Maliki’s visit to Sistani, is it really about the security agreement?

Although both head­lines are true, pro-U.S. news sites came with head­line sim­i­lar to this “Top cleric deputises parl., govt. to sign deal — PM” [which we already know that the parl. Opposes the agree­ment — as the house speaker said in his state­ment]. Other news sites came with this head­line “[U.S. sol­diers] Immu­nity remains stick­ing point in US-Iraq pact”.

The two points

Accord­ing to the Green Zone news­pa­per Al-Sabaah:

Sources revealed yes­ter­day that the [Iraqi] gov­ern­ment has received a new security-agreement draft from the American-side, while Maliki after his meet­ing with Sis­tani con­firmed that there are sev­eral points in the agree­ment are not agreed upon with the Americans.

While “well-informed” sources told the Kuwaiti news­pa­per Awan reported another scenario:

The last ses­sion of the nego­ti­a­tion between the two sides was cru­cial, an agree­ment was reached on the dis­puted points.….Washington will have the legal juris­dic­tion over U.S. sol­diers dur­ing the mil­i­tary oper­a­tions autho­rized by the Iraqi gov­ern­ment only, oth­er­wise, any Amer­i­can sol­dier com­mits a crime out­side the frame­work of this agree­ment, will be sub­jected to the Iraqi law.

The news­pa­per added this information:

The new con­text of secu­rity agree­ment is already fin­ished and is wait­ing for a for­mal dec­la­ra­tion of the Iraqi approval for signature.

So, why Maliki needed to see Sis­tani to and came with such shal­low answer quot­ing Sis­tani say­ing: “leave it to the parl.”? Ipairaq gives as the answer:

Iraqi MP Sami Al-Askari from the United Iraqi Alliance who expected that the next few days will wit­ness an esca­la­tion oppos­ing the agree­ment told the news site:

Iran and the Islamic Supreme Coun­cil of Iraq, ham­per the sign­ing of the Iraqi-American agreement.

As you can notice from the above links that Maliki’s visit to Sis­tani wasn’t about the SOFA but it was ges­ture to over­power the Supreme Coun­cil and to use Sis­tani as an argu­ment point for future con­flict with Al-Hakim’s Supreme Coun­cil [and the Kurds prepar­ing for the next week nego­ti­a­tions].

Tomor­row: Did Sis­tani really sup­ported SOFA [as Maliki claims]?