Needlenose

The Washington Post reports today:

The Iraqi government announced Monday that it intends to let voters decide in January whether the departure of U.S. troops should be accelerated.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet is submitting a draft law to parliament asking it to authorize and fund a referendum on the bilateral agreement that regulates the presence of U.S. troops, the government announced.

The referendum would be held during January’s national election.

U.S. officials have quietly lobbied the Iraqi government to suspend plans to hold the referendum, because they’re all but certain voters would annul the agreement.

If that were to happen, U.S. troops would have one year to depart, moving up their targeted December 2011 withdrawal date by almost a year.

. . . When the security agreement was negotiated last year, some lawmakers demanded that its implementation on Jan. 1 be followed by a referendum. The referendum was supposed to happen in July, but the government took no action, leading American officials to believe it would never happen.

Note that if the Iraqi government really wanted a referendum and a faster U.S. withdrawal, they could have held the vote last month as promised.

Postponing it until January (or whenever the national elections are eventually held) suggests that the main concern is keeping the American occupation alive as a political issue — and thereby distracting attention from the Iraqi government’s ongoing inability to deliver basic services like electricity.  It seems Maliki & Co. don’t want to go into that election with their own performance as the primary issue.

What’s important about the memo, revealed yesterday, from an army colonel advising American forces in Iraq that recommends an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country?

It wasn’t an expression of official policy, just one colonel’s advice — and we quickly learned the author, Col. Timothy Reese, was something of a loose cannon in terms of his opinions.

Even so, after years of neocon hype of inevitable “victory,” and as recently as three months ago (even after announcing a withdrawal timeline), President Obama still pretending that there was a mission to be accomplished, Col. Reese has formally placed on the table for discussion within the Pentagon an obvious truth regarding the U.S. in Iraq: “The use of the military instrument of national power in its current form has accomplished all that can be expected.“

It’s about time that top U.S. military officials started facing that fact. For five years now, I’ve been writing about the ability of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Shiite-dominated government he shepherded into power to resist American pressure — and been right nearly every time I bet on that ability to prevail.

A year ago, when the conventional wisdom was that Iraqi prime minister Maliki’s demands for a withdrawal timeline (during negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA) were just to placate Iraqi public opinion while coming up with a way for the U.S. to stay, I wrote that Sistani’s plan since 2004 was “to use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.”

Maliki’s successful insistence on a timeline, and the unexpected restrictions that Col. Reese’s memo says are now being placed on U.S. troops in the wake of the SOFA being implemented, represent that plan in action. And contrary to what many progressives would rightly hope, it’s not an expression of sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people. It’s Robert Shaw being hustled out of the building at the end of “The Sting.”

Sure, prime minister Maliki may make noise about extending the U.S. presence — but make no mistake, any new agreement will be on the Iraqi government’s terms, which will have far less to do with building a functional, thriving democracy than with continuing to use American military might to crush Maliki’s political enemies.

The Iraq war was a “victory” not for the United States, nor for the Iraqi people, but rather for a corrupt and authoritarian-leaning regime whose most redeeming characteristic is that it isn’t quite as brutal and dictatorial (yet, anyway) as Saddam Hussein’s — which, sadly, was the obviously probable end result all along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

A month ago in this space, I expressed skepticism about President Obama’s announced plan for withdrawing from Iraq — not so much because he was backing down from the timeline he campaigned on, but rather because the generals assigned to implement the plan might think he was.

This report today from Jane Arraf of the Christian Science Monitor doesn’t make me feel any better:

In an exclusive interview, the top US ground commander in Iraq says that while Iraqi forces have made huge strides, Iraqi officials are likely to ask for US help in the key cities of Baquba and Mosul, meaning that American troops may stay there after the deadline for redeployment to major bases. Senior military commanders say US troops will also likely stay on in the southern city of Basra.

“In Mosul and Diyala [Province], as we do a combined or joint assessment of the situation on the ground, I have every expectation that both sides will say we need to stay with this a little bit longer until this improves,” says Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin, echoing sentiments of Iraqi officials concerned about ongoing fighting in those areas. . . .

“I think the Iraqis know that there are some things that have to occur before we leave,” he says. “They know that there are some capabilities that they have to develop. I think they’ll be up to task when we do leave by 2011.“

Despite the wrangling it took for the Iraqi government to impose a withdrawal deadline on the Bush misadministration, I’m not surprised that they might turn around and ask for extensions. I kept trying to tell people during last year’s negotiations that Prime Minister Maliki’s goal wasn’t necessarily to force the Americans out, but rather to ensure that if they stayed, it would be on the Iraqi government’s terms.

By that, I mean that instead of supporting a (mythical) nascent democracy as it gains momentum, U.S. troops would more likely be subcontractors used by a partisan/sectarian regime to suppress its opponents. As the Maliki government reneges on promises of political reconciliation, that fate becomes more likely. By the time it become obvious to everyone, though, the Obama administration may feel too inextricably bound to its commitments to abandon our supposed Iraqi allies.

Oh, well. At least we’re not getting ourselves mired in deeper in Afghanistan at the same… ooooops!

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Spencer Ackerman, among others, has posted the details on President Obama’s announcement today of his planned timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

This morning’s New York Times, though, had an ominous background description of the plan, attributed to “administration officials”:

The plan would maintain relatively high troop levels through Iraq’s parliamentary elections, to be held in December, before beginning in earnest to meet the August 2010 target for removing combat forces, the officials said.

. . . The withdrawal would start slowly, with 2 of the 14 American combat brigades now in Iraq pulling out before the December elections, officials said. After the transition to a new government, the withdrawal would accelerate early next year.

“The commanders are concerned about maximizing their numbers on the ground for as long as possible, at least until we get to the other side of the elections,” another senior official said.

Marc Lynch (neé Abu Aardvark) explains the problem with this plan:

Iraq’s Parliamentary elections have not yet been scheduled and don’t even have an electoral law, and according to a number of senior Iraqi politicians probably will not be held until March 2010 (not December 2009). That would then give the U.S. about five months to withdraw the bulk of the dozen combat brigades which would reportedly remain. And then, keep in mind that U.S. officials generally agree (correctly) that the most dangerous period of elections is actually in their aftermath, when disgruntled losers might turn to violence or other destabilizing measures. So the following month will likely not seem a good time either. So that would leave four months to move, what — 9 brigades? Did someone say precipitous? Good luck with that.

I’ve never been too worked up over debates about the size of a “residual force” after the U.S. withdraws the bulk of its troops from Iraq — in my view, that’s the last 25-30% of a process that will take on a logic of its own once it has begun. The important thing has been to begin the process.

For that exact reason, I’m worried now. As Lynch notes, this slow-starting withdrawal plan originated among folks (in the military and elsewhere) who were perfectly comfortable with not withdrawing from Iraq at all.

President Obama may think that he’s worked a compromise that has gotten those skeptics/opponents to buy into accepting a withdrawal. But when I see that John McCain is “cautiously optimistic” about Obama’s plan, I fear that they think they’ve lured him into a trap. Which means that someone is in for an unpleasant surprise.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

From Reuters a couple of days ago (via Salam Pax):

Before leaving Washington last week to deliver a major foreign policy speech in Germany, [Vice President Joseph] Biden chided Baghdad for failing to settle disputes over the city of Kirkuk and to enact a law dividing oil revenue, among other issues.

“I think our administration is going to have to be very deeply involved. We are going to have to get in there and be much more aggressive in forcing them to deal with these issues,” Biden said.

Asked about Biden’s remarks on Tuesday, [Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-]Maliki, an increasingly assertive leader whose followers won surprise victories in provincial elections last month, fired back.

“I believe talk about applying pressure on the Iraqi government or taking hard measures against it no longer works,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The New York Times version is even more blunt:

“The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over,” Mr. Maliki said in answer to a reporter’s question about Mr. Biden’s remarks. “The Iraqi government knows what its responsibilities are.” [. . .]

According to political advisers, Mr. Maliki is intent on changing the nature of Baghdad’s relationship with Washington, shifting Iraq’s role from a client state to a more equal partner.

This is a point I kept trying to make last year, when I wrote that Maliki & Co. had every reason to sincerely push for U.S. concessions in the SOFA negotiations – including endorsing Obama’s proposed withdrawal timeline.   Rather than begging for a neocon occupation to prop them up, I wrote last July, the Shiite clerical powers who put Maliki and his allies in office wanted to

… use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.  Maliki’s newfound spine, if anything, just means that they think that time is drawing closer.

And it’s drawing closer still now.  Anyone on the U.S. side who imagines we’re still in a position to impose our will on Iraq, whether it’s Biden, Obama, or Gen. Petraeus and his cronies, is likely to spend the coming months finding out how irrelevant their plans are.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I was surprised at first by this post-SOFA approval development in Iraq, summarized over the weekend by the Washington Post:

Iraq’s preeminent Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has expressed concern about the country’s security agreement with the United States, saying it gives the Americans the upper hand and does not do enough to protect Iraqi sovereignty, an official at his office said Saturday.

Sistani, whose words carry great weight in Iraq, did not reject the pact outright and indicated that he would leave it to voters to decide its fate in a national referendum to be held by July 30. His comments will almost certainly bring pressure on the Shiite-led government and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to fulfill their promise to hold the vote.

It was always my impression that Sistani’s oft-cited reservations about the agreement were the key spine-stiffening element behind prime minister Maliki’s tough negotiating stance with the U.S., but I had thought there was also an element of calculation and coordination involved — specifically, pleading the need to placate Sistani and the rest of the marjaiya was part of Maliki’s bargaining strategy.

Beneath it all, I felt sure the old guy was pragmatic enough to accept the final deal as the best they could hope for under Bush (and especially tolerable since Bush and his neocon backers wouldn’t be around to renege on its terms).  With this new statement, was the grand ayatollah really experiencing what some circles on the left are calling “buyer’s remorse” about the agreement?

Then I came to my senses.  Sistani had been briefed about the negotiations every step of the way — if he genuinely objected to the agreement’s terms, he could have killed it singlehandedly by denouncing it before the legislature voted.  Instead, he chose to let it pass.  Nor did he explicitly demand a referendum, which allowed the Maliki government to offer it as a fig-leaf concession to opposition parties.  Nor was he demanding that the Iraqi public be allowed to weigh in before the rather leisurely midyear schedule approved by the legislature.

Which leads me to think that Sistani’s real goal is to defuse any public opposition by seeming to share their concerns but postponing any action until the middle of the year.  Not coincidentally, the timing of the referendum places it after the deadline for U.S. troops pulling out of Iraqi cities, which will help the Maliki regime in making its case for approval.

Other hints dropped in various news accounts suggest a range of side benefits as well.  By voicing concerns over the implementation of the agreement, Sistani keeps the carrot-and-stick of his approval in place for the incoming Obama administration, positioning Maliki to push for more concessions around the edges of the accord to ensure that the referendum passes.

At the same time, he and the marjaiya get to distance themselves from the government, whose ineptitude and corruption have tarnished their image after they used their influence to bring it to power.  And Sistani is able to extend a rhetorical olive branch to the Sadrists, keeping the option of their return to the mainstream political fold open, even as the practical effect is to suck the oxygen out of their opposition to the SOFA and marginalize them further.

That grand ayatollah is a pretty smart guy.

Update: Via the sidebar of Abu Aardvark, Iraqi vice president Adel Abed al-Mahdi (a top pol in the Shiite hierarchy allied with Maliki) is quoted in an Arabic-language article as saying the “referendum gives us leverage in the negotiations” with the U.S., just as I described above. So I guess they’re not even hiding it.

Like, perhaps, some holiday get-togethers, the Iraqi parliament’s long-awaited vote on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the U.S. turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic.  From Reuters:

Iraq’s parliament on Thursday approved a landmark security pact with the United States that paves the way for U.S. forces to withdraw by the end of 2011, taking the country a big step closer to full sovereignty.

The deal, which parliament linked to a series of promised political reforms and a public referendum next year, brings in sight an end to the U.S. military presence that began with the 2003 invasion.

. . . Lawmakers in Iraq’s 275 seat parliament passed the deal with 149 MPs out of 198 present voting.

. . . “The withdrawal, theoretically, is completed at the end of December 2011, but we are expectant and hopeful that we could achieve that earlier,” government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

In an article before the vote, Reuters noted what a victory this is for the Iraqi government:

. . . the deal gives Iraq formal authority over the U.S. presence for the first time, replacing a U.N. security council mandate. U.S. troops must quit Iraqi towns and villages by the middle of next year, then leave Iraq within three years.

That will greatly strengthen the hand of Maliki and his Shi’ite-led government, which will continue to enjoy the benefits of U.S. military backing whilst scoring nationalist points for being the ones who ushered it out.

Conversely, today’s vote seems to marginalize the Sadrists, who have staked their claim to popularity on opposing the occupation, but were left helplessly (if entertainingly at times) on the sidelines as Maliki negotiated its end.  And the Sunnis in the legislature weren’t left with much, either, as Reidar Visser relates:

The developments in the Iraqi parliament today very much went in the direction Maliki wanted them to go, even if the opposition managed to create at least a degree of friction . . . today’s package of legislation is sadly reminiscent of many of the deals that have been cut with the Maliki government since 2006: it bestows ample privileges on the Iraqi government in return for promises of reform that are both vague and without a clearly defined timeline.

Even the one tangible concession — that of a public referendum on the agreement sometime in mid-2009 — is less than meets the eye.  Spencer Ackerman did the math yesterday and explained that given the six-month lag time and the one-year notice required for cancelling the agreement, a withdrawal forced by the referendum failing would basically match the timeline proposed by Barack Obama (and endorsed by the Iraqi government).   So Maliki & Co. get what they want either way… as usual.

(P.S.  Via ThinkProgress, a PDF of an English translation of the agreement is here.)

In the post just below, I waxed atypically (if faintly) optimistic about politics taking precedence over violence in the Iraqi debate over the U.S. SOFA/troop withdrawal agreement.  I was also impressed by the Maliki government letting a Sadrist anti-SOFA protest take place — yes, such protests had been occurring regularly for the past few months, but I figured that those actually strengthened the government’s hand in negotiations with the Americans (“We’d love to make more concessions, but alas, we have to placate those noisy Sadrists!”).  With the agreement signed, I guessed Maliki would find dissent less useful.

But, as occasionally happens despite my best efforts, I may once again not have been cynical enough in my assessment.  At least, that’s what occurred to me on reading this Washington Post story over the weekend:

Iraq’s defense minister warned Saturday that the government would declare a state of emergency if there was no agreement to keep U.S. forces in the country past the end of the year.

The threat by Abdul Qadir Muhammed Jassim appeared aimed at pressuring parliament to approve a security accord allowing U.S. troops to stay three more years.

Jassim has been a strong supporter of the agreement, which would replace a United Nations mandate that expires Dec. 31. But his language Saturday was unusually stark. . . .

“There are armed groups that believe they are stronger than the security forces,” Jassim said. He noted bluntly that some political parties maintain armed wings and suggested that foreign intelligence services were trying to intervene in Iraq’s affairs.

. . . On Friday, thousands of supporters of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched in central Baghdad against the agreement.

. . . The Sadr group, with 30 seats in the 275-strong parliament, has led opposition to the pact. Sadr has threatened to end a cease-fire he has imposed on his militia if the agreement passes.

Sad to say, threatening (even if it’s just a bluff) to unleash more sectarian violence via the Sadrists if the Sunnis don’t fall in line would be more in keeping with Maliki’s track record than making genuine political concessions.

CNN reports on today’s protest in Iraq against the SOFA agreement proposed by Prime Minister Maliki :

Iraqis outraged by a proposed security pact between Iraq and the United States staged an angry but peaceful protest against the deal Friday.

Thousands of people — most of whom are backers of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — streamed into Baghdad’s Firdous Square waving Iraqi flags, hoisting posters with portraits of the cleric and carrying signs scorning the agreement.

Protesters at one point set fire to U.S. flags and an effigy of President Bush, but the rally was well-organized and peaceful with no evidence of fighting or arrests. People dispersed amicably after the 2½-hour event.

Think about that.  In a country ruled by violence both before and after the U.S. invasion, a political faction held a massive demonstration in the capital against a key policy of the government… and then everyone went home peacefully.  Of course, that situation is by no means guaranteed to last, as the New York Times hints today in its coverage of the legislative debate over the agreement:

When cornered on the stairways and balconies of the Iraqi Parliament building in the Green Zone, many of those who are threatening to vote against ratification openly admit that they approve of its terms.

“To be clear, it is not the treaty that is the problem,” said Aala Maki, a senior member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party that has suggested it might not vote for approval. “What will be built on the treaty, that is the problem.”

Other than the followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who reject any agreement in principle (and who continue to bang their hands on their desks in Parliament when it is being discussed), most lawmakers consider the pact at least satisfactory, if not ideal.

But the Sunnis, and others, are worried that the agreement will leave too much power to Mr. Maliki’s government, given that only two years ago elements of the government-run Iraqi police force were functionally little more than Shiite death squads.

The major Sunni parties, after several days of mixed messages, have largely come together and demanded a series of guarantees from the government and the Americans in return for their support. . . .

. . . Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker, said members of the Kurdish coalition were privately mulling whether to draw up their own list of demands.

“Everybody is afraid of Maliki,” Mr. Othman said. “Nobody is afraid of the agreement.”

Truth be told, this is the Sadrists’ real objection, too — since part of Maliki’s strongman ambitions is using the remaining U.S. presence to wear down their ability to oppose him (just as he’s done for the past year), even an orderly, gradual withdrawal is unsatisfactory to the Sadrists.  Thus they are forced to insist that a SOFA with a hard withdrawal deadline is in fact a puppet’s capitulation, that Obama is every bit the imperialist Bush/Cheney were, and so on.

For the moment, though, the debate is taking place in the political realm rather than on the streets, and that has to count as progress.  If Maliki has the sense and capacity to cut political deals with the Sunnis and Kurds to ensure broad support for the pact rather than steamroll it through by a narrow majority, that would be even more encouraging (though still transient).  We’ll know more on Monday, when the agreement is due to be voted on.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Update: Did I say Monday? Make that Wednesday or Thursday:

The speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, said Saturday that he would call for a ratification vote as soon as the different blocs came to some kind of agreement, which he urged them to do by Wednesday or Thursday.

A press officer for Mr. Mashhadani said the speaker’s emphasis on arriving at an accord before the vote was directly related to recent statements by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric, who has insisted that any agreement achieve national consensus.

Supporters of the pact, largely consisting of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite bloc, and their Kurdish allies, appear to have enough votes for a majority, but they have grown frustrated in their attempts to persuade others to support the agreement. They said they believed that the ayatollah’s approval of the pact, which is considered critical, is contingent on more than token Sunni support.

. . . Late on Friday, Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, and Mr. Mashhadani invited members of Sunni parliamentary blocs to Mr. Talabani’s Baghdad home for discussions.

Some Sunni parliamentarians have asked that an appendix be added to the pact outlining their proposed guarantees. Since such an appendix is unlikely to be approved by the Americans, the Kurds countered with the idea of a treaty among Iraqi political blocs to ensure that the Sunnis’ demands are met after the pact is signed, said Abdul Khaliq Zangana, a Kurdish legislator who was at the meeting on Friday.

Will the Sunnis let themselves be fooled again persuaded to accept vague promises that Team Shiite has no intentions of keeping, or will they be able to pry some genuine concessions out of Maliki?  Stay tuned.

(Iraqis at a Baghdad cafe during a televised address by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on the proposed security agreement with the U.S., vIa the Associated Press and the New York Times.)

(NOTE:  I’ll have an actual post on this subject coming up one of these days…)