No military win possible in Iraq, says Kissinger
Foreign Desk Report

LONDON—Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday. In a wide ranging interview on British Broadcasting Corp. television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors — including Iran — if any progress is to be made in the region.
“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday AM breakfast show. But Kissinger warned against a rapi
d withdrawal of troops, saying it could lead to “disastrous consequences,” destabilizing Iraq’s neighbors and causing a long-lasting conflict. “If you withdraw all the forces without any international understanding and without any even partial solution of some of the problems, civil war in Iraq will take on even more violent forms and achieve dimensions that are probably exceeding those that brought us into Yugoslavia with military force,” he said.
Iraq’s neighbors, especially those with large Shia populations, would be destabilized should their be a quick withdrawal from Iraq, Kissinger said. “So I think a dramatic collapse of Iraq — whatever we think about how the situation was created — would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.
Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq’s neighbors and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region. He also said that the process would have to include Iran and that the U.S. must enter into dialogue with the country.
Asked if it was time for President Bush and British Prime MinisterTony Blair to change course, he responded: “I think we have to redefine the course, but I don’t think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal.
A suicide bomber killed 22 people south of Baghdad on Sunday by offering poor Shi’ite workers day laboring jobs and then detonating explosives packed inside his minibus as the crowd gathered around it.
On a day when Syria’s foreign minister was due on a rare visit to hear Iraqi and U.S. concern about Sunni suicide bombers coming in through Syria, a Sunni Islamist group claimed the attack in Hilla, calling it revenge for a mass kidnap from a Sunni-run Baghdad ministry building last week. Three near-simultaneous explosions, at least two of them car bombs, killed at least six people and wounded 30 at a bus station in mainly Shi’ite east Baghdad. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem was due to fly to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi leaders likely to focus on repeated U.S. and Iraqi complaints that Damascus has done too little to stop the flow of insurgents and weapons across its border.
With U.S.President George W. Bush looking for fresh ideas that could help calm violence and let American troops go home, there have been new calls from his allies and in Washington for him to talk to Syria and Iran, both at loggerheads with the United States and blamed by it for fomenting trouble in Iraq.
Sunni Muslim insurgents are battling Iraqi and U.S. forces. The U.S. military said it killed eight insurgents in air and ground attacks in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on Saturday after troops came under mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire.