Bilateral talks: "The fix is in"

Mashraq Abbas, Baghdad bureau chief for AlHayat, having talked to many Iraqi participants and observers of the bilateral negotiations, believes the final outcome will finesse the issue of "withdrawal schedule" by something like the following timetable:

(a) By the end of 2008: Turnover of security in all provinces to the Iraqi security forces, and withdrawal of the American forces to their camps.

(b) By the end of 2009: Completion of the withdrawal from Iraq of around half of the American troops currently in the country.

(c) By the end of 2010, start of talks respecting a permanent treaty, and defined schedules (of withdrawal) but which will guarantee the presence of American forces in a group of bases for an additional three years, renewable (the American negotiators want this guaranteed period to be five years).

For the Bush administration and its neo-conservative backers, the advantage of signing this kind of document before the end of the Bush administration will be a way of snatching "victory" from the jaws of "failure", by setting up a new theme: Establishment of a "new Iraq", friendly to the United States, in the heart of the Middle East, and next door to Iran. In this way they hope to neutralize the Obama withdrawal proposal as a campaign issue. Moreover, by calling it a memorandum of understanding instead of an agreement or a treaty, they plan to circumvent any legislative scrutiny, in either country.

The writer suggests circumventing the Iraqi legislature, along with other key issues, aren't going to be problems for the GreenZone political elite. He writes:

With the formula "memorandum", this will not, according to the Iraqi government have to be presented to the people in a referendum, as demanded by the biggest political sect (referring to the Sadr current). In fact the talk within the Political Council for National Security, which represents the major political leadership, is toward the idea that there isn't any practical or constitutional need to present the memorandum to the parliament for a vote there either.

The use of the formula "memorandum" also weakens the whole debate about Iraqi sovereignty, even if in reality it is no different from an agreement or a treaty... The crisis scenarios over "withdrawal" that raged following the statements of Maliki (starting with his famous statement in Abu Dhabi), and then afterwards settled down again, indicate clearly that the escalations in attitudes have been built on pre-established positions and the retreat by the Iraqi government from a demand for "evacuation" to acceptance of a non-binding "temporal horizon" is also connected to that pre-established position.

The outline appears to have ended up as the signing of a memorandum of agreement on the status of forces that will involve setting up joint committees to administer operations [that's all he says about that], the turnover of security in the provinces to Iraqi security forces before the end of this year, and the conversion of the American forces' role to that of support and training...

The journalist concludes:

Clearly this discussion, which has been referred to by a number of sources, is not so much about an objective schedule for withdrawal, as it is about a future mechanism for negotiations on withdrawal, [the negotiations] to begin in 2010 and end in 2013.

Still, the sure thing in all of this is that the Iraqi political view of a complete American withdrawal differs from the American view, which is held by Republicans and Democrats alike.