« Auto Industry Recovery Package Back On The Table
Insane Afghanistan Mudslide »

Iraqi Parliament Passes 2011 Withdrawal Deal

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Iraq, Legislation, The World, War

Amid the turkey and stuffing, I neglected to update everybody on this good news…

In a vote heralded by supporters as a momentous step toward restoring Iraqi sovereignty, lawmakers here passed a crucial bill Thursday, setting out a three-year timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi soil.

The bill passed after months of backroom negotiations with the Americans, political arm-twisting by Shiite Muslim Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, and warnings from a small but vocal bloc of hard-line Shiite opponents that the law could be manipulated to keep American soldiers in Iraq indefinitely.

However…

And the whole process could still be derailed in July when, in a concession to Sunni Arab parties, a national referendum is to be held to ratify the accord.

Does anybody believe that the Iraqi people will vote against this? They want the US out as much as the folks in Parliament. In fact, even more so. They’d be foolish not to ratify this thing because it’s the most likely path to fully regaining their sovereignty.

In any event, it looks like we’ll be gone by 2011 and that’s something we can all give thanks for.

Related Posts

Zemanta

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 and is filed under Iraq, Legislation, The World, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Iraqi Parliament Passes 2011 Withdrawal Deal”

  1. arleang Says:
    November 29th, 2008 at 9:47 am

    Iraq’s SOFA will be subject to a referendum of the Iraqi people. But isn’t it interesting that the terms of this agreement have not been widely circulated in our media? Not only will our Senate not have a chance to ratify this treaty (which it truly is), but the will of the electorate is unimportant in the United Statess. We live in interesting times.

Leave a Reply


NOTE TO COMMENTERS:


You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.


Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.


One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.


Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.


Related Posts: