IRAQ U.S. threatens to pull security force funds

Violence throughout Iraq escalated on Monday.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Amid growing tensions between U.S. officials and Iraq's pro-Iranian Shiite political parties, America's ambassador warned Monday that unless Iraq's factions unite to form a nonsectarian government free from ties to militias, the United States will withdraw funding for the nation's security forces.
The warning came on a day of bloodshed that underscored the dangers of the deepening political stalemate that has taken hold since Iraqis voted in December for their first permanent government since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
At least 23 people, including an American soldier, died in bombings across the country, including 12 who were burned alive when a suicide bomber boarded their bus in the Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhamiya.
Other bombings in Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit that targeted day laborers, police officers eating at a restaurant and a convoy of trucks ratcheted up the level of violence after a relative lull in recent weeks.
Here's the situation
More than two months after the elections, negotiations on forming the government have hardly begun, fueling fears that the Sunni-dominated insurgency will take advantage of the political vacuum to wage a renewed campaign of violence targeting Shiites, and that Shiite death squads will step up their campaign of executing Sunnis.
Speaking at a rare news conference, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad emphasized that the U.S. wants to see what he called a "government of national unity" that includes representatives of all the major political groupings, and not one that gives key posts to factional leaders.
"The fundamental problem of Iraq is polarization along ethnic and sectarian lines," he said. "Ministers, particularly the security ministers, have to be people who are nonsectarian and are broadly acceptable and do not have links or ties to militias.
"Otherwise," he added, "Iraq faces a period of warlordism like Afghanistan went through. ... Unauthorized militia formations have been allowed to operate." Khalilzad was the ambassador to Afghanistan before he took the Iraq post.
It was the most public criticism by a U.S. official yet of the outgoing Shiite-dominated government, which has been accused by its opponents of allowing Shiite militias to infiltrate the country's security forces, especially those run by the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry.
"The United States has invested billions of dollars into these forces," he said. "We're not going to invest money in forces ... run by people who are sectarian."
Drastic step
Withdrawing funding from the security forces would be a drastic step that could undermine America's exit strategy from Iraq. The U.S. military is accelerating the effort to train Iraq's security forces so that they can begin substantially taking over from U.S. troops by the end of the year, and Khalilzad said that he is still confident that Iraq's politicians would reach an agreement on a broadly representative government.