By Howard Cincotta
Washington File Special Correspondent
Washington – The United States has long stressed a multilateral, regional approach to Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, citing U.S. support for the International Compact with Iraq (ICI), which was launched at the United Nations earlier this year. In an interview with Bloomberg Television on November 3, Rice said that she had earlier met with representatives from more than 30 nations in New York to encourage greater engagement with Iraq through the International Compact, and noted that other ICI meetings have included Iraq's neighbors like Syria and Iran. The ICI is an effort to build a framework for Iraqi security, good governance, and regional economic integration, according to U.N. documents. The ICI recently held its first preparatory meeting in Abu Dhabi, co-chaired by Barham Salih, deputy prime minister of Iraq, and Mark Malloch Brown, deputy U.N. secretary-General. As she has in a recent series of radio and television interviews, Rice stressed that any abandonment of Iraq by the United States at this point would provide terrorists with a destabilizing foothold in the region. (See related article.) Rice said that the political debate over Iraq policy was important, but added, "There is one thing that is very clear, the President has laid out a course that we are going to finish the job in Iraq and leave an Iraq in which the fundamentals are there for a stable and democratic Iraq." Some of the milestones that mark progress are hard to see right now, she acknowledged, but she highlighted one in particular: an upcoming Iraqi law on oil development and revenue sharing that "I believe ... will be a source of political unity." Rice rejected calls for a division of Iraq into three parts, saying that “Iraqis want to have one country” and know a division would be destabilizing. Besides, she said, it could never resolve issues in cities like Baghdad and Mosul that are ethnically mixed and have large Sunni and Shiite populations. She called Prime Minister Maliki "a devoted patriot, a good man." “He has a tough political coalition around him that he’s always trying to respond to. And we have said, in no uncertain terms to the Iraqis, that they’re going to have to make these difficult political decisions, overcome their political differences so that the sectarian violence has no political basis,” the secretary of state said in the interview. The transcript of Secretary Rice's interview with Bloomberg TV can be found on the State Department Web site. For more information, see Iraq Update and the International Compact with Iraq. |
