It's so great being the most popular kid in the class. Everyone loves America. We know how to treat our friends and piss off our enemies. I don't think our reputation could be much worse. Maybe, soon they will have less reason to hate us, not that we are proactively doing anything about it.
Our ally in Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has publicly rejected The U.S.'s proposed terms of our continued occupation of Iraq once the UN mandate expires in December. The initial terms were aggressive, allowing the American troops to establish 50 permanent bases, soldiers and private contractors to serve with immunity, the US to operate militarily at will, and to use the airspace as if it was our own. Apparently, the State Department was led/led us to believe that Maliki would advocate this U.S. security pact and convince the current Iraqi government, made up of chaotic factions, to sign off on it. So either he was blowing smoke or he was naive enough to think that he would be able sell this bill of goods to all the different volatile pieces that make up Iraq today. Not surprisingly, he got a lot of flack from his own government, and Moktadar al-Sadr this past week took large, mostly peaceful crowds to the streets in protest. So under what appears to be a lot of political pressure, today the Prime Minister said in no uncertain terms:
The Iraqi demands are unacceptable to the Americans, and the American demands are unacceptable to the Iraqis, and the result is that we have reached an impasse.....The Iraqis will not consent to an agreement that infringes their sovereignty.
Iraq resists Washington’s demand to have a free hand in undertaking military operations without cooperation with the Iraqi government...We can not give permission to the American forces’ independent right to arrest Iraqis or execute operations against terrorism. We can not allow them to use the Iraqi skies and waters at all times.
So how is this apparent impasse, good news for us as a nation? Well, it could mean two things. It could be the beginning of a negotiation that will result in a security pact that Obama will inherit and our own Congress didn't have a voice in. I think that could be problematic, OR it could be the beginning of the end. What if these splinter groups that are fighting against each other, become united in their desire to get the U.S. occupying forces out. What if they KICK US OUT?!?! They ask us to leave...Maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing. We leave and we stop both the literal and figurative bleeding. This allows us to get back to the business of stabilizing Afghanistan and fighting the good fight. Will we leave if asked?? That is a whole other post, but in the meantime a girl can dream cant she???