WASHINGTON: Here’s an example of what we love in Washington — political irony and great timing.
While Iraq’s prime minister was in the White House Rose Garden holding a joint press briefing with the president of the United States, auditors at State Department released a report at the same time, stating that America’s largest diplomatic mission, the US Embassy in Baghdad, is greatly overstaffed and its size should be more in keeping with the “evolving US-Iraq relationship” and that reductions should “begin immediately.” The report came as President Barack Obama met Nouri Al-Maliki in Washington for talks on the significant changes in the US-Iraqi relationship and Washington’s shift of attention from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Wednesday’s meeting was first between the US president and the Iraqi prime minister since US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities at the end of June.
Obama told journalists in the fragrant Rose Garden that US troops would completely withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011 as scheduled, and that Washington supports Iraq’s political reconciliation process, while Al-Maliki said Iraqi security forces had the “high capability” to impose peace after US pullout. The brief news conference was held after the two met for more than an hour at the White House.
Obama acknowledged that the situation in Iraq was not, ahem, a rose garden. “There will be some tough days ahead. There will be attacks on Iraqi security forces and the American troops supporting them… There are still those who want to foment sectarian conflict.” The Obama administration remains concerned that ongoing political disputes between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, and even within the majority Shiite community — will impede progress on economic and administration issues and may risk more serious sectarian strife.
Al-Maliki, whose Shiite-dominated government faces national elections in January, pledged that his government “will work very hard in order not to allow any sectarian behavior an opportunity to flourish.”
He added that American troops remain ready to help, despite reports of Iraqi restrictions on the roughly 130,000 US forces in the country, following their withdrawal from cities and towns last month.
Al-Maliki came to Washington after talks in New York with United Nations officials on ending the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. President Obama said he supports the move.
Also on Wednesday, government auditors said the US Embassy in Iraq, the government’s largest overseas diplomatic mission with 1,873 employees, is significantly overstaffed and needs to be downsized to reflect the reduced American role in the country, according to a new State Department report.
“There is a clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the embassy: The time has come for a significant rightsizing,” it noted.
In addition to downsizing the embassy, the report recommends ending the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, by 2011, which have been the prime US tool for rebuilding civilian life in Iraq’s provinces.
“For some, it (the downsizing) is much overdue, as they believe the ’civilian surge’ went too far,” the report says. “For others, it is a necessary result of the now-changed circumstances in Iraq and in our bilateral relationship.”
The American Embassy in Baghdad became a symbol of the Bush Administration’s ambitions to remake Iraq. A huge new structure was built on the banks of the Tigris River, at a cost of more than $700 million, and hundreds of civilian experts from agencies across the US government were deployed to help with reconstruction.
The 103-page inspector general’s report gives high marks to embassy personnel for what it calls an exemplary relationship between American civilians and the US military in Iraq.
