Will SOFA ends in Obama’s or McCain’s drawer?

Prob­a­bly the British under­stood that there is no chance to sign some­thing sim­i­lar to SOFA with Iraq if the U.S. failed to “impose” the pact on Maliki’s gov­ern­ment. This is the rea­son behind the Green Zone news­pa­per Alsabaah’s report this morn­ing say­ing that the British are medi­at­ing between the Iraq and the U.S. to open the deadlock.

A par­lia­ment source told the news­pa­per that the British are started to play a medi­a­tor role between the par­lia­ment and Washington.

The source revealed that this morn­ing there was meet­ing between al-Adeeb, head of the United Iraqi Alliance in the par­lia­ment with the deputy com­man­der of British forces, fol­lowed by a sec­ond meet­ing with mem­bers of the UIA, and another with a num­ber of other par­lia­men­tary polit­i­cal blocs.

The source refused to say what hap­pened in these meet­ings, but he added: “We insisted on our national positions.

As the Al-Sarq Al-Awsat reported today, the posi­tion of the United Iraqi Alliance is very weird. and that makes them the most impor­tant fac­tor in this “SOFA’s equa­tion” An Iraqi offi­cial told the newspaper:

The irony is that they [UIA] are the ones who nego­ti­ated the Amer­i­cans, and they are the ones who sup­posed to defended right now, but some­thing hap­pened made them change their minds.

My own per­sonal opin­ion is that the emerge of the new expected Shi­ite alliance between for­mer PM Al-Ja’afari and Muq­tada Al-Sadr as reported on Al-Watan today, forced the UIA to think twice about accept­ing or reject­ing SOFA.

But Zaid Al-Zubaidi on Al-Akhbar says that the United Iraqi Alliance still wants to keep at least a tiny thread con­nects them with the Amer­i­cans noticing:

The Iraqi street is con­vinced that the cur­rent posi­tion of the United Iraqi Alliance [the rul­ing bloc] from SOFA meets the Iran­ian demand.

It is note­wor­thy that in the con­text of their rejec­tion and repeated crit­i­cism of SOFA’s arti­cles, the UIA tries to hold two apples with one hand, end­ing their remarks with “Thanks to the friendly lib­er­a­tion forces”.

Al-Qabas insists that the SOFA will end in Obama’s or McCain’s drawer say­ing that even if Maliki wanted to sign the agree­ment, then the state­ment of US com­man­der Mullen destroyed this one chance. Maliki will feel that he is forced to accept the agreement.