Iraqi Constitution Requires Parliament to Approve Long-Term U.S. Presence

Yesterday, General Douglas Lute, a top Iraq adviser to President Bush, said that the administration didn’t require Senate ratification for its forthcoming long-term security guarantee to the Iraqis. It’s unclear whether that’s true, and I’ll tell you more as soon as I know it. But even if it is, the Iraqi constitution stipulates that Iraq’s parliament has to ratify any such agreement. And the Iraqi parliament is a lot more hostile to the idea of hosting U.S. troops indefinitely than the U.S. Senate is.

Take a look at Article 58, Section 4 of the Iraqi constitution. It stipulates that the Iraqi parliament shall ratify “international treaties and agreements by a two-thirds majority.” Whether or not President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki can finagle the deal so that it’s not a treaty — as Lute suggested yesterday — it most certainly is an “agreement.”

And it’s hard to see the votes for a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

In May, 144 out of 275 parliamentarians signed a petition calling for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces. Convincing those same parliamentarians that they should vote for an indefinite U.S. presence is made an even harder sell when considering that Maliki is dishonestly selling his deal with Bush as meaning an end to the occupation. If there was any doubt about Maliki’s strategy to push the security deal through despite popular and parliamentary opposition, one of his senior aides told the Los Angeles Times that, in the paper’s paraphrase, “what was being discussed was a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces in the next few years.” Score one for full-on bamboozlement.

But just because, procedurally, Maliki would be constitutionally obligated to seek parliamentary ratification is no guarantee that he will. After all, he helms a government that, among other abuses of power, tortures and assassinates corruption judges for investigating his cronies. So the rule of law isn’t much of a prophylactic for the Iraqi premier. But if Maliki contravenes his own constitution in order to give President Bush an enduring U.S. troop presence in Iraq, that’ll at least undercut the Bush administration’s pledge that it seeks this new “normalized” relationship in order to “Respec[t] and uphol[d] the Constitution as the expression of the will of the Iraqi people and stan[d] against any attempt to impede, suspend, or violate it.”

Note: Thanks to TPMm Reader BF.