Getting to the Bottom of the Deceptive, Secretive and Artificial Iraq-U.S. Negotiations

By Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted October 27, 2008.

Despite the recent surge of attention to the U.S.-Iraqi negotiations over an agreement to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years into the future, the resulting agreement or lack of agreement is likely to have little actual impact on the occupation. The negotiations are being conducted by representatives of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- neither of whom actually want the U.S. troops to leave (Maliki's government would not likely survive the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and Bush remains committed to permanent U.S. control of Iraq, its oil, and its strategic location for U.S. military bases).

But both Bush and Maliki face political and electoral pressures to posture as if they do want a timetable for troop withdrawal. As a result, most of the negotiations seem to have focused less on substantive disagreements between the two sides, and more on finding language that disguises the reality of continued occupation and U.S. domination, with politically acceptable language extolling Iraqi sovereignty.

The negotiations are officially aimed at producing a bilateral agreement between the United States and the U.S. occupation-backed Iraqi government that would set the terms for how U.S. and "coalition" troops would continue to occupy and wage war in Iraq. The urgency surrounding the negotiations is based on the looming expiration of the current United Nations mandate for the so-called "multinational force" (diplo-speak for the U.S.-led occupation) on December 31, 2008. The goal is to create an agreement between Washington and Baghdad that would replace that mandate. Even the New York Times agrees that if there is no agreement in place after December 31st, and the Security Council has not extended the mandate, the U.S. troops occupying Iraq would have no legal basis for their presence; legally, they would have to be pulled back to their bases and quickly withdrawn from the country.

In fact, it's quite unlikely that any new bilateral agreement, or any extension of the UN mandate, will have any real impact on the fighting. The U.S. invaded Iraq illegally; it's unlikely that the government would end its occupation because of a technicality like acknowledged illegality. And those forces fighting against the U.S.-led occupation, both the resistance forces targeting the U.S. occupation alone and those extremists also committing terrorist acts against Iraqi civilians, are unlikely to stop fighting because of a new or renewed legal document; they are fighting against a hated foreign occupation, and will likely continue to do so regardless of diplomatic niceties.

It should be noted that so far the actual content of the agreement remains unclear. No version, either in Arabic or English, has been released, though Arabic drafts have been leaked, and informal English translations are all that are available. So, if the devil is in the details, the devil remains hidden.

Congress and Parliament

The agreement hasn't been submitted to Iraq's parliament, as its constitution requires, and has not been submitted to the Senate for ratification, as the U.S. Constitution requires. In fact, on the Iraqi side, even leaders of Maliki's own party have distanced themselves from the agreement, while other political leaders, most notably Shi'a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr (who called a Baghdad protest of tens of thousands last weekend) oppose it altogether. It appears that secular, nationalist, and Sunni forces remain largely skeptical. Iran opposes the agreement. Only the main Kurdish parties, Washington's closest allies, have apparently endorsed its terms. And most Iraqis, other than Maliki's supporters, are looking to better possibilities from a new post-Bush U.S. president.

The Bush administration has similarly refused to engage Congress, claiming that the agreement is "merely" an ordinary Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), similar to agreements the U.S. has with Germany or Japan. But of course there's no war being fought by U.S. troops in those countries. In Congress there is strong opposition to the agreement, but it's primarily focused on the exclusion of Congressional input and approval rather than the substance of the terms.

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Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of "Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy U.S. Power" (Interlink Publishing, October 2005).

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