SOFA Update

SOFA UPDATE….Nouri al-Maliki tells AP that (a) a security agreement with the United States is critical, and (b) legal jurisdiction is the biggest remaining hurdle:

The most important hanging issue here is the immunity or the legal jurisdiction over the American troops because certain powers, political powers inside Iraq are getting ready to use this issue once it’s — if it’s — approved, as a vehicle to overthrow, to destabilize the entire political system in Iraq, to destabilize the government. They would use it as a vehicle to re-ignite public feelings inside the country.

We have proposed that the legal jurisdiction would be on one hand, on one side, with the Americans … when the troops are performing military operations. When they are not performing a military operation, they are outside their camps, the legal jurisdiction would be in the hands of the Iraqi judiciary.

Translation: if we don’t get civil jurisdiction over U.S. troops, the government will fall. It’s too much of a hot button issue for guys like, oh, Muqtada al-Sadr, just to pick a name out of a hat.

This actually seems pretty doable to me. The trick is to write language that appears to give Iraq jurisdiction over soldiers who aren’t performing military missions, but then define “military mission” in a way that effectively prevents Iraqi police from issuing anything more important than a parking ticket to U.S. troops. This would be accompanied by a tacit agreement with Maliki that they won’t force the issue by ever actually arresting an American soldier in the first place.

Of course, if that’s all there were to it, we’d already have an agreement. Still, it’s hard to imagine that this issue can’t be finessed fairly easily.