Iraqi cabinet approves US troop deal

NY Times:

Iraq’s cabinet on Sunday overwhelmingly approved a proposed security agreement that calls for a full withdrawal of American forces from the country by the end of 2011. The cabinet’s decision brings a final date for the departure of American troops a significant step closer after more than five and a half years of war.

The proposed pact must still be approved by Iraq’s Parliament, in a vote scheduled to take place in a week. But leaders of some of the largest parliamentary blocs expressed confidence that with the backing of most Shiites and Kurds they had enough support to ensure its approval.

Twenty-seven of the 28 cabinet ministers who were present at the two-and-a-half-hour session voted in favor of the pact. The near-unanimity was a victory for the dominant Shiite party and its Kurdish partners. Widespread Sunni opposition could doom the proposed pact even if it has the votes to pass, as it would call into question whether there was a true national consensus, which Shiite leaders consider essential.

The proposed agreement, which took nearly a year to negotiate with the United States, not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal, but puts new restrictions on American combat operations in Iraq starting Jan. 1 and requires an American military pullback from urban areas by June 30. Those hard dates reflect a significant concession by the departing Bush administration, which had been publicly averse to timetables.

Iraq also obtained a significant degree of jurisdiction in some cases over serious crimes committed by Americans who are off duty and not on bases.

In Washington, the White House welcomed the vote as “an important and positive step” and attributed the agreement itself to security improvements in the past year.

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“This vote shows that the Iraqis have figured out how to stand up for themselves, to Iran and to the U.S.,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on Iraq at the Brookings Institution. “They will have stared in the face at the various options and concluded that none are ideal but the best for their security is an amount of ongoing but finite American cooperation, while also indicating their strong desire to run their own country on their own as soon as possible.”

American officials said the accord was the result of tough bargaining by the Iraqis. Speaking about the negotiations a few days ahead of the cabinet vote, Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, said of the 100 requests for changes sought by the Iraqi side in recent weeks: “Some were substantive, some were linguistic, some were stylistic. We looked at it all; we were as forthcoming as we could possibly be in responding.” Some Iraqi Shiite politicians said a significant factor in the cabinet decision was the approval of the pact by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, who from the outset had laid down three conditions: full Iraqi sovereignty, transparency and majority support for the pact.

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I think this is another sign that we have won the Iraq war. The troops will hang around for a few years in case something is stirred up by al Qaeda or Iran, but the war is largely over. We will still be needed to help the Iraqis build their logistic infrastructure. That is the Iraqi army's most obvious weakness at this point.

Democrats may claim this as some sort of acceptance of their policy, but they are just blowing smoke. They wanted to retreat and leave Iraq a failed state. At this point it is not.