Cheney presses Iraqis to show gains

BAGHDAD -- Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Baghdad yesterday to urge top Iraqi officials to move as quickly as possible toward a political reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'ite factions, whose bitter divisions underlie much of the country's violence.

Cheney, in an unannounced visit to the capital's well-guarded Green Zone, met with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, President Jalal Talabani, and other leading Iraqi officials. On a day when a massive suicide truck bomb killed 14 people in the generally peaceful city of Irbil, in Iraq's Kurdish north, Cheney pressed for movement on key political issues such as revising the constitution, passing legislation to manage oil revenue, and fostering cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites, according to Iraqi officials.

"His message was really one of support for the government and also underlining the significance of time, that there is a great deal of pressure by Congress and by the American public to produce some results," said Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. "We are doing our best to meet these goals, and we share the same goals."

US officials traveling with Cheney said he was also concerned that Iraq's parliament was considering a two-month summer vacation at a time when important legislation is pending. The Iraqi government has made little progress on benchmark goals established by the Bush administration, including allowing some former members of the once-ruling Ba'ath party, who were driven from the government en masse after the 2003 invasion by US-led coalition forces, to return to their jobs. Their dismissal is widely seen as fueling the insurgency and a sense of isolation and powerlessness among Sunnis.

Cheney's second trip to Iraq comes as more than half of the nearly 30,000 new American soldiers in a troop increase intended to control the ongoing violence have arrived in and around Baghdad. The daily threats were made clear yesterday when an early evening explosion in the Green Zone shook the windows in the US Embassy while Cheney was visiting. Reporters following Cheney took cover in the basement but Cheney was not moved and "his business was not disrupted," said spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride.

At a news conference after the blast, Cheney said his discussions with US military and Iraqi officials suggest that sectarian violence is declining in Iraq but that the situation remains precarious.

"I think everybody recognizes there still are serious security problems, security threats; no question about it," he said. "But the impression I got from talking with them -- and this includes their military as well as political leadership -- is that they do believe we are making progress, but we've got a long way to go."

The most startling violence in Iraq yesterday came in the northern region known as Kurdistan, considered almost a sanctuary from sectarian violence and a place where officials are aggressively recruiting foreign investment and pushing for economic growth. A suicide truck bomb exploded outside the Ministry of Interior offices in the regional capital of Irbil, killing 14 people and wounding 87 others, many of them government employees, according to Kurdistan's interior minister, Karim Sinjary.

In Diyala Province one US soldier died and four were injured in a gun battle, the US military said.