NEW YORK — Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, a frequent advisor to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, has concluded that the United States must choose between stability and democracy in Iraq -- and that democracy, for now, is out of reach.
"I think that's reality. I think that was true from the beginning," Kissinger said in an interview last week.
"Iraq is not a nation in the historic sense," he said, pointing to the ferocity of the conflicts among Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs. "The evolution of democracy ... usually has to go through a phase in which a nation [is] born. And by attempting to skip that process, our valid goals were distorted into what we are now seeing."
Instead of holding elections and trying to build democratic institutions from the ground up, Kissinger said, the United States should focus on more limited goals: preventing the emergence of a "fundamentalist jihadist regime" in Baghdad and enlisting other countries to help stabilize Iraq.
Speaking in unusually blunt terms at a time when the administration is reviewing policy options for Iraq, Kissinger emphasized that he did not intend to be critical of the president or other officials who have managed the U.S. effort in Iraq.
"I supported going in," he said. "I'm basically supporting the administration. And these are the criticisms of a friend of the administration who thinks well of the president."
Kissinger has made some of these points before, especially his argument that the United States should try to "internationalize" the problem of Iraq by enlisting other countries, including Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Russia, in a joint effort.
But as debate escalated over possible changes in U.S. strategy in the wake of the Democrats' victory in the congressional election, his latest comments amounted to a sharp critique of the administration's course.
He said he would have preferred a post-invasion policy that installed a strong Iraqi leader from the military or some other institution and deferred the development of democracy until later. "If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed," he said.
In Iraq, he said, elections, the centerpiece of the administration's political strategy, merely sharpened sectarian differences.
"It [was] a mistake to think that you can gain legitimacy primarily through the electoral process," he said.
