Steve Burns: Congress passes Iraq withdrawal timeline, nobody notices

Last Wednesday, President Obama signed into law the 2010 Defense Authorization Act, providing $550 billion for the Department of Defense and the national security programs of the Department of Energy and $130 billion to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since there is no disagreement between Republicans and Democrats about the need for the US to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined, military spending bills like this one generally attract no media attention, and this one would have been completely unremarked-on by the corporate media if not for the inclusion of Federal hate crimes legislation in the bill.

Another provision seems to have gone completely unnoticed, a measure reaffirming the December 2011 date for a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq that is part of the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration and ratified by the Iraqi parliament in November 2008. The new provision also requires the Pentagon to report to Congress every three months on progress to withdraw all U.S. troops, withdraw or transfer to Iraqi authorities all military equipment, close down or transfer to Iraqi authorities military bases, and release or transfer to Iraqi authorities all Iraqi detainees before the December 31, 2011 deadline.

Obama himself had no comments on the Iraq withdrawal language contained within the military-spending bill, and a Google News search shows that a Friends Committee on National Legislation press release on the topic was picked up on only by Reuters and the San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

Despite the lack of media interest, the provision may be significant as an example of Congressional push-back against efforts within the Defense Department to extend a US military presence in Iraq beyond December 2011. Back in July, for example, while on a surprise visit to Baghdad, Defense Secretary Gates speculated that the Iraqi government may "need" US troops to stay beyond the Dec. 2011 deadline. Gates added: "What happens beyond 2011 is a subject best left to the end of 2010 or 2011 itself," as if the matter had not already been settled by the Iraqi parliament's ratification of an agreement requiring a full US withdrawal by the end of 2011.

But this was not the first example of the US military treating the US-Iraq withdrawal agreement as a set of suggestions, rather than as binding law. The military also attempted to delay a June 30 withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi cities as required by the agreement, and finessed the requirement by redrawing the Baghdad city boundaries to exclude a US base within the city. A required July 30 national referendum on the agreement - with an immediate withdrawal of all US forces if the referendum fails - has been delayed, with the agreement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, until Iraq's parliamentary elections in January of 2010. And those January elections may themselves be delayed, providing a pretext for military officials to argue for delaying further troop withdrawals.

Congress' insistence on a hard withdrawal deadline and regular reporting by the Pentagon on steps taken towards that goal is a natural follow-up to an earlier Congressional ban on permanent US military bases in Iraq. However much we may disagree with the Dec. 2011 timetable, we should still consider these examples of Congress asserting its authority over military matters as a welcome change from its all-too-common tendency to defer to the Generals.

There has long been a strongly-held belief among a large majority of the Iraqi public that the US plans to stay in Iraq forever, a feeling that US military officials help to fuel when they endlessly speculate about pushing back the deadline for our withdrawal. But, however much the Pentagon may want to treat the US-Iraq withdrawal agreement as a mere scrap of paper, the Iraqi public and parliament take the agreement quite seriously. As Aura Kanegis, Director of Public Policy for the American Friends Service Committee said, "The U.S.-Iraq bilateral agreement is so central to public discourse in Iraq, but too often forgotten in the U.S." And it's an agreement that not only the Pentagon tends to forget: Among the thousands of media outlets failing to take any notice of Congress' reaffirmation of the agreement's Dec. 2011 withdrawal timeline were the indefatigable Antiwar.com and the progressive news sites Common Dreams and Alternet. And, other than Friends Committee on National Legislation, you won't find mention of this nail in the coffin of a permanent US occupation of Iraq on the websites of any national peace organizations. Is the peace movement unwilling to acknowledge progress, however small, towards its goal of a complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq?

Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and can be reached at: outreach@wnpj.org