The Iraq Trap

The Bush Administration continues to seek a long-term military agreement with Iraq despite complaints from some Democrats to, as Sen. Hillary Clinton put it, "try to bind the United States government and his successor to his failed policy."
Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wondered "how do you make an (sic) commitment to a country where there is no way of measuring whether that country is likely to have a functioning government?"
In a letter to the White House in December 2007, Biden questioned the language in the Declaration of Principles agreement between the US and Iraq: "[It] contains language suggesting that the agreement you intend to negotiate with Iraq may oblige U.S. Armed Forces to support Iraq in combating 'Saddamists, and all other outlaw groups regardless of affiliation.' I am concerned about the implications of such a commitment, as it could mire us in an Iraqi civil war indefinitely, especially if a sectarian Iraqi government determines who qualifies as a 'Saddamist' or 'other outlaw group.'
At issue is the role played by Congress in agreeing to any agreement with Iraq that binds the US to Iraq for years to come, despite the widespread demand by the American public that the war be brought to a close. Gen. Douglas Lute, President Bush's Assistant for Iraq and Afghanistan, said in November "we don't anticipate now that these negotiations will lead to the status of a formal treaty which would then bring us to formal negotiations or formal inputs from the Congress."
But law Professor Michael Matheson of George Washington University Law School testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, and Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia) that "security commitments in the technical sense have generally been undertaken by treaty, or at a minimum by act of Congress [and] certainly a binding commitment to use armed force in defense of Iraq would call for such action." (He noted that "properly limited security assurances – such as a simple promise to consult – have taken various forms, including sole executive agreements and policy statements, and the President could offer them on the basis of his own Constitutional authority." [emphasis added]).
Lute also said at the November briefing that "we have about a hundred agreements similar to the one envisioned for the U.S. and Iraq already in place, and the vast majority of those are below the level of a treaty," but almost certainly those agreements don't permit the US to conduct combat operations within those nations and thus play a role in the internal politics of those countries.
Yet, as the NY Times reported today, "the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials." (The civilian contractor immunity issue will hardly go down well with the Iraqi public following several widely-reported, fatal clashes between contractors such as Blackwater and civilians.)
The Bush Administration's efforts to phrase the agreement as routine--"the U.S. has concluded similar agreements with more than 120 countries around the world, including many countries in the region," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe--and not an attempt to bind the hands of the next president are belied by the recent comments of both Bush and Iraq's Defense Minister, Abd al-Qadir al-Ubaydi. Bush said, in early January, "long-term success will require active U.S. engagement that outlasts my presidency," while al-Ubaydi said "according to our calculations and our timelines, we think that from the first quarter of 2009 until 2012 we will be able to take full control of the internal affairs of the country ... in regard to the borders, regarding protection from any external threats, our calculation appears that we are not going to be able to answer to any external threats until 2018 to 2020."
Sen. Clinton noted, in a letter to Bush in November 2007, that "security assurances, once made, cannot be easily rolled back without incurring a great cost to America’s strategic credibility and imperiling the stability of our nation’s other alliances around the world."
But isn't that just the point? As Newsweek's Michael Hirsh put it, "the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president." It would, he added, "be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact."