As a senator, Mr. Kerry suggested that the United States should consider linking its support for Iraq with Mr. Maliki’s willingness to order the inspection of the Iranian flights. “If so many people have entreated the government to stop and that doesn’t seem to be having an impact,” Mr. Kerry said in September when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “that sort of alarms me a little bit and seems to send a signal to me maybe we should make some of our assistance or some of our support contingent on some kind of appropriate response.”
As secretary of state, Mr. Kerry has adopted a less confrontational approach.
Concerning Iraq’s fraught political scene, Mr. Kerry pushed Mr. Maliki to reconsider a recent decision to postpone provincial elections in Anbar and Nineveh Provinces, where protests are continuing by Sunnis — which dominate the two provinces but which are a minority in Iraq as a whole. The Iraqi government has justified the delay by citing security concerns.
“Everyone needs to vote simultaneously,” he said on Sunday, adding that “no country knows more about voting under difficult circumstances than Iraq.” The elections had been scheduled for April 20.
Mr. Kerry also met with Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni who is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, and spoke by telephone with Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Regional Government, who is in Erbil.