U.S. Fears Election Strife in Iraq Could Affect Pullout

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The deadly suicide bombings in Iraq on Wednesday highlight the central quandary facing President Obama as he tries to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war there: Will parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sunday, throw the country back into the sectarian strife that flared in 2004 and delay the planned American withdrawal?

Senior Obama administration officials maintained in interviews this week that Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw all American combat troops by Sept. 1 would remain on track regardless of who cobbles together a governing coalition after the election. Under the plan, no more than 50,000 American forces would stay behind, mostly in advisory roles. (Now there are slightly more than 90,000 troops in the country, down from 124,000 in September.)

But administration officials also acknowledged that the bigger worry for the United States was not who would win the elections, but the possibility that the elections — and their almost certainly messy aftermath — could ignite violence that would, at the least, complicate the planned withdrawal.

In part for that reason, “we’re not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday in a telephone interview. The bulk of the remaining American troops, he said, “will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys.”

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American military commander in Iraq, has drawn up a contingency plan that would keep a combat brigade in northern Iraq beyond the Sept. 1 deadline, should conditions warrant, administration officials said. Kirkuk and the restive Kurdish area in the north remain major concerns for American military planners.

Beyond that, military and administration officials say they are prepared to use the remaining American noncombat troops for combat missions, if things heat up.

For Mr. Obama, however, such a sleight of hand could have huge political repercussions back in Washington. The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy platform when he ran for president — and indeed, the reason many political experts say he was able to wrest a primary victory from Hillary Rodham Clinton — was his opposition to the Iraq war from the start.

At a time when Mr. Obama has already angered his liberal base by ramping up the number of American troops in Afghanistan and missing his own deadline to shut down the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even the appearance that he has fudged the troop drawdown in Iraq could set off a rebellion as Democrats face difficult midterm elections.

There is also concern that the administration has been so preoccupied by Afghanistan and Pakistan that Iraq has gotten less attention from top policy-makers in the State Department or the National Security Council, according to administration officials and outside experts.

Ten months ago, Mr. Obama effectively handed Mr. Biden the administration’s Iraq portfolio, and the vice president has been to Iraq several times since then to cajole, prod and push Iraqi political leaders to compromise — often using the looming American troop pullout as a warning to the politicians that they will not have an American security blanket forever.

Mr. Biden has led monthly meetings in the White House Situation Room and recruited other agencies, like the Treasury and Agriculture Departments to help with Iraqi reconstruction.

But below Mr. Biden, the main Iraq working group consists of five relatively junior officials from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, one administration official said. Other officials counter that senior policymakers, including Antony Blinken, the vice president’s chief foreign policy adviser and Puneet Talwar, a senior director in the National Security Council, are both heavily involved in Iraq.

Still, with Mr. Biden also juggling other duties, some experts contend that the administration could use more senior-level officials whose primary focus is developing Iraq policy.

For his part, Mr. Biden said that while the administration was worried about trouble spots, particularly in the north, he was confident that Iraqi violence would not reach the levels it did during the last election in 2005. He said that was in part because Iraq’s quarreling sects had realized that they could achieve more working within the political process than by lobbing grenades from the outside.

“Politics has broken out in Iraq,” Mr. Biden said.

For the Obama administration, the best strategy could be to remind the Iraqis that they must conduct a responsible election if they want a long-term relationship with the United States, experts said.

“You can effectively say to any Iraqi, ‘Barack Obama was not elected to keep the United States in Iraq; if you guys are going to do something that does not serve American interests there, his incentive will be to cut his losses,’ ” said Kenneth M. Pollack, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The American ambassador to Baghdad, Christopher R. Hill, has been meeting with party leaders to deliver the message that the United States wants a clean election. While he said the administration recognized the danger of uncertainty after the vote, he said Iraq had shown it could navigate such periods peacefully.

“We can draw comfort from the fact that Iraq politicians have always pulled back from the brink,” he said in a telephone interview. “We believe they fully understand the risks of a protracted government formation period.”

With no party expected to get a majority, or even a strong plurality, analysts foresee intense horse trading, with factions like the Kurds trying to play kingmaker as diverse groups attempt to cobble together coalitions.

Mr. Hill emphasized that the United States did not want to get drawn into postelection wrangling among Kurdish, Shiite or Sunni parties. He and General Odierno have already been criticized in some quarters in Iraq for speaking about Iran’s influence in the election process.

“Assuming that everything is going to go off fine, we will execute our withdrawal as we advertised,” Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said Tuesday in an interview. It would take a “proactive national decision” by Mr. Obama to divert from the withdrawal plan, he said, adding, “The military always thinks through different options in how we might react.”

Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.