Bush Hosts An Ally On Force Agreement

Checkpoint Baghdad

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Babak Dehghanpisheh

Larry Kaplow

Rod Nordland

Lennox Samuels

Silvia Spring

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Larry Kaplow

President George W. Bush probably can't find an Iraqi more sympathetic to the idea of keeping U.S. troops in his country than Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who stopped by the White House today. The topic was the negotiations over the future of U.S. troops in Iraq and what legal status they will have when the United Nations resolution authorizing them expires at the end of the year.

Talabani is an elder statesman and patron for Iraq's ethnic Kurds. He's the long-time leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main Kurdish factions. Kurds, who suffered chemical gas attacks at the hands of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, have been America's closest allies in Iraq since American jets started protecting their autonomous region with a no-fly zone in the mid-1990s. U.S. soldiers can walk around safely in Kurdistan. On a trip there late last year, several Kurds told me they'd be glad to host U.S. bases permanently. For one thing, they think it would deter the Turkish invasion they fear from the north.

U.S. officials in Iraq are relying on the Kurds to help sell a new agreement on an American presence in the country to more hesitant Iraqis, especially the Shiite coalition leading the government, but it's been slow going. Though American diplomats hold out hope to meet a self-imposed July 31 deadline for a deal, Iraqis are less interested. A senior Shiite figure close to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told me this week that they didn't see the deadline as firm, a fact U.S. negotiators have obliquely acknowledged.

The agreement would have to spell out what control Iraqis have over U.S. military operations, whether American civilian contractors have to face Iraqi law when they are accused of killings (or other crimes), whether American troops can continue detaining Iraqis and how many bases they can have here. Those are all sensitive issues that have to be coaxed through the Iraqi parliament (while the Bush administration has taken the controversial stance that the agreement does not need approval from Congress).

Talabani is considered a wily and skilled political tactician. But his usefulness to Bush is limited by his health. At 73, Talabani went to Washington after a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, which he said was meant to help him lose weight. He went there once last year, reportedly after he had collapsed.

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