This Week In Iraq

Juan Cole responds to protests in Iraq over the weekend and the impending SOFA vote:

If I were a betting man, I’d say that the security agreement is likely to pass through parliament, even if narrowly– though if the Sunni Arabs do unanimously vote against or absent themselves, the agreement will lack the legitimacy that would have come from a national consensus across ethno-religious groups.

It seems to me that if the Iraqis cannot manage to get a national agreement to get rid of the occupiers, the odds of their coming to any sort of national agreement when the occupiers are gone is close to non-existent. No one has yet been able to convince me – from Petraeus on down – that there is any serious chance of a stable unified country existing in 2011 without the continued presence of over 100,000 US troops. The much bigger likelihood seems to me to be a newer and nastier civil war. What we need to do now is thnk through how we’d be able to minimize the spill-over, and avoid the trap of staying there – for just a little while longer – to prevent the reckoning that never ends in Iraq.