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BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 16 - The top two American officials in Iraq called Friday for the country's main political groups to come together quickly to form a broad-based government once Thursday's election results are known, saying hopes of quelling the Sunni Arab insurgency should not be squandered. Enlarge This Image Joao Silva for The New York Times
Shiites demonstrated in support of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance's election slate after Friday Prayer in the Sadr City section of Baghdad.
"The people, particularly the Sunni folks that I talk to, want a government that is seen as broadly representative of all the different ethnic and sectarian groups of Iraq," Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the American commander in Iraq, told a Pentagon news conference by video link from Baghdad. "That is the one thing I think that will help pull this country together in relatively short order."
A similar statement was issued by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born Muslim who has been an energetic conciliator here. He is expected to help broker the compromises necessary before Iraqis get their first full-term government since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
The public statements by the two most powerful Americans in Iraq - the general who will guide military strategy and the ambassador who will coach and nudge Iraqi politicians - were a rare, and apparently coordinated, display of American influence at a key juncture in the Iraq war. With the election over, the last major milestone in the American-sponsored political process here has been passed, and Iraq's future course will depend increasingly on the four-year government that will emerge from the results.
General Casey and Mr. Khalilzad appeared concerned that the momentum gained through a largely peaceful election with wide participation from all Iraqi groups, crucially including large numbers of Sunni Arabs who had previously boycotted the political process, could be lost amid a new round of political squabbling. After the Jan. 30 elections for a transitional parliament, it took Iraqi politicians three months to form a government, creating a power vacuum that the insurgents exploited with one of the most violent passages of the war.
In effect, the Americans seemed to be saying that Thursday's election has given Iraqi politicians their best chance - and, implicitly, their last chance - of winding down a conflict that has cost at least 30,000 civilian lives, paralyzed large areas of the country and prolonged the presence of 160,000 American troops.
While encouraged by the high election turnout and the stand-aside policy of some insurgent groups that helped cleared the way for the voting, American officials have been warning Iraqi politicians for weeks that failure to form a government that can reach out promptly to wavering insurgent groups could lead to intensified fighting and, in the worst case, to civil war.
The main Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish groups and a centrist, multiethnic political bloc led by the former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, are deeply divided on issues like the role of Islam, the division of oil revenues and the powers of the central government and provinces, as well as the future role of American forces and whether, as Sunni Arab groups have demanded, there should be a fixed timetable for their withdrawal.
Talks on forming the new government are not likely to begin before election results are final. Iraqi officials have said that will be two weeks, and possibly longer, as the election commission rules on allegations of irregularities, including intimidation by partisan groups of policemen prevented some voting in the Shiite south and in Kurdish-dominated areas of the north.
On Friday, American and Iraqi troops began escorting truckloads of sealed, transparent ballot boxes to election commission headquarters in 18 provincial capitals. From there, the ballots, and vote tabulations that began at more than 6,000 polling stations Thursday night, will be brought to Baghdad in an operation that will involve American military transport aircraft and heavily armed convoys.
In the capital, the tabulations will go through a complex system of double entry in separate banks of computers at the election commission's headquarters in the fortified compound known as the Green Zone.
Election officials have said that even the overall turnout, which they estimated Thursday at 10 million to 11 million votes, is not likely to be announced for a few days.
Point/Counterpoint
12-17-2005, 15:54
2 Top Americans in Baghdad Urge Unity 
