A radical Sunni argument against the treaty

A Sunni member of parliament by the name of Omar al-Jabburi (described as a member of the Arab Bloc for National Dialog*) said he opposes the proposed treaty with the United States because in order to be sound and binding, an agreement would have to be between two parties each with an independent will, and as long as the American occupation continues, that cannot be said of any Iraqi government. The remarks are reported as follows by Aswat al-Iraq:

"Iraq is still a country under occupation, and consequently it is one of those countries that lacks political stability and security, and consequently any pact arrived at in these difficult circumstances will be deemed to be not agreed to. We fear that [any such pact] would have negative effects on the future and on the independence of Iraq." He added, "For us to be sure of the soundness of the security agreement, it would have to be arrived at between two independent wills, and we are convinced that the Iraqi will, under the continuation of the occupation, is not present. And therefore we fear for the good relations [of Iraq] with its Arab and regional environment, as long as such an agreement were to continue".

This is a fairly radical rejection of the treaty proposal, because it says no matter how the approval-process is handled in a technical sense, no Iraqi agreement can be considered authentic as long as the country is occupied by a foreign army. (This echoes in a partial way the earlier Sunni-resistance argument that no political structures set up under the occupation are valid, and the whole political process should start over one the occupiers have left). Naturally, it remains to be seen how widely this line of argument will be taken up by the various Sunni organizations.

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* I am not sure if this is Alyan's group or that of Saleh al-Mutlaq. They were originally one group, their names are very similar and often confused, and I'm not sure there is a lot of policy-difference between them. Mutlaq led the Sunni parties at the negotiations on the 2005 constitution, and he opposed its ratification, arguing that the federalism provisions represented a threat to national unity.