It's a refrain that US President Bush and his top deputies have uttered many times over: "Iraq is a sovereign nation, and we stay because they have asked us to be there," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in October.
"Iraq is a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy," Bush said in November.
"It's a sovereign nation. It's their system, they make those decisions," said Major General William Caldwell IV, the US command's chief spokesman in Iraq, last week.
But as Bush prepared to unveil his new strategy for Iraq on yesterday night, the question was whether US officials could compel the Iraqis to follow the new US plan?
"Let me put it this way: At the end of the day, we're going to have to do some forcing," said Kenneth Pollack, an expert on Iraq at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
"We have to make it impossible," he said, for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki "not to do the right thing -- for him to say, `Look, we have no choice, the Americans are forcing us.'"
But Pollack and other foreign policy experts said that may require US ultimatums that, thus far, the Bush administration has been unwilling to issue.
Taking US officials at their word, Iraq has embraced its sovereignty. Al-Maliki exercised it in October when he contradicted US officials who said the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable for security measures.
He exercised it again in November when he ordered US forces to abandon checkpoints and roadblocks they had set up in Baghdad to look for a missing US soldier. He did it one more time in the last days of last year, when he ignored US requests that Saddam Hussein's execution be delayed until legal issues were cleared up.
The tension between US will and Iraqi action -- or inaction -- has been escalating ever since the US transferred sovereignty back to Iraq in 2004.
That has left the US facing a paradox. An assertive Iraqi government, responsible for security and for running the country, is needed if US troops are ever going to be able to hand over control to Iraqi soldiers and leave. But an assertive Iraqi government may not always do what it is told, which could result in a US script that the Iraqis refuse to follow.
Part of the problem is uncertainty that US and Iraqi leaders even have the same objectives. The Bush administration favors reconciliation, in the form of an Iraqi government representative of the country's major ethnic and religious groups: Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
But the heavy-handed approach taken by al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government toward Saddam's execution has raised questions about its commitment to reconciliation, some experts say.
Brian Katulis, director of democracy and public diplomacy with the Center for US Progress, a research and advocacy group, said that he could not reconcile al-Maliki's approach, which caused outrage among Iraq's Sunnis, "with his stated expression in favor of national unity."
Bush's new Iraq strategy also calls on al-Maliki to complement an expected US troop increase with an increase in Iraqi troops. But already, administration officials acknowledge that doubts remain about whether the promised Iraqi force, to be made up of Kurdish pesh merga militia units from northern Iraq, will actually show up in Baghdad committed to quelling sectarian fighting.
The US has requested more Iraqi troops in the past and then been disappointed.
Last summer, US military commanders asked for six Iraqi battalions, as part of an effort aimed at quelling violence in Baghdad.
But that effort foundered when the US and Iraqi authorities failed to marshal sufficient forces to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared of insurgents and militias.
"I do think it's a very serious problem in Iraq, because so much of what we need done depends on the Iraqis," said Daniel Serwer, the former diplomat who served as executive director of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
To be sure, the US is not without significant leverage -- 140,000 US troops -- to prod Iraqi leaders to dance to the US tune.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing US ambassador to Iraq, has often sought to warn Iraq's leaders that US support is not unlimited. But that effort has not had much resonance, Iraq experts say, in part because Bush has repeatedly assured the Iraqi leadership that the US will not desert Iraq.
"We're totally going to have to start being a little more arbitrary," Pollack of the Brookings Institution said. "We hand them back sovereignty, and now we continue to live by that charade."
He said that with the exception of the radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, most of the Shiite militia leaders do not want to see the US pull out of Iraq, and that the US should try to use that sentiment as a lever to push its agenda.
Certainly, the Bush administration could have forced the issue of Saddam's execution, to delay it; he was, after all, in US custody, and it was an US unit that turned him over to Iraqi officials in the early hours of Dec. 30.
"My guess is if we really wanted to delay the execution of Saddam, we could have done it," said Serwer, who is also a vice president at the US Institute of Peace.
But, Serwer said, "you can't do that every day," or US officials would undercut their own protestations that Iraq is sovereign.
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