At this point just about everything to be said has been said about the Tea Party and the candidates it supports in the coming election. So it's time to shift gears and look abroad at our seemingly endless commitment in Iraq.
A puzzling statement was made on August 31by interim Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. That was the date for the final withdrawal of the supposedly last U.S. combat troops from Iraq. The word "supposedly" is used because there has been combat since then, and presumably most U.S. forces are trained for combat roles in one form or another. On that date al-Maliki, in a nationally televised address, made the statement that Iraq is a "sovereign and independent nation". I suppose that under international law that may be true, the Iraqi government has the legal right to exclusive control of its territory and the population within. But there is considerable reason to doubt that such legal sovereignty translates into de facto sovereignty, actual control.
First, the government may have such legal sovereignty but it falls far short on its actual ability to govern and to exercise such control. It will soon be seven months since the parliamentary elections were held and as yet we see little indication that a new government is being formed. On the same day al-Maliki was declaring Iraq's sovereignty, Vice President Joe Biden was in that country trying to nudge the three political power centers to come together in some kind of power sharing agreement. The three centers are a Shiite coalition headed by al-Maliki, a Shiite-Sunni based coalition headed by another one time interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, and the Kurds. While little progress toward forming a new government is evident, perhaps the more important point to be noted is the U.S. intervention to structure a solution. Such high level involvement by this country hardly seems to fit any claim of exclusive authority implied within the term sovereignty.
Second, how sovereign can Iraq be when there are still 50,000 U.S. troops there? The presence and role of these troops open to question one of the implicit conditions of sovereignty--control of the security of the nation. Some of the remaining American forces have already been called upon to help put down anti-government insurgents. The case is made that these troops are there in training and combat support roles and they are scheduled to be withdrawn at the end of next year. The troop withdrawal arrangement is a major part of the status of forces agreement made between the al-Maliki government and former President George W. Bush.
One should not presume that "withdrawal" which we commonly understand to mean complete withdrawal will occur. Don't be surprised if the agreement is explicitly altered or re-interpreted to have a different meaning, one that will allow a substantial number of troops to remain there after 2011. The remaining force would continue to have an assist/support function to back up Iraqi security forces who have not been able to this point to provide an adequate level of security, and it may be a number of years before they can operate on their own.
In short, Iraq's claim of sovereignty appears to fall well short of the independent power and authority we normally associate with the term. Currently it has neither a constituted national government that reflects the results of the last election, nor the means of providing its own security. On the other hand, it may be as sovereign as Afghanistan.
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