It seems that SOFA dis­cus­sions in the Polit­i­cal Coun­cil ended in fail­ure, polit­i­cal fac­tions told Aswat Iraq that there are still seven points need to be changed in the final draft. So what hap­pened today?

You can notice that there is sum­mary of the meet­ing in the for­eign media, Moheet gives us more infor­ma­tion saying:

The Polit­i­cal Coun­cil anony­mously rejected the agree­ment and some of the MP’s of the United Iraqi Alliance [oil Min­is­ter, Shahrstani] demanded to estab­lish UN forces as an alter­na­tive to replace the U.S. occu­pa­tion forces. Oth­ers demanded a ref­er­en­dum on the agreement.

At the end the meet­ing the par­tic­i­pants agreed to reject this final draft and to take these two measures:

- Send­ing the final draft of the agree­ment to the reli­gious author­ity in Najaf, to read and decide.

- Form­ing a com­mit­tee to re-write the draft agreement.

At least we know one “new” disputed-point as reported on Al-Qabas saying:

Iraq’s right to inspect [U.S.] car­gos to/from Iraq is at the heart of the dis­cus­sions, and if these car­gos con­tain weapons that could hurt Iraq, despite the U.S. promised not to intro­duce weapons of mass destruc­tion inside Iraq.

As for the always popup issue of the “Najaf ref­er­ences” used by the Maliki’s gov­ern­ment and men­tioned above, the news­pa­per noticed the following:

There is no change in the Sistani’s or the ref­er­ences posi­tions which are four principles:

- to pre­serve national sovereignty.

- national consensus.

- trans­parency in the pre­sent­ing of the pact to the Iraqi people.

- the parliament.

But this is the trick in Sistani’s statement:

If the Par­lia­ment is rep­re­sent­ing the peo­ple, then why he said: “The peo­ple and the par­lia­ment”? Did he want a ref­er­en­dum even after the par­lia­ment approves the secu­rity agreement?