Global General

Special

Newsmaker

Asia Pacific

America

Middle East

Europe

Africa

Biden back in Iraq to keep up pressure

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-15 22:56

BAGHDAD: US Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Iraq on an unannounced visit on Tuesday to keep up US pressure on Iraq's leaders to reach political compromises on thorny issues as US combat troops prepare to go home.

US Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a "Celebration of Life Memorial Service" for Senator Edward Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum in Boston, Massachusetts August 28, 2009. [Agencies]

It was Biden's second trip to Iraq in three months, and the visit signaled that the Obama administration is anxious to resolve long-standing disputes between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities over land and oil that US officials fear could rip apart the country's fragile security.

Related readings:  Suicide bomber in west Iraq kills 7, wounds 16  Truck bomb in northern Iraq kills 19  UK says it has been given remains in Iraq  American commander: US on the road out of Iraq  Iraq's al-Qaida claims Baghdad government bombings

Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq since the height of a wave of sectarian killings in 2006, due in part to a so-called "surge" of tens of thousands of US troops, but the security gains have not been matched by much political progress.

Since 2006, Washington has pressed Iraq's Kurdish, and Shi'ite and Sunni Arab leaders, with little success, to put aside differences and compromise on issues such as a new oil law to manage the world's third-largest oil reserves.

But now with US combat operations due to end in Iraq by August 2010, the United States is running out of time and influence among Iraq's leaders to achieve its goal -- to leave behind a relatively stable Iraq that can resist efforts by neighboring Shi'ite Iran to meddle in its affairs.

There is no longer any appetite in Washington for the Iraq war. The Obama administration is preoccupied with the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and rallying fading support among Americans and skeptical Democrats who control the US Congress for the eight-year-old war there.

Humpty-dumpty

Biden warned Iraqi leaders on his last visit to Iraq that if there was renewed violence in Iraq, US troops would not stay on to "put Humpty-Dumpty back together again."

US forces pulled out of Iraq's towns and cities on June 30 under a security pact that paves the way for a full US withdrawal by the end of 2011.

The US ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, assured US lawmakers last week that a recent spate of bomb attacks blamed on al Qaeda would not upset the administration's timetable for withdrawing the 130,000 remaining US troops.

Aides said Biden would meet the top US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, and Shi'ite Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has sought to distance himself from Washington and portray himself as a nationalist leader strong on security ahead of elections next January.

Biden, the Obama administration's point man on Iraq, will also meet Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and the leader of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Masoud Barzani. A sandstorm prevented him from flying north to the Kurdish enclave on his last visit.

Northern Iraq is a key battleground between Baghdad's Arab-led government and Iraqi Kurdistan, which claim parts of the oil-producing north along its borders as the Kurds' ancestral homeland.

Massive oil reserves lie at the heart of the dispute, which is seen as a major threat to Iraqi security just as sectarian violence ebbs. US and UN officials are trying to broker a compromise.

A recent spate of bombings in northern Iraq are the work of Islamist militants trying to exploit Kurd-Arab tensions to undermine security, the US military says.