WASHINGTON, Dec 19: Iraq is heading towards a “complete disintegration into a failed state chaos,” a new report on the situation in the Arab state warned on Tuesday.
The International Crisis Group, which issued its report simultaneously in Washington and Brussels, chastised the Bush administration for continuing to support Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government in Baghdad and urged the international community to open talks with Iraq’s warring factions.
Trying to strengthen the fragile Maliki government will not contribute to Iraq’s stability, it said, adding that Iraq’s escalating crisis could not be resolved militarily and could be solved only with a major political effort.
“Hollowed-out and fatally weakened, the Iraqi state today is prey to armed militias, sectarian forces and a political class that, by putting short-term personal benefit ahead of long-term national interests, is complicit in Iraq’s tragic destruction,” the report said.
The report warned that a Shiite-Sunni Arab conflict in Iraq could draw in its neighbours in a proxy war.
The document coincides with a US Defence Department report saying that the number of Iraqi insurgent attacks on US troops and Iraqi security forces and civilians has risen to a new record high.
“This is not a military challenge in which one side needs to be strengthened and another defeated. It is a political challenge in which new consensual understandings need to be reached,” the ICG said.
“All Iraqi actors ... must be brought to the negotiating table and must be pressured to accept the necessary compromises. That cannot be done without a concerted effort by all Iraq’s neighbours,” the ICG said, calling for an international conference on Iraq that included all political players.
The suggestions by the European crisis monitoring group are far more radical than those proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group two weeks ago, which urges the Bush administration to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq in early 2008.
The new report called the study group’s recommendations “not nearly radical enough” and said that “its prescriptions are no match for its diagnosis.”
It said: “What is needed today is a clean break both in the way the US and other international actors deal with the Iraqi government, and in the way the US deals with the region.”
The Iraqi government and military should not be treated as “privileged allies” because they were not partners in efforts to stem the violence but rather parties to the conflict, it said.
The International Crisis Group proposed three broad steps: First, it called for creation of an international support group, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Iraq’s six neighbours, to press Iraq’s constituents to accept political compromise.
Second, it urged a conference of all Iraqi players, including militias and insurgent groups, with support from the international community, to forge a political compact on controversial issues such as federalism, distribution of oil revenue, an amnesty, the status of Baath Party members and a timetable for US withdrawal.
Finally, it suggested a new regional strategy that would include engagement with Syria and Iran and jump-starting the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process.
