Workers' Liberty

According to the International Herald Tribune, the US government has agreed a schedule to withdraw troops from Iraq.

There is a veritable hell-full of devils in the details.

According to the IHT: "Iraq and the Bush administration have reached a preliminary agreement under which U.S. combat forces would pull out of major Iraqi cities, where most of the fighting has taken place, by next June [2009] and leave Iraq by 2011. It would link troop reductions to achievement of certain undisclosed security milestones. The deal also would require the endorsement of top Iraqi leaders and the Iraqi parliament, which is far from certain".

In other words, the USA will do it only if the confidence of the Maliki government continues to increase - which is far from certain - and can find a thousand excuses not to do it even if that confidence does increase.

Also, "combat forces withdrawn" can leave a lot of US military in Iraq, with considerable power there.

All that said, this is a major shift. Having put down this marker both for the US public, which is war-weary, and the peoples of Iraq, who have come to detest the arrogance, clumsiness, and brutality of the US military, it will be hard for the USA not to make some sizeable moves towards withdrawal.

It will also be hard for the Maliki government, or any successor, to pull back very much from insisting on implementation of the agreement.

On 23 August, the Sadrist movement held a large demonstration in Najaf to keep up the pressure on the Maliki government. According to US academic Juan Cole:

"Secretary of State Condi Rice's visit to Baghdad for consultations on the US-Iraqi security agreement provoked a demonstration in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, with Sadrist crowds carrying placards warning against US intentions. The Sadrists said that they rejected any security agreement that lacked a specific timetable for US troop withdrawal, and would take up arms against any such treaty. Former Iraqi PM Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the Reform Movement, supported the criticism and said that the situation in Iraq was getting worse".

At the very least, such moves make it hard for Maliki to row back on the sketched-out withdrawal timetable. That the demonstration took place in Najaf - headquarters of Shia head cleric Ayatollah Sistani, who has previously kept a distance from the Sadrists - is also significant.

As I commented in Solidarity 3/136: "In some ways, that the Baghdad government feels more confident, and less as if it has to agree to almost any US demand because without US troops it will be quickly be swept away, is good news...

"We should remember, however, what sort of a government it is that feels more confident.

"It is dominated by Islamic clerical fascists or semi-fascists. It has maintained the anti-union laws from Saddam Hussein’s time; tried (unsuccessfully so far) to enforce them by telling oil industry bosses not to talk to Iraqi oil unions, and threatening to arrest or sack oil union activists; and had Decree 8750, from 2005, empower the government to seize all union funds. In its constitution for Iraq it deleted even the vague clause about the right to strike written into the US-designed Transitional Administrative Law of 2004-5.

"Iraq’s labour movement needs our support for its own independent efforts, and to help it take a lead in the struggle for self-determination for the peoples of Iraq".