Archives » Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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Larry Kaplow
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Jun 25, 2008 04:31 PM
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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