Clock ticks on Baghdad crackdown

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's government may win the Battle of Baghdad but lose the war, by squandering the breathing space the U.S.-backed crackdown in the capital was meant to give it to reconcile the country's warring communities.

"All of it is determined by matching military progress with progress in reconciliation ... We have zero tangible progress in political reconciliation," said Anthony Cordesman, a prominent military analyst in Washington.

A wave of bombings blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda that killed nearly 200 people in Baghdad on Wednesday was a terrible reminder that time is fast running out for the government to stop the country plunging into all-out civil war.

Opinion polls also show Americans want out of the unpopular four-year-old conflict, and political pressure is mounting on President George W. Bush to set a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. The Baghdad offensive is seen as his last throw.

"This is a battle of perceptions," said Cordesman. "If they don't make progress in six months, political patience in the United States is going to be critical."

Tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops have deployed in Baghdad, epicenter of the bloodletting between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs, sweeping through neighborhoods and setting up joint security stations to patrol secured areas.

They have succeeded in reducing the daily death toll in the city, especially targeted killings blamed on Shi'ite militias, but car bombings like Wednesday's and a surge in violence outside Baghdad have caused the overall toll in Iraq to go up.

But that is not the full picture. The drop in violence is also due to the feared Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who gave his tacit support to the crackdown, laying down their weapons and keeping a low profile.

Sadr withdrew from the government this week, under pressure, analysts say, from factions within his movement angry over the bombing of Shi'ite neighborhoods by Sunni insurgents. They fear that could signal the militia's return to the streets.

U.S. commanders have repeatedly stressed the war will not be won by the military but by the politicians. Washington has pressed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government to reach out to Sunnis, who feel marginalized in the post-Saddam era.

The Iraqi government says it is working hard to pursue reconciliation, including holding talks with some Sunni insurgent linked groups.

"The security crackdown has achieved great success on the military front... The future progress of the plan must achieve a balance between military and political efforts," said Abbas al- Bayati, a senior lawmaker from Maliki's Shi'ite Alliance bloc.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Analysts are also scornful of what Maliki's fractious government has achieved so far in reconciling deeply divided Sunni Arabs and Shi'ites and isolating the religious extremists of al Qaeda from more nationalist Sunni insurgent groups.

"At the start of the crackdown, there was a psychological moment, a window of three to four weeks when people really thought this could work and now that momentum has been frittered away," said Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group think-tank.

U.S. and Iraqi officials had held up the broad agreement between Iraq's parties on centralizing control of Iraq's oil as one sign of political progress, but the devil is in the detail as was shown on Wednesday when Kurdish energy officials said they objected to the law's annexes as unconstitutional.

Maliki's government has also said it has agreed a plan to allow thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to public life. But the draft law has not gone to parliament and there is fierce opposition to it.

There has been almost no progress on revising the constitution, a key demand of Sunnis. As a multi-party panel was meeting to discuss the issue last week, a bomb ripped through a cafe in the parliament, killing one lawmaker.

"The security plan should not concentrate on pursuing gunmen. If the government wants to prove success, dialogue must be opened with different political groups to push the political process ahead," said Saleem al-Jouburi, spokesman for the Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament.

Hiltermann said the international community needed to play a bigger role, especially Iraq's neighbors, in putting pressure on the government and other parties to compromise.

"The Bush administration decided to put all the onus on the Maliki government to bring about reconciliation, but it is weak, dysfunctional and too partisan to do that," he said.

James Fearon, author of "Iraq's Civil War" in the current edition of the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs, believes the Baghdad offensive, even if successful, is simply delaying what he sees as the inevitable bloodletting between groups jostling for power that will follow a U.S. troop drawdown.

"Even if it works in the sense of reducing violence in Baghdad, it is not clear ... this would put us in a position where we could leave without the violence and chaos returning in a big way," he told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad)