The New York Times
Friday 25 January 2008
Washington - With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.
This emerging American negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, according to these officials.
At the same time, the administration faces opposition from Democrats at home, who warn that the agreements that the White House seeks would bind the next president by locking in Mr. Bush's policies and a long-term military presence.
The American negotiating position for a formal military-to-military relationship, one that would replace the current United Nations mandate, is laid out in a draft proposal that was described by a range of White House, Pentagon, State Department and military officials on ground rules of anonymity. It also includes less controversial demands that American troops be immune from Iraqi prosecution, and that they maintain the power to detain Iraqi prisoners.
However, the American quest for protections for civilian contractors is expected to be particularly vexing, because in no other country are contractors working with the American military granted protection from local laws. Some American officials want contractors to have full immunity from Iraqi law, while others envision less sweeping protections.These officials said the negotiations with the Iraqis, expected to begin next month, would also determine whether the American authority to conduct combat operations in the future would be unilateral, as it is now, or whether it would require consultation with the Iraqis or even Iraqi approval.
"These are going to be tough negotiations," said one senior Bush administration official preparing for negotiations with the Iraqis. "They're not supplicants."
Democrats in Congress, as well as the party's two leading presidential contenders, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have accused the White House of sponsoring negotiations that will set into law a long-term security relationship with Iraq.
But administration officials said that the American proposal specifically did not set future troop levels in Iraq or ask for permanent American bases there. Nor, they said, did it offer a security guarantee defining Washington's specific responsibilities should Iraq come under attack.
Including such long-term commitments in the agreement would turn the accord into a bilateral treaty, one that would require Senate approval. The Bush administration faces the political reality that it cannot count on the two-thirds vote that would be required to approve a treaty with Iraq setting out such a military commitment.
Administration officials are describing their draft proposal in terms of a traditional status-of-forces agreement, an accord that has historically been negotiated by the executive branch and signed by the executive branch without a Senate vote.
"I think it's pretty clear that such an agreement would not talk about force levels," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday. "We have no interest in permanent bases. I think the way to think about the framework agreement is an approach to normalizing the relationship between the United States and Iraq."
While the United States currently has military agreements with more than 80 countries around the world, including Japan, Germany, South Korea and a number of Iraq's neighbors, none of those countries are at war. And none has a population outraged over civilian deaths at the hands of armed American security contractors who are not answerable to Iraqi law.
Democratic critics have complained that the initial announcement about the administration's intention to negotiate an agreement, made Nov. 26, included an American pledge to support Iraq "in defending its democratic system against internal and external threats."
Representative Bill Delahunt, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that what the administration was negotiating amounted to a treaty and should be subjected to Congressional oversight and ultimately ratification.
"Where have we ever had an agreement to defend a foreign country from external attack and internal attack that was not a treaty?" he said Wednesday at a hearing of a foreign affairs subcommittee held to review the matter. "This could very well implicate our military forces in a full-blown civil war in Iraq. If a commitment of this magnitude does not rise to the level of a treaty, then it is difficult to imagine what could."
Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, who raised concerns in a letter to the White House in December, said the negotiations were an unprecedented step toward making an agreement on status of forces without the overarching security guarantees like those provided in the NATO treaty. He added that the Democratic majority would seek to block any agreements with the Iraqis, unless the administration was clear about its ultimate intentions in Iraq.
"There's no exit strategy, because the administration doesn't have one," Senator Webb said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "By entering this agreement, they avoid a debate and they validate their unspoken strategy."
Over recent days, administration officials acknowledged that the language of the Nov. 26 announcement went too far. The officials said that they were limiting the scope of the pending negotiations to issues that could be resolved this year, before the Security Council resolution expired.
To that end, administration officials said the draft text was narrowly written to codify what the administration regarded as four essential requirements for the American armed forces to continue the mission in Iraq.
In seeking immunity for contractors, the administration is requesting protections for the 154,000 civilian contractors working for the Defense Department in Iraq; most carry out such duties as driving trucks, preparing meals and the like. The administration says it depends heavily on those contractors, including about 13,000 private security contractors working for the Pentagon.
Under an earlier agreement between the United States and Iraq, those contractors have been exempt from Iraqi law. Justice Department officials have said it is not clear whether any crimes committed by contractors in Iraq, including the role played by Blackwater employees in a September shooting in Baghdad, would be subject to American law, but the administration has taken steps intended to close any loopholes.
In seeking authority to conduct combat operations, the Bush administration is seeking something similar to the current United Nations Security Council resolution, which allows the United States and other coalition forces to operate in Iraq "in support of mutual goals," one Bush administration official said.
The official said the agreement sought by the United States could allow Iraq to "rescind that authority at a later date as the security environment improves and they take over the mission."
In contrast to the contractors, the immunity being sought for American military personnel is a standard part of most recent agreements for basing American forces on foreign soil. Such agreements grant exclusive jurisdiction over American forces to American law, specifically the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In terms of prisoners, the administration and military would like the Iraqis eventually to take control of all battlefield detainees. But they say that the United States still needs the authority to hold those prisoners, because Baghdad does not yet have the capacity - in personnel, facilities or legal structures - to manage the current detainee population of about 26,000.
Senior administration officials say concerns that the agreement will limit the decisions of the next president are not justified.
"More than 90 percent of this will be a pretty standard status-of-forces agreement," said one senior official involved in drafting the American proposal. "It is not something that will tie the hands of the next president."
The military-to-military aspect of the relationship is to be negotiated by July 31, well ahead of the Dec. 31 expiration date for the United Nations Security Council Resolution that has been the core legal authority for the American-led military mission in Iraq. Diplomats will also negotiate political and economic relations between the two countries.
The draft American text on military-to-military relations, now under discussion at the White House, Pentagon and State Department, is short, running fewer than 15 pages.
"It's not 'War and Peace,' and it doesn't have a lot of hard-to-read legal jargon," said one military officer.
American officials are keenly aware that any agreement must be approved by Iraq's fractured Council of Representatives, where Sunni and Shiite factions feud and even Shiite blocs loyal to competing leaders cannot agree.
A senior Iraqi Defense Ministry official said his government had been studying every American status-of-forces agreement, or SOFA, to understand what is the norm, and what is not.
"We know the Iraqis will compare it to others in the region and throughout the world," a military officer involved in the discussions said. "We do not want them to believe they are held to different SOFA standards."
US Troops Will be Gone Within Ten Years, Says Iraqi Minister
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent UK
Friday 25 January 2008
Baghdad, Iraq - US military forces will not stay in Iraq for anything like as long as some American politicians are demanding, says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari. He said crucial issues about "Who is in charge in Iraq - we or you?" would be settled in negotiations between Iraq and the United States, starting this month.
The Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, caused anger among Iraqis this month by saying during the New Hampshire primary that US military forces might stay in Iraq "for 100 years". Mr Zebari, asked by The Independent in Baghdad if the American army would be in Iraq in 10 years, said: "Really, I wouldn't say so."
Mr Zebari is much more confident than he was a year ago that "al-Qa'ida has been crushed, its network has been shattered" though it has not been completely eliminated. He says he thinks it dangerous if the Shia-Kurdish government, of which he is one of the most powerful members, does not pay and absorb into its own security forces the 70,000-strong Sunni Awakening movement which is fighting al-Qa'ida.
"That is the danger," said Mr Zebari. "The Awakening movement is not that well organised and it could be easily manipulated by al-Qa'ida." He added that it was an illusion that the Sunni political parties and their leaders "represent the Sunni community".
Mr Zebari originally made his name as the energetic spokesman and foreign representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party during its long years of resistance to Saddam Hussein. He has been the most successful of Iraqi ministers since he was appointed in 2004, cultivating good relations with the US and Iran. Three years ago, insurgents tried to assassinate him using a vehicle packed with a tonne of explosives, including a naval torpedo, which was detected near his home before it was detonated.
For all Mr Zebari's optimism, Iraq remains an extraordinary violent country. Yesterday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan, the chief of police of Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city. He had been inspecting the ruins of a building in which 20 civilians had been killed and 150 wounded in an explosion the previous day.
The Iraqi leaders are eager to sign by July a bilateral treaty with the US which would in effect determine who rules Iraq. It would settle issues such as Iraqi sovereignty, command and control of Iraqi security forces, and the immunity of foreign troops and private security companies. The Iraqi intelligence service, at present controlled and financed by the CIA, will be brought under Iraqi government control.
Above all, said Mr Zebari, "the duration of the American presence here will be negotiated ... so their presence will not be open-ended". Although sovereignty was theoretically returned to Iraq in June 2004, the US remains very much in charge of security.
Mr Zebari says that he has no doubt that the new agreement would be denounced as a sell-out in Iraq, but it was necessary for Americans and Iraqis to end uncertainty about their future relations.
The Foreign Minister sees US support for the Iraqi government as being essential to prevent foreign invasion. "If we did not have the Americans here we would have seen many interventions by our neighbours, the latest of which was the massing of the Turkish troops [on Iraq's northern border]."
Syria has also made it more difficult for al-Qa'ida members to cross into Iraq and Iran has restrained the Shia militias and cut back on sending sophisticated Iranian-made roadside bombs into Iraq. "We convinced many countries that you are playing with fire, you have a snake by the tail" in supporting the insurgency in Iraq, says Mr Zebari.
Paradoxically, Iran is a strong supporter of the present government in Baghdad, which is dominated by religious parties from the majority Shia community. But Iran is a rival of the US for influence over the Iraqi government and does not want to see a threatening American army permanently encamped in Iraq and on its borders. Mr Zebari has tried to foster dialogue between Tehran and Washington, though with mixed success. But he is convinced that Iran has played a crucial role in restraining the Mehdi Army, the powerful Shia militia at present observing a ceasefire. Baghdad has invited the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to visit Iraq.
Mr Zebari would not confirm reports that Iran has recently taken a tougher line, postponing talks with US representatives several times in recent weeks because Tehran is increasingly confident that the US is going to attack it. This follows a US National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran is not developing a nuclear bomb.
The Iranians may also be worried that the Awakening movement is a US-run Sunni militia that will never give its loyalty to a Shia government.
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