After SOFA

Quite day today, enough time to view some arti­cles pub­lished today.

Not very opti­mistic view from Dr. Mas­souma al-Mubarak saying:

The Agree­ment will be put to a ref­er­en­dum … the­o­ret­i­cally this is the top of democ­racy, but from prac­ti­cal side this is unre­li­able prac­tice in the Third World coun­tries where human beings have no value, let alone a ref­er­en­dum which we already know the out­come in advance (the Agree­ment received a huge acceptance).

The most impor­tant opin­ion is the one on AL-Ghad by Zweiri in which he pre­dicts that the provin­cial elec­tion itself will be a SOFA ref­er­en­dum, he men­tions three points:

- There is no trans­parency in such sit­u­a­tions, each party or player has his own inter­ests related to the Agreement.

- The Agree­ment will be the cause of a new polit­i­cal view in Iraq. This will be very clear in the com­ing provin­cial elec­tion 2009, which is to be con­sid­ered as indi­rect ref­er­en­dum on SOFA.

On Jor­dan­ian news­pa­per Al-Rai, a Jor­dan­ian writer Kha­roob says:

The 27 Novem­ber is the start of a new era, unknown yet who are the win­ners and losers among the polit­i­cal blocs came on the back of the Amer­i­can tanks after the occupation.

The power bal­ance will change and Iraq will not be the same as before the Agree­ment. Maliki and his Dawa Party will emerge as one of the biggest win­ners, but we also can say that he will pay the price of his suc­cess. Even for the Amer­i­cans, his role is ended by pass­ing the Agreement.

Al-Bayan’s op-ed asks about the inter­na­tional justice:

Let us ask: Is the story ends with the with­drawal of the U.S. forces?

If the Inter­na­tional law and jus­tice can be applied on the world’s super, then a in the Iraqi sit­u­a­tion a sanc­tion must be imposed on the United States and force them to pay com­pen­sa­tion to Iraq and its peo­ple and hold­ing them respon­si­ble for pay­ing reconstruction.

What a tragedy: After years of sys­tem­atic destruc­tion, U.S. forces with­draw from Iraq safely a ques­tion­able secu­rity agreement.