By Michael Jansen JORDAN TIMES
It is surprising that President Barack Obama failed to predict that Iraq would refuse the US terms for the extension of the deployment of 3,000-odd US troops to “train” the country’s soldiery.
On October 21, Obama announced that the withdrawal of all US forces would be completed before the end of this year, in line with the 2008 agreement reached with the Bush administration.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki was willing to agree to Washington’s demand for immunity of US soldiers from prosecution for crimes committed in Iraq, but radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and more moderate Iraqi politicians were not. Sadr has not only made his opposition clear over the past many months, he also said his fighters, remnants of the Mehdi Army militia, would attack US troops deployed in the country after December 31, 2011.
While Sadr’s stand amounted to a clear threat against a residual US military presence, on this issue he was in tune with the views of a majority of Iraqis.
Iraq did not agree because Iraqis did not agree, particularly since Washington demanded that the troops staying on should enjoy immunity from being answerable to Iraqi law. US military contractors and civilian employees set to remain in Iraq do not enjoy such immunity.
Most other countries where US forces are based have agreed, why not Iraq?
Former US ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, blogging on Reuters news service, understands. He points out that the Kurds were prepared to let the US troops stay, but not the majority of the 85 per cent of Iraqis who are Arabs. They could not “support a continuation of foreign troops in their country. Call it visceral. Call it cultural. The fact is, no one likes to be invaded and occupied, and for eight years, told what to do and how to behave. To extend the stay of even just a few US troops was to extend what many Iraqis, mindful of their country’s history, considered another occupation”.
The occupation has not been kind to Iraq. The US invaded in 2003, destroyed much of Iraq’s economic infrastructure, overthrew and dismantled the country’s government, and demobilised its armed forces, security agencies and police. Washington’s occupation regime also played off against each other Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, in the expectation that the traditional imperialist divide-and-rule practice would enable the US to stay forever in Iraq.
Categories: Asia, Iraq, Jordan, United States, War