Gotta Get Away From Iraq

I’ve kind of dropped the ball on this story, but it’s worth paying attention to the current wrangling over the security agreement with Iraq. The text does, after all, call for a “date-certain” withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. The Bush administration expended a huge amount of time and effort trying to secure more wiggle room on that timing. It’s not clear to me if they did that because they wanted to avoid endorsing what’s basically Obama’s Iraq strategy even though that’s what the Iraqi people want, or if they did that because they can’t abandon their neo-imperial fantasies even though that’s what the Iraqi people want. Doubtless, it was a convenient confluence of factors.

Still, even as it stands the agreement is highly controversial in Iraq. And for understandable reasons. What the US government wants is for American soldiers to operate freely in Iraqi territory, heavily armed, shooting bullets and blowing things up at their discretion, and to have immunity from Iraqi law as they do so. Obviously, that’s not acceptable to Iraqis. No American would stand for allowing foreign soldiers to roam the streets of our cities immune to American law — not even soldiers from close allies. At the same time, subjecting American soldiers to Iraqi law as they operate in a combat zone is completely unacceptable to the United States. As it should be. Those would be impossible conditions to subject American forces to. It’s all well and good for soldiers stationed abroad in a peacetime situation — Germany, Japan, etc. — to be subject to host country law when they go off base, but nobody’s expecting the Marines to get into a firefight in Seoul.

Now the obvious solution to this dilemma is for American soldiers to leave Iraq rapidly — that’s what Iraqis want, it would resolve the otherwise unresolvable jurisdictional issue, and it would let us start investing additional resources in productive ways at home. Instead, the Bush administration is going to keep wrangling and try to get Iraqis to agree to continued legal immunity.