKLASH
By Toby Harnden

Telegraph (UK)
May 21, 2006

Original source: Telegraph

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is sending extra troops to Iraq amid fears of an offensive by insurgents who want to destabilise the new Iraqi government.

A battalion of 650 soldiers from the United States Army's 1st Armored Division will be moved from Kuwait as a "temporary measure," even as officials draw up plans to reduce force levels in the country to around 100,000.

Another Kuwait-based battalion from the same division, deployed in March, will remain, despite earlier assurances that it would leave, bringing total troop strength to 133,000.

The moves highlight the dilemma for President George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who are due to meet in Washington this week, as they try to keep a lid on the bloodshed, while responding to political demands to bring troops home.

Support for the invasion in America dropped to a new low of 39 per cent last week, according to a poll by CBS News and the New York Times.

Mr. Bush's approval ratings have sunk below 30 per cent, making him the most unpopular U.S. president since Richard Nixon, while a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph this month found that the Prime Minister had the backing of just 26 per cent of Britons.

Since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, at least 2,430 American and 111 British soldiers have died in military operations, and almost 18,000 have been wounded in action.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said: "Although there may be tactical increases here and there, strategically we're going to be moving in the direction of downsizing our forces." But he cautioned, shortly after the new government took its oath of office, that changes in force levels were "always dependent on the conditions."

Mr. Blair hailed the appointment of the government, after months of political deadlock, as "a very crucial change for Iraq." He has asked to meet Nuri al-Maliki, the new Iraqi prime minister, at the earliest opportunity. Mr. Blair gave no timetable for a withdrawal of Britain's 7,000 troops, who mainly patrol the Shia-dominated south.

In the past 50 days 126 American and seven British troops have died in Iraq, making it the deadliest period since late last year -- despite an increase in the number of Iraqi units fighting the insurgency.

Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, is due to present a comprehensive "drawdown" plan to Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defenSe secretary, as early as this week.

Troop levels in Iraq were reduced from 138,000 after Iraqi parliamentary elections in December, and Gen. John Casey said last month that his "general timeline" for a large scale reduction by the end of this year was still on track.

American commanders fear that a politically-driven timetable to pull out troops could undermine stability and provide the insurgents with a chance to strengthen their grip, hastening a Vietnam-style defeat for U.S. forces.

Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the senior operational commander in Iraq, conceded that violence had increased as a result of "accelerators" in the insurgency, whose leaders wanted to discredit the new government.

"Those accelerators are the actions of Zarqawi and his terrorists, who see this as a tremendous opportunity, a tremendous strategy that they can implement, that they can use to try to get Iraqis to concentrate on something totally different," he said.

He believed there were signs that this strategy would fail. "The good news is that we are not seeing Iraqis in neighborhoods picking up arms against each other. We continue our joint patrols in the neighbourhoods to give people a feeling of security."

Gen. Chiarelli's upbeat assessment, that the installation of the new government was a "historic and decisive moment" for Iraq, echoed the words of previous commanders who at key junctures said a corner was being turned. But his comments suggested that a permanent reduction in violence could be very far off.

It was necessary, he said, to "build up Iraqi ministerial capacity to provide basic services and create hope and economic opportunity."

He added that "disillusionment, poverty, and hopelessness are the breeding grounds for violence" and that it was important "to take the angry young men off the street."