This Week In Iraq

Juan Cole responds to protests in Iraq over the weekend and the impending SOFA vote:

If I were a betting man, I'd say that the security agreement is likely to pass through parliament, even if narrowly-- though if the Sunni Arabs do unanimously vote against or absent themselves, the agreement will lack the legitimacy that would have come from a national consensus across ethno-religious groups.

It seems to me that if the Iraqis cannot manage to get a national agreement to get rid of the occupiers, the odds of their coming to any sort of national agreement when the occupiers are gone is close to non-existent. No one has yet been able to convince me - from Petraeus on down - that there is any serious chance of a stable unified country existing in 2011 without the continued presence of over 100,000 US troops. The much bigger likelihood seems to me to be a newer and nastier civil war. What we need to do now is thnk through how we'd be able to minimize the spill-over, and avoid the trap of staying there - for just a little while longer - to prevent the reckoning that never ends in Iraq.