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 Speaking to reporters in the Massachusetts island of Martha's
Vineyard, where he is vacationing with his family, Obama said Iraq
had made important strides toward rebuffing fighters from the
Islamic State, an al-Qaeda offshoot, since the United States
authorized air strikes last week.
He urged the quick formation of an inclusive government to address
the needs of all Iraqis.
"Today Iraq took a promising step forward in this critical effort,"
Obama said in brief remarks.
Obama's comments and a congratulatory telephone call he made to
Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi signal the
administration's expectation, or hope, that Prime Minister Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki's 8-year-rule is all but over, even as Maliki shows
no sign of relinquishing power.
"They’re treating him like he’s the prime minister already,” Michael
Knights, a Boston-based fellow and Iraq scholar at the Washington
Institute, said of Abadi.
"Now the U.S. can press on with its offer of enhanced security
cooperation with Iraq."
Maliki, a Shi'ite Muslim Islamist blamed by Washington for driving
the alienated Sunni minority into a revolt that is fueling the
Islamic State's brutal insurgency, deployed militias and special
forces on the streets on Monday in a potentially dangerous political
showdown.
Obama urged Abadi to quickly form a new cabinet that represents
Iraq's different ethnic and religious communities. "This new Iraqi
leadership has a difficult task," Obama said. "It has to regain the
confidence of its citizens by governing inclusively and by taking
steps to demonstrate its resolve."
Abadi, a deputy speaker and veteran of Maliki's Dawa Party, was
named by President Fouad Masoum on Monday to replace Maliki.
"PARTNER IN BAGHDAD"
Obama's comments underline what one former U.S. official described
as a potential "sea change" in Washington's ties with Baghdad if
Abadi forms a government following increasing U.S. disenchantment
with Maliki, who Washington backed as prime minister in 2006 when a
Sunni insurgency raged and again in 2010 for a second term.
"The U.S. will finally have a partner in Baghdad," said Wayne White,
a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and a former
senior State Department intelligence official.
Born in Baghdad in 1952, Abadi was a trained electrical engineer
before entering Iraq's government after the U.S.-led invasion in
2003. He was part of the political opposition to late dictator
Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime and lived in Britain for many
years. Two of his siblings were executed in 1982 for their
membership in the then-outlawed Dawa party.
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James Jeffrey, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010
to 2012, said he had met Abadi in Baghdad and believed he was
"someone the United States could work with."
He said that Abadi's main strength was that "he's not Maliki" and
has not alienated groups across the Iraqi political spectrum. He
predicted that Maliki would resist but not be able to hold onto
power. Too many forces inside Iraq, including the country's Shia
establishment in the city of Najaf, have turned against Maliki, he
added.
Jeffrey said that while some Iraqi army units remain personally
loyal to Maliki, the presence of 600 American advisers make it
difficult for Maliki to get all of Iraq's security forces to act on
his behalf.
"He's really trapped."
A U.S. official said that to his knowledge the United States had not
played a role in the selection of Abadi.
"We were sufficiently burned by the interference and choice of
Maliki that people around here are not into king-making," said the
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "In this case, he was
pretty much chosen by the (Iraqi) process and everybody is pretty
relieved that they have chosen somebody and that it was not Maliki."
Obama late last week authorized air strikes in Iraq to protect U.S.
personnel in Arbil from the Islamic State, a Sunni fundamentalist
militant group that has swept through northern Iraq, and to ensure
that members of the Yazidi sect were not subject to systematic
violence at the hands of the militants.
The air strikes carried out so far are the first direct U.S.
military action in Iraq since the Obama administration completed its
withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2011.
(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan, Rebecca Elliott and Arshad
Mohammed in Washington, and David Rohde in New York. Editing by
Jason Szep and Richard Chang)
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