Iraqis’ Progress Lags Behind Pace Set by Bush Plan

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/washington/15policy.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1173961037-K5GW7mABoapbZfJBdZapxw

Iraqis’ Progress Lags Behind Pace Set by Bush Plan


By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: March 15, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 14 — The Bush administration, which six months ago issued a series of political goals for the Iraqi government to meet by this month, is now tacitly acknowledging that the goals will take significantly longer to achieve.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has promised reforms that have yet to appear.

In interviews this week, administration officials said that the military buildup intended to stabilize Baghdad and create the conditions for achieving the objectives would not be fully in place until June and that all of the objectives would not be fulfilled until the year’s end.

A “notional political timeline” that the administration provided to Congress in January in an attachment to a letter from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had called for most of the objectives to be met by this month.

Four of the significant objectives are final approval of an oil law regulating distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the oil industry; reversal of the de-Baathification laws that are widely blamed for alienating Sunnis by driving them out of government ministries; the holding of local elections; and reform of Iraq’s Constitution.

A Pentagon assessment of progress in Iraq through the end of last year, submitted to Congress on Wednesday, notes that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “has promised to reform his government, beginning with his cabinet and the ministries,” but that none of those steps had yet happened. It cited the “passage of a framework” last month for sharing oil revenues among Iraq’s ethnic groups as a modest sign of progress, but notes that the last two months of 2006, before Mr. Bush announced his new strategy, “saw little progress on the reconciliation front.”

The report also described some of what is happening in Iraq as a “civil war” and described this past October through December as the most violent three-month period since 2003.

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