With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.
Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.
The short-term American targets include passage of a $48 billion Iraqi budget, something the Iraqis say they are on their way to doing anyway; renewing the United Nations mandate that authorizes an American presence in the country, which the Iraqis have done repeatedly before; and passing legislation to allow thousands of Baath Party members from Saddam Hussein's era to rejoin the government. A senior Bush administration official described that goal as largely symbolic since re-hirings have been quietly taking place already.
Bush administration officials have not abandoned their larger goals and still emphasize the vital importance of reaching them eventually. They say that even modest steps, if taken soon, could set the stage for more progress, in the same manner that this year's so-called surge of troops opened the way, unexpectedly, for the realignment of Sunni tribesmen to the American side.
A senior official said the administration was intensifying its pressure on the Iraqi government to produce some concrete signs of political progress.
"If we can show progress outside of the security sector alone, that will go a long way to demonstrate that we are in fact on a sustainable path to stability in Iraq," the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's planning.
[This senior official's statement worries me. It tells me that our "lowering the bar" in Iraq is all about PR spin back home, and shoring up domestic support for the Iraq occupation. Read between the lines: They want to keep this thing going for years to come! -- J ]
On Saturday, Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said the military had created an opportunity for progress, but warned, "This is going to be a long, hard slog."
"It is going to be one thing at a time, maybe two things at a time, we hope with increasing momentum," he said. "It is a long-term process."
The White House has clearly been elated by the decline in violence that followed the increase in American forces, now totaling 162,000 troops. Public comments by President George W. Bush and his aides, however, have been muted, reflecting a frustration at the lack of political progress, a continuation of a pattern in which intense American efforts to promote broader reconciliation have proved largely fruitless.
There have been some signs that American influence over Iraqi politics is dwindling, not growing, after the recent improvements in security — which remain incomplete, as shown by a deadly bombing on Friday in Baghdad. While Bush administration officials once said they aimed to secure "reconciliation" among Iraq's deeply divided religious, ethnic and sectarian groups, some officials now refer to their goal as "accommodation."
"We can't pass their legislation," a senior American official in Baghdad said. "We can't make them like each other. We can't even make them talk to each other. Well, sometimes we can. But we can help them execute their budget."
Ambassador Crocker drew a distinction between the effectiveness of the American military buildup in quelling violence and the influence the United States could bring to bear at a political level, where the Iraqis must play the decisive role.
"The political stuff does not lend itself to sending out a couple of battalions to help the Iraqi's pass legislation," he said.
Officials in Washington and in Baghdad share the view that military gains alone are not enough to overcome the deep distrust among Iraqi factions caused by nearly five decades of dictatorship and war. And in both capitals there are leaders who continue to hold out hope for broad political gains, eventually.
"We need a grand bargain among all the groups," said one senior member of Iraq's government, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
But with that not yet in sight, Bush administration officials said that they hoped that securing approval of a few initial steps might lead to more substantive agreements next year, including provincial elections, which the White House wants to see held before Bush leaves office less than 14 months from now. The prospect of such elections has been politically delicate because of the fear that some regions, like Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, are most likely to vote for leaders who support stronger regional governments at the expense of the Baghdad administration.
While one Bush administration official called the renewed pressure on Baghdad a "political surge" after the increase in troop levels this year, most of what Washington is seeking appears to reflect a diminished and more realistic set of expectations after months of little political progress.
The troop increase at the beginning of the year was intended to create the conditions for an improvement in Iraq's political stability measured by so-called benchmarks, including a broad agreement on sharing oil revenues.
But those benchmarks remain largely unfulfilled despite a significant drop in attacks recorded by the American military from a peak in June. The administration's critics in Congress have cited the lack of progress toward those benchmarks as evidence that the White House is on the wrong track in Iraq and ought to begin a rapid drawdown of American combat forces.
Perhaps the most achievable of the administration's short-term targets, American and Iraqi officials said, is legislation that would allow thousands of members of the Saddam-era Baath Party, most of them Sunnis, to return to government positions. A senior administration official described that legislation as largely symbolic — since the Shiite-dominated government had begun to accommodate some Sunni officials in practice — but important in that it would at last signal some progress, capitalizing on the relative lull in violence.
Other immediate steps the Bush administration is pressing the Iraqi government to take include passing a budget, $48 billion for the coming year, and again renewing the United Nations mandate for the American troop presence before it expires at the end of the year.
In Baghdad, Iraqi officials indicated that the various parties, which like much of the country are defined largely by sect or ethnicity, remained far apart on the more difficult issues of sharing power and revenues. Some seemed surprised by the idea that the Bush administration would apply more pressure.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, said that it would not take any pressure from the Americans to persuade the Iraqi leaders and Parliament to approve a budget. "Every state needs a budget," he said. "It's impossible to function without a budget. It does not need any push from anyone."
At the same time, though, he expressed an appreciation for the Bush administration's effort to keep all sides talking.
Although the White House no longer faces the immediate prospect of losing crucial political support for the war effort in Iraq — because the war's opponents lack the necessary votes in Congress to force a change in policy — the imperative for political progress remains, if only because of the American elections in less than a year.
Despite the reduction in violence, with attacks now down to levels last seen in early 2006, some Democrats in Congress have continued to press for a timeline for a withdrawal. Most recently, the House tried to tie a deadline to a $50 billion war spending bill, although that proposal died in the Senate.
When Congress debated the war earlier this year, the administration pushed hard for the Iraqis to approve some of the same pieces of legislation that have yet to materialize. Several times, for example, the law on dispensing oil revenues, which are now surging because of world oil prices nearing $100 a barrel, appeared on the brink of adoption, only to stall.
One of the immediate American concerns is getting Iraq to request an extended United Nations mandate, which authorizes the American-led military presence. In Baghdad, a senior Iraqi government official said that the extension of the mandate for the American-led multinational forces would not be a problem, but that there was little progress in negotiating the longer-term agreements on a "strategic partnership" between the United States and Iraq.
"It's the status of forces agreement that we have to start on," the official said. That agreement, although not an issue until 2009 or later, is a far more delicate matter because it will frame the future military relationship between the countries.
The most important thing the Americans can do is keep the political blocs in Iraq — Shiite and Sunni Arab and Kurds — talking to each other and to help them understand legislation now being debated, several Iraqi politicians said. Only with concrete information, they said, could rumors be dispelled that specific legislation might help or hurt certain groups.
"So far the activities of the American Embassy are a bit limited in this regard," said Qassim Daoud, an independent Shiite in Parliament, who served as a minister for security in the government of Ayad Allawi before Iraq regain its own sovereignty.
Earlier this month, the White House dispatched several senior aides to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis on specific legislative areas. They include the under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, who is working on the budget and oil law; the State Department's senior Iraq adviser, David Satterfield, who is focused on the elections and de-Baathification law; and Brett McGurk, the National Security Council's Iraq director, who is pressing for the United Nations mandate and a longer security agreement. All have been meeting with a variety of officials and party leaders across Iraq, a senior administration official said.
American officials in Baghdad appear to understand the limitations they face and are focusing on pragmatic goals like helping the Iraqi government spend the money in its budget. That, officials in both countries said, could do more than anything else to ease tensions and build support for the national government.
"I think reconciliation will eventually come," a senior Bush administration official said, but adding, "That's a long way down the path."
