Cheney Pushes Iraqis for Quick Action

Sectarian Reconciliation, Legislative Issues Stressed in Baghdad Visit

BAGHDAD, May 9 -- Vice President Cheney flew to Baghdad on Wednesday to urge top Iraqi officials to move as quickly as possible toward a political reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite factions, whose bitter divisions underlie much of the country's violence.

Cheney, in an unannounced visit to the well-guarded Green Zone, met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Jalal Talabani and other leading Iraqi government and military officials.

On a day when a massive suicide truck bomb attack killed at least 14 people in the generally peaceful city of Irbil, in Iraq's Kurdish north, Cheney pressed for movement on key political issues such as revising the constitution, passing legislation to manage oil revenue and fostering cooperation between Sunnis and Shiites, according to Iraqi officials.

"His message was really one of support for the government and also underlining the significance of time, that there is a great deal of pressure by Congress and by the American public to produce some results," said Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who met with Cheney. "We are doing our best to meet these goals, and we share the same goals."

U.S. officials traveling with Cheney said he was also concerned that Iraq's parliament was considering a two-month summer vacation at a time when important legislation is pending. The Iraqi government has made little progress on the benchmark goals established by the Bush administration. Those goals include: amending the constitution to address Sunni concerns; passing the oil law; and allowing some former members of the once-ruling Baath Party, who were driven from the government en masse after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, to return to their jobs. Their dismissal is widely seen as having fueled the insurgency and the sense of isolation and powerlessness among Sunnis.

Cheney's second trip to Iraq comes as more than half of the nearly 30,000 new U.S. troops being deployed to the country, in a buildup intended to curb the ongoing violence, have arrived in and around Baghdad. The daily threats were made clear on Wednesday when an early evening explosion shook the windows in the U.S. Embassy while Cheney was visiting. Reporters following Cheney took cover temporarily in the basement but Cheney was not moved and "his business was not disrupted," said Lea Anne McBride, his spokeswoman.

U.S. military and embassy officials said they did not know what caused the explosion, though it is common for mortar shells and rockets to land within the Green Zone, where the embassy is located.

At a news conference after the blast, Cheney said his discussions with U.S. military and Iraqi officials suggested that sectarian violence was declining in Iraq but that the situation remained precarious.

"I think everybody recognizes there still are serious security problems, security threats -- no question about it," he said. "But the impression I got from talking with them -- and this includes their military as well as political leadership -- is that they do believe we are making progress, but we've got a long way to go."

The most startling violence in Iraq on Wednesday came in the northern region known as Kurdistan, considered almost a sanctuary from sectarian violence and a place where officials are aggressively recruiting foreign investment and pushing for economic growth. A suicide attacker's truck bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the Interior Ministry in the regional capital of Irbil, killing at least 14 people and wounding 87, many of them government employees, according to Kurdistan's interior minister, Karim Sinjary. The massive bomb was hidden in a truck carrying bottles of liquid soap, he said.

"Terrorists are the enemies of Kurdistan and they will not be able to stop the wheels of development in this region," said Adnan al-Mufti, president of Kurdistan's parliament.

In Diyala province, north of Baghdad, one U.S. soldier was killed and four others were injured in a gun battle, the U.S. military said. Diyala has become increasingly deadly terrain for American soldiers in recent months.

During his day in Baghdad, Cheney also met with Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni who is one of Iraq's two vice presidents. At the meeting, Hashimi asked for the release of detainees who are languishing in custody without being charged and called for greater Sunni participation in the Shiite-led government, according to Ayad al-Samarrae, a parliament member from Hashimi's political party. Sunni leaders recently threatened to step down from the government if they do not see more cooperation.

"We don't want to destroy the political process, we don't want to blackmail the others, but at the same time we can't be responsible for great mistakes in the process," Samarrae said. "We feel we are slipping toward a dictatorship once again."

One Shiite legislator, Haider al-Ebaidi, said he hoped Cheney and other U.S. officials would push neighboring Arab countries, Saudi Arabia in particular, to cut off funding for insurgents and do more to prevent foreign fighters from crossing into Iraq.

"These countries are the allies of the U.S. How come the U.S. does not put pressure on them?" he said. "Iraqi patience is running very, very low on this."

Cheney's visit sparked protests in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, organized by the followers of one of the most staunch opponents of the American presence in the country, Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi and Waleed Saffar in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.