Talabani Says Iraq Report 'Very Dangerous'

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Sunday harshly criticized the bipartisan report recommending changes to U.S. war policies, saying it contained some "very dangerous" recommendations that would undermine the sovereignty of Iraq.

Talabani, a Kurd, said the report "is not fair, is not just and it contains some very dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and the constitution."

He singled out the report's call for the approval of a de-Baathification law that could allow thousands of officials from Saddam Hussein's ousted party to return to their jobs.

"There is an article to bring back the Baathists to the political scene, which is very dangerous," he said in an interview with reporters at his office in Baghdad.

Other top Shiite and Kurdish leaders have disparaged the Iraq Study Group report. Sunni Arabs said they agree with the report's prognosis of Iraq's problems — but not the proposed cure.

Reaction to the 96-page document released Wednesday has underlined this nation's political and sectarian fissures, signaling the magnitude of the task ahead for a Bush administration anxiously searching for a change of course in troubled Iraq.

The divisions over the report, reflecting Iraq's ethnic and religious fault lines, center around some of the most highly charged issues afflicting today's Iraq — national reconciliation, sharing oil wealth and the role of neighboring nations in efforts to end Iraq's problems.

They also come at a time when serious doubts have been raised on whether the ruling Shiite-led government and its leader, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, have the strength to place the nation on the road to stability at a time when its U.S. backers are publicly pondering an exit strategy that would leave Iraq's nascent security forces taking the lead in efforts to end the violence.

Facing rising dissent from within his government, al-Maliki last week said an often-delayed national reconciliation conference would be held this month. A senior aide at the Ministry of National Dialogue, who declined to be identified because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said the meeting would open Dec. 16.

The opposition by the myriad ethnic and religious factions is going to make the report's recommendations for changes in U.S. Iraqi policy a hard sell here, despite calls by the bipartisan commission to reduce political, military or economic support if the government in Baghdad cannot make substantial progress.

U.S. President George W. Bush has sought to play down the significance of the report's recommendations, saying he would weigh them along with other possible courses of actions on the table. Iraqi opposition might embolden him to ignore those he already publicly disagreed with, like engaging Syria and Iran.

The report's recommendations, which are not binding, also have met stiff opposition from some in the United States for its suggestion to pull out nearly all combat brigades from Iraq by early 2008.

"The report includes inaccurate information that's based on dishonest sources," Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a top Shiite politician, said of the report. He also rejected the report's linkage between ending Iraq's problems and a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Another Shiite politician, Saad Jawad Kandeel of al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, objected to the report's contention that a review of a new constitution adopted in a referendum last year was essential to national reconciliation.

"The report made many errors ... that is one of them," countered Kandeel, charging that the report was biased in favor of one group. He did not name that group, but he was alluding to the once-dominant Sunni Arabs who overwhelmingly voted against the constitution.

An aide to al-Maliki said the Iraqi leader had unspecified reservations on the report but has yet to form a detailed response. A meeting Sunday of the prime minister, coalition partners, the president and his two deputies will discuss the report, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The government's initial reaction to the report came last week from Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurdish politician. He said its recommendations generally conformed with the government's own timeline for meeting objectives.

But his upbeat assessment has since been overtaken by less welcoming comments.

The strongest criticism has come from the Kurds, an influential minority whose leaders zealously guard their 15-year-old self-rule region in the north, worried that the chaos and violence sweeping the rest of the country could spill over into their enclave.

"We think that the Iraq Study Group has made "unrealistic and inappropriate" suggestions, said Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish region. He also objected to recommendations on sharing the oil wealth, reinstating Saddam loyalists in their old government jobs and giving Iraq's neighbors a role in efforts to end the violence.

Barzani, whose stand was backed by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, saved his harshest words for a recommendation that a referendum to decide the fate of a northern oil-rich region claimed by the Kurds be delayed. Arab and Turkomen residents of the Kirkuk area reject the Kurdish claim. The constitution states that the vote must be held before the end of 2007.

"Any delay in the implementation of this article will have grave consequences and it will in no way be accepted by the people of Kurdistan," Barzani warned in a statement.

Sunni Arab leaders, perhaps sensing that the report appeared to support some of their own stands on key issues, have generally been welcoming of its recommendations.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of parliament's largest Sunni Arab bloc, said many of the recommendations made by the report were "positive," including the call for engaging U.S. adversaries Iran and Syria in the search for an end to the violence raging in Iraq.

"There are many very positive recommendations, but this government will not be able to carry out any of them," he said. "It is a sectarian and biased government."

The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni Arab group thought to have links to the insurgency, said the report gave a "very accurate and commendable" summary of Iraq's problems. "But the solutions it proposed did not match the strength of the prognosis," said the association's spokesman, Sheik Mohammed Bashar al-Fayadh.

Meanwhile, Syria on Sunday warned that United States that it would face hatred and failure in the Mideast if the White House rejects recommendations made by a U.S. advisory panel on Iraq.

Syria's ruling party's Al-Baath newspaper urged U.S. President George W. Bush to take the Iraq Study Group's report seriously because it would "diminish hatred for the U.S. in region."

"But if it failed to pick up the positive signals either in the report or in the Syrian welcome of what the report has contained, it (the U.S.) would remain drowned in the quagmire and the situation in the region and the entire world would remain unstable," the newspaper said.