WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”
“However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open.” Zebari says.
Though Obama claims the US presence is “illegal,” he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the “weakened Bush administration,” Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.
Wow. Just wow. Even the Iraqis can see what Obama was trying to do.
Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as “a man of the Left” - who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq’s liberation. Indeed, say Talabani’s advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.
Maliki’s advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win - but the prime minister worries about the senator’s “political debt to the anti-war lobby” - which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was “the biggest strategic blunder in US history.”
Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show “a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues.”
If this can be proven, Obama might as well hang it up. Not only is meddling in ongoing US negotiations with Iraq a no-no of epic proportions, the idea that Obama would even dare to suggest to Iraqis that they should not deal with the Bush administration in creating a timeline (thereby leaving troops in Iraq longer than needed) just to try and make Dems look better if he takes office is sick.
And I don’t know why I’m so surprised, I always thought the Dems would do whatever it took to claim the Iraq victory for themselves. I just never thought they’d go so far as to leaving our troops exposed for years longer than necessary to do it.
UPDATE - Here’s the word from Team Obama.
But Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri’s article bore “as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial.”
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
…
“Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades,” Morigi said.
That statement didn’t help Obama’s case much, seeing as his national security spokeswoman just admitted that Obama stuck his two cents where it didn’t belong. That’s still tampering with an ongoing US-Iraq negotiation, and the idea that Obama didn’t urge a delay in negotiations is negated by the fact that he did indeed say that the Iraqis should wait until the next administration to do anything. I’m no genius, but that counts as urging a delay in negotiations to me. And if Taheri’s report is correct, that’s how the Iraqis interpreted Obama’s remarks.
