This is a bold step by the Iraqi prime minister Maliki:
"There can be no treaty or agreement except on the basis of Iraq’s full sovereignty," al-Maliki told a gathering of Shiite tribal sheiks. He said an accord must be based on the principle that "no foreign soldier remains in Iraq after a specific deadline, not an open time frame."
Al-Maliki said the U.S. and Iraq had already agreed on a full withdrawal of all foreign troops by the end of 2011 — an interpretation that the White House challenged.
Juan Cole suspects Iranian pressure behind Maliki’s stand. That may well be the case.
But the real fight behind this could also be about federalization or partitioning of Iraq and growing U.S. pressure into that direction.
There is some ominous movement behind the scenes. Via Roads to Iraq:
Kurdish sources told Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan that Maliki refused to include Kurdistan among the U.S. military bases presence in the SOFA agreement, noted that Maliki used Iran and Turkey’s refusal to prevent the American from establishing and American base in Kurdistan.
Also this:
The Kurdistan Regional Government has allocated 1,500 acres of land near Iran’s border for the construction of a large US-financed airport.
The airport is to be built in a town called Halabja situated about 11 kilometers from the Iranian border in the northern Iraqi province of Sulaimaniyah, our Press TV correspondent reported from Irbil on Monday.
A civil airport of that size in Halabja does not make much sense. But a military airport only 11 km from the border, light artillery distance, is a dubious endeavor too. News of the airport plans is about a month old. Back then a U.S. official denied such plans.
The first big dog that argued for partition of Iraq was Joe Biden in May 2006 together with Leslie Gelb, a former head of the Council of Foreign Relations. Later the plan gained some traction with the current administration.
The U.S. knows for some time that there will not be a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Maliki that comes even near to what it wants. Is a big base in the Kurd North Iraq together with pressure for partition the alternative plan?
Maliki is against partition. His rivals from al-Hakim’s ISCI are pro partition, or expressed softer, for a federal Shia state in all south Iraq. If Maliki could be moved out of the way and some ISCI politician into his current position, federalization could go forward.
This is just speculation, but for some reason Maliki felt he needed to step up the pressure on the U.S. Is this the response to the Biden nomination and Biden’s partition plans?
UPDATE:
I just see that Reidar Visser finds that Biden has now somehow forgotten his partition plans.
Remarkably, however, it seems that Biden may have cleaned up his Iraq rhetoric as part of his VP bid. At least, it is quite conspicuous how every trace of his “plan for Iraq” now appears to have been erased from his website at joebiden.com, where he now instead supports Barrack Obama’s more general argument about shifting the focus to Afghanistan.
Hmm …