Iraqis Crap On Bush’s SOFA, Update IV

Finally, an end to Bush’s bullshit SOFA

A little over three years ago I wrote my first post on the 2008 Status Of  Forces Agreement (SOFA) entered into  between the George W. Bush Administration and the government of Iraq. (For that and the subsequent two entries, see “Related Posts” below). Despite the many efforts of both the Bush and Obama administrations to extend its original three year term, the SOFA turns into a pumpkin at midnight, December 31, by which time all remaining US troops must have vacated the premises.

As Juan Cole explains in his post This is the Way the Iraq War Ends, with Bangs and Whimpers, SOFA agreements are designed to shield American troops from various forms of legal prosecution by a host country, something the US typically insists upon when stationing troops in foreign lands. However, this was not something that the Iraqis were predisposed to approve.  And following the slaughter of 17 innocent civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Nisoor Square in September 2007, followed in turn by the refusal of US courts to prosecute the company and its employees, the die was cast. Any agreement would be on Iraqi terms.

Even so, the Bush Administration believed it or its successor administration, whether Republican or Democratic, would be able to negotiate an extension.  (The Military Industrial Complex is a truly bi-partisan enterprise.) Well, it’s didn’t quite work out that way.

Cole:

Washington hawks had wanted to keep 25,000 US troops in Iraq indefinitely. The Obama administration had decided by this September that that goal was unrealistic, and decided to seek a small contingent of 3,000 or so. But there would be no point in having them in Iraq if they could not fight when necessary, and for that activity they would have needed a new SOFA or a legislated extraterritoriality. They got neither, and so the US has to go…

The consequences of the ill-conceived and ill-executed US occupation, besides its humongous cost in blood and treasure to Americans and Iraqis alike?

The US will leave behind a failed state. A determined guerrilla insurgency based in the Sunni Arab community (though not necessarily widely supported by the latter) continues to hit Baghdad, as it did on Wednesday in a series of attacks that targeted police and killed 25…

There are severe tensions between the Kurds in the north and the Arab government in Baghdad…

Cole goes on to describe just one of the many failed ventures that was part of the grand neocon enterprise of nation building. After using billions of borrowed dollars to destroy what was then the Middle East’s most modern infrastructure, the plan was to pay American contractors like Halliburton to rebuild it, using more billions of borrowed dollars, all guaranteed by the US taxpayer.  Shoddy work, a long tradition of official corruption, and a determined insurgency that destroyed stuff as soon as it was built were just the most obvious impediments to “success” and “victory.”

Then there are the geo-strategic consequences of Bush’s insane war. Cole again:

The US keeps fretting over Iranian influence in Iraq, but that is silly. If you didn’t want Iranian Shiite influence in Iraq you shouldn’t have overthrown the Sunni Saddam Hussein and seated the Shiite fundamentalists as a controlling interest in Parliament. Now that Washington has put the Iraqi Shiites in power, it should expect at least moments of great cooperation with Tehran.

And let’s not forget the millions of Iraqis that George W. Bush forced to flee from their homes.

From WikiP:

In 2007, the United Nations estimated that nearly 5 million refugees fled the country since 2003,^[1] with nearly 100,000 fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.^[2][3] In October 2006, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Iraqi government estimated that more than 365,000 Iraqis had been displaced since the 2006 bombing of the al-Askari Mosque, bringing the total number of Iraqi refugees to more than 1.6 million.^[4]

More recent numbers estimate that those numbers have continued to grow. Costs of War, a report from Brown University‘s Watson Institute for International Studies, reported that “three and a half million Iraqis have fled their homes and have not returned” since 2003. That number includes 1.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 1.8 million Iraqi expatriates.^[5] The UNHCR puts the number even higher, estimating 4.7 million displaced Iraqis since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The UNHCR reports the same proportion of IDP refugees in Iraq as Costs of War–i.e., 2.4 million internally displaced Iraqis, of which 58% rent housing, 18% live with host families or relatives, 24% live in public buildings, but only 1% live in tented camps.^[6] This has caused a strain on infrastructure and further deterioration in the humanitarian situation where 4 million are food insecure (25% of children are chronically malnourished) and only one in three children has access to safe drinking water.

[…]

According to the U.N., roughly 40% of Iraq’s middle class is believed to have fled. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return.^[14] Refugees are mired in poverty as they are generally barred from working in their host countries.^[15][16] In Syria alone an estimated 50,000 Iraqi girls and women, many of them widows, are forced into prostitution just to survive.^[17][18]

Heckuva job, Georgie! Heckuva job!

Cole concludes:

And so that is the way the war ends. No great demonstrations in the US against it in its twilight. It is ending almost by default, because the Iraqi parliament can seldom get real legislation done, the US is forced to adhere to the 2008 SOFA. In the background, the bombs are still going off and the country is riven by ethnic disputes. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. The US will receive no benefit from its illegal war of aggression, no permanent bases, no bulwark against Iran, no new Arab friend to Israel, no $14 a barrel petroleum– all thing things Washington had dreamed of. Dreams that turned out to be flimsy and unsubstantial and tragic.

The only remotely good news now is the savings to the American taxpayer of not having to station tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq, an estimated $50 billion a year. Now, if we could only repeat that feat in Afghanistan.