Talabani blasts 'insulting' US report on Iraq

BAGHDAD: President Jalal Talabani, a long-time US ally, made a stinging attack on the controversial Iraq Study Group report on Sunday, calling it "dangerous" and insulting to Iraqi sovereignty.   

The report's recommendations were also implicitly criticised by outgoing defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who paid a defiant farewell visit to US troops and urged them to stay the course.   

Four days after the release of the report, which was hailed by many US lawmakers and commentators as pointing to a way out of the Iraq crisis, Talabani invited journalists to his Baghdad villa to denounce it.   

"If you read this report, one would think that it is written for a young, small colony that they are imposing conditions on, neglecting the fact that we are a sovereign country, and respected," he said.   

The president was angered by the recommendation that more US troops be directly assigned to Iraqi army units, demanding instead that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki be given full command of all Iraqi forces.   

"As a whole, I reject this report," he said. "I think that the Baker-Hamilton report is not fair and not just, and it contains dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and its constitution."   

The report -- seen in Washington as an indictment of President George W Bush's strategy in Iraq -- was written by 10 former officials working under former secretary of state James Baker.   

Talabani's most scathing attack on the report was on Baker himself, who in Iraq is seen as responsible for the fateful US decision not to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991 after expelling his forces from Kuwait.   

"We smell in this report the attitude of James Baker in the aftermath of the war in Kuwait," Talabani said.   

Talabani said he would write to US President George W Bush -- whom he described as "courageous -- to outline Iraq's objections to the study group's advice, much of which the US leader has already discarded.   

Bush's former point man on Iraq, Rumsfeld, was unapologetic during his farewell visit to Iraq about his views and strategies in the conflict, which were broadly criticised in the report.   

In front of thousands of cheering soldiers at two different US military bases, Rumsfeld defiantly repeated his justifications for the war and the need to stick to it, according to an American Forces Press Service article.   

"We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three," Rumsfeld said Saturday at al-Asad base in a remote part of Al-Anbar province.   

"At the same time, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success," Rumsfeld said, according to the article on the Pentagon website.   

"The enemy must be defeated," he added, predicting that the US "war on terror" would be a Cold War-like struggle that would take half a century.   

Rumsfeld left Washington on Friday, but it was not until late Saturday that the Pentagon revealed he had made the trip, a final chance to express appreciation to the troops.   

US officials in Baghdad on Sunday would still not comment on his trip. The visit coincided with the death of two marines, bringing the toll of US military dead since the March 2003 invasion to 2,927. More than 40 have died in the first week of December alone.   

Violence elsewhere in the country continued unabated with at least 88 people killed or found murdered, including 60 who had been shot dead execution-style in apparent sectarian killings in the capital.   

Among the dead were nine Shiite men who had been murdered after being separated from their female relatives.   

The US policy review expressed serious concern about the worsening sectarian bloodshed and recommended that the prime minister work harder to reconcile the nation's fractured political factions.   

Maliki's efforts to hold a national reconciliation conference for Saturday immediately foundered, however, when political leaders began squabbling over who could and could not take part.   

Talabani blasted the report for suggesting that representatives of the former regime, who are believed to be playing a major role in the insurgency wracking the country, be included.   

It is "against the long struggle of the Iraqi people against dictatorship," he said.   

Authorities meanwhile arrested the chief warden of the Badush prison near the main northern city of Mosul on suspicion of helping ousted president Saddam Hussein's nephew escape a day earlier.   

Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf of the national police command centre said on national television that the deputy prison governor was also detained as the escape of Ayman Sabawi appeared to be an inside job.   

Sabawi, who is being hunted by security forces, is accused of financing the Sunni insurgency and providing its fighters with arms and explosives.