Hokey Pokey In Iraq

We put some more troops in, we get all the troops out...

Mixed messages from Iraq over the past 24-48 hours. On the one hand, the Prime Minister has agreed to hold a referendum on the American troop presence in Iraq, which would remove the US forces a year earlier than currently scheduled.

If Iraqi lawmakers sign off on Maliki's initiative to hold a referendum in January on the withdrawal timeline, a majority of voters could annul a standing U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, forcing the military to pull out completely by January 2011 under the terms of a previous law.

It is unclear whether parliament, which is in recess until next month, would approve the referendum. Lawmakers have yet to pass a measure laying the basic ground rules for the Jan. 16 national election, their top legislative priority for the remainder of 2009.

At the same time, the US military wants to break one facet of the status of forces agreement by putting troops back into major cities in the north.

In an effort to defuse mounting Arab-Kurdish tensions, the U.S. military is proposing to deploy troops for the first time in a strip of disputed territory in northern Iraq, the top American general in Iraq said Monday.

....Though the plan is still not finalized, Odierno said that he had discussed it recently with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and with Massoud Barzani, the president of the regional government, and that both had been receptive to the idea.

The New York Times calls this a done deal. So on the one hand, Maliki wants US troops in the north so Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot exploit tensions between Arabs and Kurds, but on the other hand, he favors a referendum that could accelerate the full US withdrawal.

Juan Cole has some thoughts about this. But it sounds to me like the classic tension between policy and politics. It's good politically for Maliki to call for an referendum on withdrawal - the US presence is broadly unpopular. Having open warfare break out in the North, however, wouldn't meet Maliki's goals either, so as long as the US military remains, there's a lot to be gained out of placing them there. It may look incongruous on the outside, but Maliki is speaking different language to different groups.

Meanwhile, a major bombing in Baghdad shows that violence is still a fact of life in the war-torn country. I don't believe that the US military can change that reality after six years in country, so if the referendum passed and the troops had to leave by January 2011 instead of December, I would not necessarily be upset.

Prop. Thamaaniyah

The Iraqi Parliament did pass the withdrawal agreement mandating the end of a US military presence in Iraq by the end of 2011, but Juan Cole notes that the Sunnis extracted a price for their support.

Of 275 members of parliament, 198 attended and 145 voted in favor. That means it barely passed from the point of view of an absolute majority, though it was a clear simple majority. Apparently the al-Maliki government bowed to Sunni Arab demands that the agreement be submitted to a national referendum, California-style. If that is true, it is possible that it could still be rejected by the Iraqi people. But al-Maliki got it through parliament by painting opponents as implicitly opposing a US withdrawal, and that campaign tactic may work with the general public, too.

I think such a tactic is more likely to work with skittish politicians than an Iraqi public which wants the occupying forces out, and knows that if they vote down the agreement the forces would have to leave immediately. The Sunnis demanded other concessions from the Shiite government in exchange for their votes, including the release of political prisoners and an end to Shiite suppression of the minority, and when those promises get predictably reneged, that would threaten the referendum's passage as well.

It is, however, interesting that the Shiites, Sunnis, politicians throughout the Parliament, and every individual Iraqi will have a chance to weigh in on this security agreement with the United States, yet basically one "decider" in this country is allowed to do so.

We are, however, a shining city on a hill, so that balances things out.