Iraq Realities Force Bush to Respond

Once again, the Sunday Times scooped the U.S. press on a big Iraq war story. "US 'in talks with Iraq rebels,'" the London newspaper reported this weekend.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quickly confirmed the story and downplayed it, suggesting it should not be surprising that U.S. officials were secretly negotiating with battlefield enemies. Rumsfeld and U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. George W. Casey Jr. made an important distinction: The U.S. was talking to Sunnis violently opposed to the occupation, not foreign fighters linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi.

But the Arab News in Saudi Arabia, among others, was surprised and didn't make the distinction. "US Officials Held Talks With Terrorists" was their headline.

As with the Downing Street Memo, the Times was quicker than any American news organization to document the gap between rhetoric and reality of U.S. policy in Iraq.

President Bush will address the American people Tuesday night amid mounting questions about claims of progress in Iraq. Polls show once-solid public support for the war has dissipated. Restive Republicans are increasingly critical. The coverage in the international online media highlights the administration's problem. While the White House complains that news organizations ignore signs of progress in Iraq, the Iraqi press itself is full of reports of chaos and corruption.

The secret negotiations, according to the Sunday Times, suggest how the United States may be trying to ease its predicament. "The talks appear to represent the first serious effort by Americans and Iraqi insurgents to find common ground since violence intensified in the spring," the paper said.

The Times story, based on unidentified Iraqi sources, described two meetings earlier this month between an American team that "included senior military and intelligence officers, a civilian staffer from Congress and a representative of the US embassy in Baghdad." Representatives for insurgent groups included members of Ansar al-Sunna, "which has carried out numerous suicide bombings and killed 22 people in the dining hall of an American base at Mosul last Christmas," the story said.

"Washington seems to be gingerly probing for ways of defusing home-grown Iraqi opposition and of isolating the foreign Islamic militants who have flooded into Iraq to wage holy war against America under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq," said the Sunday Times.

The United States has also been talking to leaders of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, according to al-Mutamar, a Baghdad daily.

"The interim leadership of the dissolved Ba'ath party is holding negotiations with the Americans but not with the Iraqi government," said a summary of the June 21 story translated by the Iraqi Press Monitor.

"A party leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the negotiators have presented a list of conditions issued by the party, including freeing arrested members and ending the hunt for its members."

Several analysts told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that they doubted the talks would help. David Hartwell, a Middle East expert with the London-based Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment, says "negotiating with insurgents is a difficult task for an occupying power."