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Talabani slams Iraq Study Group report

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said on Sunday that the US program to train Iraq's security forces had been a repeated failure and denounced a plan to increase the number of US advisers working with the Iraqi Army, saying it would subvert the country's sovereignty.

Talabani's remarks, made during an interview with Western news service reporters, were an extraordinarily harsh denunciation of a central US strategy in Iraq and challenged a major recommendation by the Iraq Study Group in Washington.

Talabani was the highest-ranking Iraqi official to criticize the report, adding to growing anger among Iraqi leaders who have disagreed with some of its recommendations. US army commanders have poured more than US$12 billion into training and equipping Iraq's security forces and have tied a withdrawal of US troops to success in these efforts. But Talabani ridiculed them.

"What have they done so far in training the army and the police?" he asked. "What they have done is move from failure to failure."

Talabani, who is Kurdish, said the Iraq Study Group report offered some "very dangerous" recommendations that undermined the country's ability to control its own army and police force and threatened Iraq's sovereignty.

He did not offer specific criticisms of the training program except to say that the US forces had inadequately screened recruits to the Shiite-dominated police force to ensure their loyalties to the state rather than to a sect.

His remarks were likely to dismay the US leadership, which has regarded him as one of its more reliable and like-minded partners in Iraq.

The Iraq Study Group called for increasing the number of US trainers to as many as 20,000 from more than 4,000 now in the hope that it would help Iraqi units more quickly assume full control of the country's security.

But Talabani said the proliferation of US advisers threatened Iraqi control of the security forces and was a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

The leaders of the Iraq Study Group, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, defended their report on Sunday against Talabani's attack.

"Up until this point, we've given a blank check to the Iraqis," Hamilton said on CNN.

"And I'm not surprised that the president would like that sort of a deal. But we believe that the American people want our aid to be conditional. We want that aid to be given only if there is a response from the Iraqi government that shows performance," he added.
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