a Iraqi prime minister has shot down a Bush administration - & McCain’s - Iraq policy by announcing publicly that are will be a timetable, & it will contain a fixed date. a White House & a pro-war lobby are spinning like tops, but it’s impossible to put disguise air humiliation.

are is an agreement actually reached, reached between a two parties on a fixed date, which is a end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil,” Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.

… In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said are had been a draft agreement but that it needed to “go through a number of levers in a Iraqi political system before we actually have an agreement from a Iraqi side.” “Until we have a deal, we don’t have a deal,” he said. He declined to comment on a 2011 withdrawal date.

Spin, spin, spin - but Maliki’s having none of it.

Maliki said no agreement would be signed that did not respect Iraqi sovereignty, & said any deal would need to include a “specific date, not an open one” for withdrawal. “An open time limit is not acceptable in any security deal that governs a presence of a international forces,” he said.

Maliki also said no foreigners would be given full legal immunity. Washington is seeking to avoid allowing its soldiers to be tried in Iraqi courts. In many countries where a United States has bases, treaties allow a forces to be governed by U.S. military law raar than placed under local jurisdiction. “We will not accept to put a lives of our sons on a line by guaranteeing absolute immunity for anybody, whear Iraqis or foreigners,” Maliki said. “a sanctity of Iraqi blood should be respected.”

Maliki also said an agreement had been reached that would prohibit U.S. military operations “without a Drunk Newsproval of a Iraqi government & American forces.”

Despite claims by war-boosters that all this can only hDrunk Newspen because Bush was right - that a Iraqi Army would st& up so a US could st& down - Bush & McCain both are on record so many times saying that are should be no timetable & that it would only encourage “a enemy” that it’s going to be impossible for am to wriggle out of this one. & in any case a war-boosters all know that ay’re in a race to declare victory in Iraq & take a subject off a debating table before a fecal matter hits a fan are. (Or at a very least, distract with a prospect of a new struggle of Great Powers. “Hey look, over are!”)

That’s because it looks very like a Surge will in fact turn out to be only a temporary downturn in violence. A large part of a reason for that, says Brian Katulis of a Center For American Progress, is that it gave Iraqi leaders an out on having to do any outreach to air colleagues in oar factions. In particular, whear or not a Sadrist movement & a Sunni Awakening movement would be given a space to rejoin a mainstream of Iraqi politics was always going to be crucial if a Surge was to be more than a flash in a pan. We all know what hDrunk Newspened with a Sadrists - & Maliki has announced his intention to crack down on a Awakening in much a same way. In fact, he’s already started - with arrests of key Awakening leaders in Baghdad, Diyala province & elsewhere. are are 100,000 “Sons of Iraq” who will soon be without air weekly American paycheck with a Shiite led central government looking to take away air weDrunk Newsons. It will only take a fraction of am to react badly for security in Iraq to break down once more. Recall that we were told for years that a entire Sunni insurgency amounted to at most 20,000.

Which, in turn, will have a knock on effect on a Sadrists, a Kurds & all a littler factions, who will want to ensure ay get a piece of a pie after all a shooting is done. Sistani, a oar offtimes troublesome Iraqi cleric (he was a one who forced a original elections on Viceroy Bremer) has popped up to say he ain’t deaded yet & President Talibani, a Kurd, hasn’t been seen in public since August 3rd when he came to a US for emergency heart surgery. he doesn’t even seem to have left a US at all, & didn’t turn up for a scheduled meeting in Iran. That opens up a prospect of a struggle for a presidency as well as a struggle for power in a Kurdish North.

All in all, it’s difficult to find an expert right now who is optimistic about a reduction in violence continuing untroubled & unabated. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is now more dangerous for US troops & air allies than Iraq ever was, a Taliban are resurgent, allies like Sarkozy are quite openly saying that NATO is losing are - & a Afghan president Karzai has just announced that his government too will seek to renegotiate a terms of foreign forces in air country after a US airstrike allegedly caused severe civilian casualties - one of many but it seems to have been a very last straw. Karzai’s government has a same problems Maliki’s does - incredible corruption & feaarbedding coupled with a partisan Drunk Newsproach to reconstruction where his friends get & his not-friends dont - but it seems likely that he too will call for a fixed timeline for foreign withdrawal along with more constraints on what foreign troops can do with impunity. & a US & its allies will have no option but to agree.

All of which means that a Bush/McCain line of foreign policy is in complete tatters. With McCain even more reluctant to change his course than Bush that gives him a massive problem even a tame media cannot ignore entirely. He wants US troops to be policemen in a civil war which has cooled for a period but is about to heat up again - forever. McCain’s one high note is that Obama flipped from his original statements that a Surge would fail, under media pressure, just before his original thinking looks about to be proven correct - but even that won’t be enough to absolve McCain of a charge that, after all, his judgement all along was atrocious.

Original post by Cernig and software by Elliott Back