Category: Iraq-2008-q4

Did you think that after the chief US commander and the US Ambassador in Baghdad both signed a final “Withdrawal Agreement” with the Iraqi government on November 17, the 140,000-plus US forces remaining in Iraq would shift their mission to prepare for their successive withdrawals (a) out of all Iraq’s cities and large towns, and (b) out of the whole country, as mandated by the agreement? Did you think they might start to work very hard at building a much better, more cooperative relationship with all segments of Iraqi society, as a way of ensuring their regrouping and subsequent complete withdrawal could be carried out with minimum casualties?
Did you think they might start to behave better?
Think again.
CNN today carries a grotesque story about a US “Special Forces” raid on a family farmstead outside Baghdad on December 10, in the course of which the Americans killed a member of the farming family, apparently in cold blood, and then either before or after the killing chopped off his right index finger and apparently took it away with them.
(HT: Raed Jarrar.)
CNN’s Michael Ware is careful to report both “sides” of the story. Including the detailed claims made by surviving family members about how the man, Hardan al-Jubouri, was first of all forced by the heavily armed Americans to lie down in an outside courtyard in only his underwear, like all other male family members, and was then directed by the Americans to return inside the house and turn on all the lights, after which they killed him inside there. And the claims from the US military that he had somehow escaped from their control in the courtyard, returned voluntarily into the house and emerged with an assault rifle.
The family has some grainy video footage of the aftermath of the raid, including of a lot of blood on the walls, bullet holes, and Hardan’s mutilated hand.
Ware reported that the US military is conducting an investigation.
Raed is asking his readers to contact the US military and ask whether cutting off people’s fingers is official policy… also about whether executing people described simply as “Al-Qaeda suspects” is also official policy. (He gives an email address at the Iraq.centcom.mil domain name. I think it might be better to go higher up the chain of command?)
These are good and important questions.
There are also some larger questions that urgently need asking about the US’s military policy in Iraq. Primarily this: Does our government intend to fulfill its completely unequivocal obligations to undertake a complete withdrawal from the cities by the end of next June and a complete withdrawal from the whole country by the end of 2011– or is it planning to look for a way to evade those obligations?

I just saw Phyllis Bennis on the Real News Network talking about the Obama foreign policy team. She did a terrific job. Except at one point, a couple of minutes in, she made quite a point of saying that the Bush administration “hasn’t shown us the American text of the SOFA”, that they “haven’t made it public”, etc… And therefore that she still didn’t really believe it said that all the US troops would be out by the end of 2011.
But Phyllis! The text of the SOFA (more accurately, a “Withdrawal Agreement,” as it is titled) was posted on the White House website last Thursday.
But actually, the fact that even a savvy, go-getting analyst like Phyllis Bennis hadn’t seen it by the time she recorded the RNN segment– maybe yesterday afternoon?– means that the White House’s strategy of “publishing the text by stealth” seems to have worked!
Last Thursday was, you see, Thanksgiving Day here in America. A great day for the President’s media people to “bury” news that they’re not too happy or proud about…
(I blogged about it on Friday. I guess Phyllis Bennis wasn’t reading JWN either…)
But it’s true that the release of the official English-language text of the SOFA/WA has gathered just about zero discernible coverage in the US MSM. That, despite the fact that this really is, the crowing “accomplishment” of a war that has cost more than 4,200 American lives, drained our country’s treasury, and considerably damaged our standing all around the world.
You’d think the MSM would have had some interest in the final text of the agreement?? But no…
So the burying strategy apparently worked.
The writer of this fascinating AFP article from last Wednesday (Nov. 26) tells us, however, that the timing of the release was not determined only by a desire to ‘bury’ it away from the US news media as much as it was by a desire to ‘bury’ it away from Iraq’s parliamentarians before they held their crucial vote on the agreement later that same day.
The AFP piece said this:

three officials in Washington said the administration of US President George W. Bush has withheld the official English translation of the agreement to suppress a public dispute with the Iraqis until after the parliamentary vote.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the official English language text of the agreement was designated as “sensitive but unclassified.”
“There are a number of areas in here where they have agreement on the same wording but different understandings about what the words mean,” said one US official.
The White House National Security Council said it had held up the translation’s release until the Iraqi parliament votes.
“We plan to release it soon,” said spokesman Gordon Johndroe. “We are waiting for the Iraqi political process to move further down the road.”
In the event the SOFA is approved, the US could simply circumvent parts of the agreement, said officials.
For example, for the provision that bars the US from launching military operations into neighboring countries from Iraqi territory, the administration could cite another provision that allows parties to retain the right of self-defense — such as pursuing groups that launch strikes on US targets from Syria or Iran.
The provision that appears to require the US to notify Iraqi officials in advance of any planned military operations and seek Iraqi approval for them could also be altered, said the officials.
Some US military figures find the provision especially troubling, although US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, head of the US Central Command David Petraeus and the top US commander in Iraq Raymond Odierno have all endorsed it…

So they’re saying that the “self-defense” provision could be used to over-ride the “not using Iraqi terrain for attacks against others” provision, and that the notification provision could simply “be altered”, unilaterally by the US side at some point?
I doubt if the Iraqis or anyone else in the International community would see matters that way.
Anyway, go back to my post from last Friday to see the points I made there about the “exact” meaning of the all-important Article 24 regarding the “total” nature of the December 2011 withdrawal and the fact that both the Arabic and English texts have been described by the parties as “equally binding.”

Raed discusses the SOFA/WA with Iranian-owned Press TV, here.

Yesterday, the Iraqi parliament gave preliminary ratification for the Status of Forces– or, more correctly, Withdrawal– Agreement with the US that had been negotiated by PM Maliki (and foreign minister Zebari) over the course of the past seven or so months.
The ratification was only preliminary because it was made conditional on a countrywide popular referendum to provide final approval for the Withdrawal Agreement on July 30, 2009. That is one month after the deadline specified in the text of the agreement for the withdrawal of all US (and other foreign forces) from Iraq’s towns and cities into bases/cantonments outside the urban areas. That provision provides an important mechanism by which the Iraqi political system can ‘benchmark’ the performance of the US side of its obligations under the agreement.
Oh, how the balance has shifted since the days, not so long ago, when numerous actors in the US political system asserted they had the possibility (and some kind of ‘right’) to ‘benchmark’ the behavior of the Iraqi government.
The fact that the Iraqi parliament approved the SOFA/WA, reportedly through winning the votes of 148 of the 198 lawmakers attending the session, is known. So too– finally!– is the exact content of the English-language version of the final text of the treaty, which was published by the White House here (PDF) yesterday, while most Americans were busy gorging themselves on turkey and not thinking about Iraq at all.
Much else about the agreement remains murky. This includes the question of whether all the Iraqi legislators who took part in the vote were all agreed regarding what it was they were voting on… and also, the precise attitude towards it of the ruling bodies in neighboring Iran.
On this latter point, the FT’s Najmeh Bozorgmehr has the best reporting I’ve seen to date.
She writes from Tehran,

The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad has been unusually silent about the Iraqi government’s approval of the security pact with the US. But that may be because it has been loathe to publicise its dramatic change of attitude towards the agreement.
People close to the government in Tehran said that after initially opposing it – and asking its Shia allies in the Baghdad government to resist it – Tehran has been relatively satisfied with the last-minute changes demanded, and won, by Iraq.
Analysts see an additional reason for the about-turn: the election of Barack Obama as US president.

Bozorgmehr quotes Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran’s former ambassador to Paris, as saying that “Iran has adopted active silence [regarding the SOFA/WA] which means it is generally okay with the moderated version even though it does not agree with all of it.”
See also this analysis by NIAC’s Babak Rahimi, which was quoted by Bozorgmehr.
Back on November 17, I noted, as Rahimi did in his piece several days later, that Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi had expressed his approval of the Iraqi cabinet’s November 16 adoption of the SOFA/WA.
I commented in that post:

There has been some speculation that Iran’s clerical authorities have adopted this apparently cooperative posture as a gesture of goodwill to the US’s president-elect Barack Obama. Perhaps. But I suspect the stronger force driving this position has been an assessment by the Supreme Leader that having US forces tied down as sitting ducks in very-close-by Iraq through the end of 2011 is seen as a handy guarantor– at least for the next three years– that no-one in Washington will decide to attack Iran in this period.

I still think that analysis holds up.
I’ll note in passing that the coverage that Juan Cole had today of the question of Iran’s attitude toward the SOFA/WA seemed uncharacteristically ill-informed and muddled.
However, Juan– and the Iranian radio report that he characterizes, unjustifiably, as “celebratory in style”– are not the only parties who have seemed generally unclear as to what is actually in the SOFA/WA text.
The NYT’s Suadad al-Salhy blogged here on Monday that,

It seems like 70% of the Iraqi MP’s have no idea what is in the agreement. This is clear from the complaints and criticisms that I hear when I am listening to their questions in the press room of the parliament building, and on the television coverage when I get home.

She also gives some good examples of that…
Let’s hope the Iraqi parliamentarians became somewhat better informed before they voted yesterday?
So now, what can we say about the content of the SOFA/WA text?
As far as I know, the version web-published (PDF) by the White House yesterday was the first version released publicly of the official English text. And the White House also, for good measure, web-published (PDF) an official English-language version of the accompanying ‘Strategic Framework Agreement’, while they were about it.
I note that both these documents appear to be PDF’s of the official international agreements that were signed on November 17. Both carry the signatures of the signatories from each side. Both also state this:

Signed in duplicate in Baghdad on this 17th day of November, 2008 in the English and Arabic languages, each text being equally authentic.

This is interesting– particularly as regards Article 24, the crucial article regarding US withdrawal.
My understanding is that the Al-Sabah version of the Arabic text that Raed Jarrar directed us to on November 17 was the “definitive” Arabic version of the text.
It states, at Article 24, the following:

المادة الرابعة والعشرين
انسحاب القوات الأميركية من العراق
اعترافا بأداء القوات الامنية العراقية وزيادة قدراتها، وتوليها لكامل المسؤوليات الامنية، وبناء على العلاقة القوية بين الطرفين، فانه تم الاتفاق على ما يلي:
1. يجب ان تنسحب جميع قوات الولايات المتحدة من جميع الاراضي العراقية في موعد لا يتعدى 31 ديسمبر/كانون الاول عام 2011 ميلادي.
2. يجب ان تنسحب جميع قوات الولايات المتحدة المقاتلة من المدن والقرى والقصبات العراقية في موعد لا يتعدى تاريخ تولي قوات الامن العراقية كامل المسؤولية عن الامن في اي محافظة عراقية، على ان يكتمل انسحاب قوات الولايات المتحدة من الاماكن المذكورة اعلاه في موعد لا يتعدى 30 يونيو/حزيران عام 2009 ميلادي

Raed had translated that as:

Article Twenty Four
Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq
Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:
1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.
2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009…

This, where the White House text says only, in both those paragraphs, that all the US troops “shall” withdraw. However, in the Arabic, the word “yujib” that introduces each of these paragraphs clearly carries the meaning “must.”
Interesting.
I note, too, that in the White House version, the title of the agreement (which they are eager not to call a treaty) is given as an agreement between the two countries “On the Withdrawal of the United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during their Temporary presence in Iraq.”
… More about the content of the now-released version of the Strategic Framework Agreement later. But at my first reading, I’d say that it doesn’t look nearly as weaselly, sinister, or threatening to Iraqi sovereignty as some people had previously feared.