The Wall Street Journal reported on October 5, 2009 that there might not be a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Iraq and the United States. The SOFA is actually two documents that set the future relations between the two countries. When it was originally debated in Iraq’s parliament, the Iraqi [...]
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While President Bush was still in office and his administration was trying to come to an agreement with the Iraqi government on terms governing the continued troop presence in Iraq (what is referred to as the Status of Forces Agreement, or “SOFA”), Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani made a public statement demanding that any such agreement [...] Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet submitted a draft law to parliament calling for a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to coincide with the January 2010 parliamentary election. The SOFA was originally passed in November 2008 by the Iraqi parliament. Alongside it was a second law, the Political Reform Document, which also called [...] In another example of the pushback against Colonel Reese’s call for a slightly accelerated timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, The New Republic’s Michael Crowley makes an appeal to the "tar baby conundrum," as I termed it back in March 2008:
Here is Crowley on why Obama should reconsider his plans for pulling US forces out of Iraq:
Of course, Crowley was amongst the chorus of voices issuing warnings back in 2007 that withdrawal in the midst of such heightened civil war violence was too risky. Only now, according to Crowley, we can’t leave because of the relative peace. Either way, we stay. As is customary with the ebb and flow of the Iraq withdrawal debate, Col. Timothy Reese’s widely disseminated memo calling for a slightly accelerated timeline for removing troops from Iraq has provoked responses from those that warn against deviating from the original timeline (at least in terms of getting out ahead of schedule), and those that advocate pushing the ultimate withdrawal date back a decade, or longer (as [...] A senior U.S. military official and adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command, Col. Timothy R. Reese, wrote a rather blunt memo that has recently found the light of day (copy here). In the memo, Reese argues that the U.S. should accelerate its withdrawal from Iraq based on the following factors: we have already [...] Mike Hanna is on point, as usual: The United States took an important step yesterday toward leaving Iraq by moving combat troops out of Iraqi population centers in anticipation of the June 30 deadline specified in the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). This redeployment has focused attention on Iraq’s current security situation and triggered stepped-up [...] |
Blake Hounshell (aka praktike), our co-founder and main man, is now managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. 
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