Also see:
AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications •
Go to Original
Bush, Maliki Break Iraqi Law to Renew UN Mandate for Occupation
By Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland
AlterNet
Thursday 20 December 2007
A majority of Iraqi lawmakers say renewal
requests not ratified by the parliament are illegal.
On Tuesday, the Bush administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council extending the mandate
that provides legal cover for foreign troops to operate in Iraq for another
year.
The move violated both the Iraqi constitution and a law passed earlier this
year by the Iraqi parliament - the only body directly elected by all those
purple-finger-waving Iraqis in 2005 - and it defied the will of around 80 percent
of the Iraqi population.
Earlier in the week, a group representing a majority of lawmakers in Iraq's
parliament - a group made up of Sunni, Shiite and secular leaders - sent a
letter to the Security Council, a rough translation of which reads: "We
reject in the strongest possible terms the unconditional renewal of the mandate
and ask for clear mechanisms to obligate all foreign troops to completely withdrawal
from Iraq according to an announced timetable."
We don't know if it was even read by members of the Security Council, but we
do know that it, like previous communications from the Iraqi legislature, was
completely ignored.
James Paul, director of the Global Policy Forum, which follows the United Nations'
intrigues, said that while "there's concern in many delegations at the
United Nations about what is going on," Security Council delegates "are
under instructions from their governments to lay low and pass the U.S. resolution."
According to Paul, the move "shows the despotic power of the U.S. government
to force everyone to knuckle under, no matter how much the law is violated."
It was an egregious assault on Iraq's nascent democracy, as well as its supposed
"sovereignty," and can only encourage more bloodshed. Yet the commercial
media has so far ignored the story entirely, reporting only that "Iraq"
had requested that the mandate be renewed.
The real picture is dramatically different. Just as some congressional Democrats
in Washington have tried desperately to limit Bush's ability to maintain troops
in Iraq forever - inserting various conditions into the endless series of supplemental
spending bills that have financed the occupation - and been thwarted by the
administration, so too has a majority of Iraq's parliament come out against
renewing the mandate without attaching conditions to it, including a requirement
that the United States set a timetable for withdrawal.
That's a process story, unsexy by definition, but that doesn't change its importance.
This move speaks to the degree to which occupation and democracy are mutually
exclusive, and to how Bush and Maliki must run roughshod over the Iraqi legislature
(not to mention the U.S. Congress), sacrificing opportunities for political
reconciliation along the way, in order to maintain an almost universally despised
American military presence in the country.
The UN Mandate
The U.N. mandate provides vital political cover for the occupation. The Bush
administration has ignored or violated much of the international law governing
the conduct of an occupying power. As Orwellian as it is, the United States,
having bombed the hell out of Iraq, invaded it with a huge mechanized army and
installed a government that exists wholly within the confines of its sheltered
"international zone" - the "Green Zone" - and now maintains
that its troops are in the country by the invitation of that government. The
United Nations' mandate is a key part of maintaining that fiction.
Last year, at Maliki's request, the Security Council renewed the U.N. mandate
suddenly, surprising many of the Iraqi lawmakers we reached in Baghdad at the
time. Dr. Alaa Makki, a Sunni MP representing the Accord Front, asked that we
send him a copy of the U.N. resolution and Al-Maliki's letter since he had no
clue about the machinations that were going on between the PM and the Security
Council. Hasan al-Shammari, a Shia parliamentarian with the Al-Fadhila party,
told us by phone: "We had a closed session two days ago, and we were supposed
to vote on the mandate in 10 days. I can not believe the mandate was just approved
without our knowledge or input." Dr. Hajim al-Hassani, a secular MP and
the former speaker of the parliament, also didn't know that the mandate had
been renewed until receiving our call. "We were supposed to have a meeting
with the Prime Minister and other top officials in the parliament during the
next couple of weeks to decide what to do with the mandate," he said.
A majority of Iraq's legislators viewed the renewal as unconstitutional. While
article 80, section 6, of the young constitution gives the cabinet the right
to "negotiate" and "sign" international agreements and treaties,
article 61, section 4, reads: "A law shall regulate the ratification of
international treaties and agreements by a two-thirds majority of the members
of the Council of Representatives." Like the U.S. system, the executive
branch can only negotiate international treaties; the legislature has to ratify
them.
At the time, Maliki argued that while he respected the powers given to the
parliament, the U.N. mandate didn't count as either a treaty or an agreement,
and therefore didn't require a nod from the legislative branch.
Hoping to avoid a repeat of the PM's maneuvers this year, the Iraqi legislature
has tried to put its foot down and assert its rights under the country's constitution.
First, at the end of April, 144 members of the parliament - a majority - sent
a nonbinding letter to the members of the United Nations Security Council and
to the United Nations secretary general condemning last year's "unconstitutional"
renewal and calling for a timetable for foreign troops to withdraw from Iraq.
The Parliament then went a step further at the end of May, when 140 of its
members co-sponsored a resolution requiring Maliki to get parliamentary approval
before renewing the mandate this year.
Here the story gets a bit legalistic, but bear with us. The resolution was
submitted on May 27. During the session, Al-Mashhadani, the head of the Iraqi
parliament, refused to allow a vote on the measure, sending it instead to the
parliament's legal committee for review (also known as "sending it to die
in committee"). On June 5, however, Al-Mashhadani bowed to pressure and
allowed a vote on the resolution, which passed by an 85-59 margin. Maliki's
cabinet then had a choice of vetoing the law or sending the resolution to the
federal court for review.
According to Article 73, section 3 of the constitution, if neither of those
actions are taken, then a law passed by the parliament is "considered ratified
after 15 days from the date of receipt." The legislation was neither vetoed
nor sent to the judiciary for review, so, according to the Constitution, it
was duly passed and became binding under Iraqi law.
A few days later, Hoshyar Zebari, the minister of foreign affairs, was called
to a hearing at which a member of the parliament's legal committee posed a question.
"A few days ago," said Omar Khalaf Jawad, an MP from the secular National
Iraqi Dialogue Front, "the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution that obligates
the cabinet to receive approval from the parliament before renewing the occupation
forces' mission. What steps have your ministry, or the Iraqi cabinet as a whole,
taken to inform international entities and countries with forces in Iraq about
this resolution, so that we will be sure the resolution will be respected and
implemented?" Zebari assured the parliament that its legislation would
be disseminated to the appropriate parties and respected by the prime minister
and his cabinet.
But, four months after that hearing, in an off-the-record conference call with
most of the Security Council's 15 delegates and a number of Sunni, Shiite and
secular Iraqi MPs, two unexpected discoveries came to light.
First, the delegates were informed that a report submitted by the secretary-general
contained some crucial factual errors. The SG's report said that the parliament
had "passed a nonbinding resolution on 5 June obligating the cabinet to
request parliament's approval on future extensions of the mandate governing
the multinational force in Iraq and to include a timetable for the departure
of the force from Iraq." On the call, the Iraqi lawmakers explained to
the delegates that the resolution was a binding law and that it did not contain
a request to include a timetable. One of the MPs attending the meeting from
Baghdad clarified: "All that the resolution requests is that the Iraqi
parliament be allowed to practice its constitutional rights."
The second and more shocking discovery of the meeting was that the letter sent
in April by the 144 members of Iraq's parliament had never been delivered to
the Security Council delegations. Some of the Iraqi MPs confirmed that they
had handed the letter to Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the United Nation's special representative
for Iraq (Qazi later insisted that he had indeed delivered the letter to the
Security Council members and to the secretary-general).
The next day, the Iraqi MPs took it upon themselves to notify the Security
Council delegates that any request to renew the mandate that is "issued
by the Iraqi cabinet without the Iraqi parliament's approval is unconstitutional."
It added: "The Iraqi parliament, as the elected representatives of the
Iraqi people, has the exclusive right to approve and ratify international treaties
and agreements including those signed with the United Nations Security Council."
At the end of November, Foreign Affairs Minister Zebari was again called to
testify before the Iraqi parliament. He promised, unequivocally, that any request
to extend the mandate "will not be presented to the U.N. Security Council
prior to its submission to the Iraqi parliament for deliberation."
But that wasn't to be. In the letter sent this week, Iraqi lawmakers' demand
was unambiguous: "We ask the Security Council not to accept any letter
requesting renewal that is not ratified by the parliament. Such a letter would
be deemed illegal and unconstitutional according to the laws of Iraq,"
it read.
No debate was held in the Iraqi legislature, and on Tuesday the Security Council
voted unanimously to renew the mandate.
Iraqi Lawmakers Not the Only Ones Getting the Runaround
Our sources in the United Nations told us to expect a vote towards the end
of the week, and we were caught by surprise when it was held Tuesday.
The timing appears to have been a response to senior members of Congress picking
up on the Iraqi legislature's efforts to put conditions on the renewal. In a
letter sent to Condoleezza Rice on Dec. 5, Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., chairman
of a House subcommittee on foreign affairs, noted the Iraqi parliament's legislation
and warned that ignoring its prerogatives might lead to a broader perception
that the occupation is "illegal, illegitimate and evidence of a desire
for the long-term basing of our military officials in Iraq."
On Wednesday, Delahunt held hearings on the renewal (at which one of this article's
authors, Raed Jarrar, testified). We can't say for sure if the attempt to get
these issues into the record on Capitol Hill had to do with the vote being moved
up to Tuesday, but the fact that the mandate was renewed, suddenly, just one
day before Congressional hearings were held suggests that there was an effort
to create "facts on the ground" that would effectively sideline legislators'
interest in the matter.
What this story reveals, again, is that U.S. "interests" - that
is, the interests of the U.S. foreign policy elite - which include establishing
a permanent foothold in the Middle East and exerting influence over the political
and economic course Iraq takes in the future, are paramount, and that any talk
of democratizing missions or "liberating Iraqis" has never been more
than political theater.
The renewal is the latest in a string of instances in which the Bush administration
and its allies in Iraq's executive branch have shut down a nonviolent, political
avenue for Iraqi citizens to resist the presence of foreign troops in their
country. By denying them those avenues, Bush and Maliki have effectively done
what they accuse advocates of withdrawal of doing: "emboldening" violent
insurgents and getting more innocent Iraqis and more U.S. troops killed.
One can only wonder, now that the United States has "liberated" Iraq
from Saddam Hussein, just who will liberate Iraq from the United States?
-----------
Raed Jarrar is Iraq consultant to the American Friends Service Committee.
He blogs at Raed in the Middle. Joshua Holland is an AlterNet editor and staff
writer.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story