By Steve Hynd
You have to wonder how much of this is politics and how much reality.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ruled out signing a new security pact with the United States to extend the presence of U.S. troops in the country, his office said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The Prime Minister rule out possibility for any new security agreement to prolong the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, because the (current) document of the strategic agreement (SOFA) is clear in this respect," the statement quoted Maliki as saying in an interview with the local television channel of Biladi to be broadcasted later.
However, Maliki noted that not signing another security agreement doesn't mean that Iraq will not cooperate and coordinate with the United States in the fields of training and arming Iraqi troops, the statement said.
As my good friend Eric Martin wonders, the real question is "how Sadr plays this - speaking of politics and reality". Maliki is under a lot of pressure from the US, with Gates visiting to urge a SOFA extension and Biden following up that visit with a phone call urging the same thing. But Mookie is putting his own pressure on the Iraqi PM.
According to Muqtada, "The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army in a new statement which will be published later ... Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins." So if the US stays, Muqtada will turn Baghdad into a giant Tahrir Square - with the added bonus of commandos turning the Green Zone red and condemning contractors to road-kill status. The great 2011 Arab revolt keeps reinventing itself in myriad ways.
I suspect the American solution will be to rebrand any US troops as "military advisers" - after all, that's the current get-out-of-jail phrase when you want to deny there are any "boots on the ground" - and greater reliance on mercenaries. But I doubt Sadr will aquiesce in such a stroke-of-the-pen solution.
This could all be seen in perspective, as explaining the "urgency" of the impending invasion of Libya. Losing in Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, the faltering (international capital driven) empire desperately needs another lily pad. Unfortunately, the odds in Libya are even worse than those underpinning the Iraq invasion, where the Shiite sympathizers (SCRI) far outnumbered the Sunni. Not to mention the potential of a Libyan Mookie somewhere ready to play the spoiler.
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