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By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in George W. Bush | Iraq | The Future | The Surge | War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Understanding that it is entirely possible that a Democrat may be elected President and understanding as well that such an election may throw any gains and advances in Iraq in peril, the Bush Administration is now working to ensure that it solidifies the gains that have been brought about by the surge and the implementation of the counterinsurgency plan:

In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: "We're putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington," he told reporters. "The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process." The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush's Iraq coordinator in the White House--in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Read on . . .

Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president. It will become just another piece of the complex global security framework involving a hundred or so countries with which Washington now has bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements. Last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to commit to any such agreement without congressional approval. The president said nothing about that on Saturday, but Lute said last fall that the Iraqi agreement would not likely rise to the level of a formal treaty requiring Senate ratification. Even so, it would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact.

As far as the number of U.S. troops that would remain in Iraq under such a pact, the administration is considering changes that could also pre-empt anything the Democrats have in mind. Gen. Petraeus told reporters that he and Pentagon planners were also working on a new "intellectual construct" for a U.S. troop presence in Iraq beyond the planned withdrawal of five brigade combat teams, two Marine battalions and the Marine Expeditionary Unit by the end of July. "We're going to continue to play with this, if you will," Petraeus said. "We literally meet a couple of times a week and keep working this along." Asked whether he and the Pentagon were considering a larger drawdown than the current one--which would shrink the U.S. presence to a pre-surge level of about 130,000, he added: "Certainly there is a possibility of that." In fact, one Pentagon contractor who is working on the long-term U.S. plans for Iraq says that the administration is considering new configurations of forces that could reduce troop levels to well under 100,000, perhaps to as few as 60,000, by the time the next president takes office.

As pointed out in the article, the end result of such an arrangement is to preempt and render moot the efforts of any future potential Democratic President to short circuit the mission in Iraq. Smart move. One certainly hopes that we don't draw down to "as few as 60,000" troops in a precipitous fashion but as long as the Administration is crafting an agreement that allows General Petraeus a goodly amount of leeway in making the necessary decisions regarding troop levels, there would appear to be little chance that a rash decision or two would leave us shorthanded in Iraq. And in any event, this will ensure that Petraeus's influence remains to affect the actions of the next President, whatever the next President's current desire to bring the reconstruction effort in Iraq to a precipitous end.

A good move by the Administration and one that is backed by the successes that have been brought about by the surge and the counterinsurgency plan. Let's hope the agreement goes through soon. In time, we shall likely be happy that it did, just as we are happy that we went forward with the surge and the implementation of the current counterinsurgency strategy.