Via Hot Air:

Amir Taheri accuses Barack Obama of interfering in the attempt to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq while making his trip to Baghdad in July.  In his New York Post column, Taheri quotes the Iraqi Foreign Minister, on the record, telling him that Obama tried to convince the Iraqis to end the negotiations and instead ask the UN for another one-year extension to the current mandate.  That would have left US troops in current position for another year, but more importantly, would have provided the US a diplomatic setback that Obama could have exploited on the campaign trail:

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops – and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”

Color me skeptical in one aspect of Taheri’s argument.  He claims that this would have hypocritically delayed the withdrawal of American troops until 2011, and you have to read the column to see how he calculates that through Iraqi elections and parliamentary procedure.  That assumes, however, that an Obama administration would bother to negotiate a drawdown and withdrawal with Baghdad.  Obama probably will just pull American troops out of Iraq without worrying about such niceties as a status-of-forces agreement.

Hypocrisy isn’t the issue here; it’s the interference of Obama in military and diplomatic affairs.  Just on diplomacy, interfering with the United States in its diplomatic efforts is a Logan Act violation.  Interfering with war policy treads on even more serious ground, especially since the primary motivation appears to be winning an election without regard to whether it damages our ability to fight the enemy or drives wedges between us and our ally, the elected, representative government in Baghdad.

Taheri has had some credibility problems in the past.  He falsely accused the Iranian mullahcracy, who really need no help in villainy, of passing dress-code legislation that required religious minorities to wear color-coded clothes.  That created a firestorm until reporters reviewed the legislation and found no reference to any kind of requirement for dress identification for Jews, Christians, or Zoroastrians.  Taheri offered a weak defense of his story, which was not sourced on the record, and it passed into urban-legend status.

This looks different, if for no other reason than Taheri’s main source goes on the record.  Hoshyar Zebari didn’t hide behind a “high-level source in Baghdad” tag for this story.  Zebari’s testimony puts the onus on Obama to explain why he attempted to interfere with the Bush administration’s negotiations despite his having absolutely no authority to do so.  If Obama wants to negotiate a defeat for America, he needs to wait until Americans elect him to the White House before betraying our allies and our troops in the field.

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OBAMA TRIED TO STALL GIS’ IRAQ WITHDRAWAL

By Amir Taheri

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops – and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

"However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open." Zebari says.

Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.

While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined.

Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet.

Supposing he wins, Obama’s administration wouldn’t be fully operational before February – and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.

By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June.

Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament – which might well need another six months to pass it into law.

Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Bush administration have a more flexible timetable in mind.

According to Zebari, the envisaged time span is two or three years – departure in 2011 or 2012. That would let Iraq hold its next general election, the third since liberation, and resolve a number of domestic political issues.

Even then, the dates mentioned are only "notional," making the timing and the cadence of withdrawal conditional on realities on the ground as appreciated by both sides.

Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as "a man of the Left" – who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq’s liberation. Indeed, say Talabani’s advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.

Maliki’s advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win – but the prime minister worries about the senator’s "political debt to the anti-war lobby" – which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was "the biggest strategic blunder in US history."

Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show "a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues."

Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn’t want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive" war – that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America.

Despite some usual equivocations on the subject, Obama rejects pre-emption as a legitimate form of self -defense. To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years.

Yet Iraq is doing much better than its friends hoped and its enemies feared. The UN mandate will be extended in December, and we may yet get an agreement on the status of forces before President Bush leaves the White House in January.