IT'S W'S AMERICA, THEY'RE JUST BICKERING OVER WHO GETS TO MANAGE IT (via Kurt Brouwer):

Sorry, Barack, You’ve lost Iraq: Bush's efforts to negotiate a long-term U.S-Iraq pact may remove troops as an '08 election issue for Obama, Clinton. (Michael Hirsh, 1/12/08, Newsweek)

In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: "We're putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington," he told reporters. "The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process." The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush's Iraq coordinator in the White House--in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president. It will become just another piece of the complex global security framework involving a hundred or so countries with which Washington now has bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements. Last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to commit to any such agreement without congressional approval. The president said nothing about that on Saturday, but Lute said last fall that the Iraqi agreement would not likely rise to the level of a formal treaty requiring Senate ratification. Even so, it would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact.

As the most significant president since FDR, it should come as no surprise that George W. Bush will have such a profound effect on his successors--far greater than Ronald Reagan's--not just in terms of the Reformation he's set in motion in the Middle East and the enlargement of the Anglosphere, but in regards to free trade, taxes, entitlement reform, etc..

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2008 4:39 PM