Iraqi Parliament Overwhelmingly Approves Status Of Forces Agreement

It’s a done deal: 

Reporting from Baghdad — Iraqi lawmakers today approved a pact allowing U.S. forces to stay in the country through 2011 after winning support from skeptics by promising a public referendum on the plan.

Of the 198 parliament members attending today’s session, more than 140 held up their hands in favor of the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA.

Auspiciously, Maliki went out of his way to gain Sunni support for the deal, conceding to their demands to hold a referendum on the deal by July 2009.  This is the kind of consensus-building critics of the new Iraqi government have claimed was absent, if not impossible.   The fact Sunnis demanded a referendum also demonstrates the continuing deep desire for representative government among Iraqis despite the chaos of the early days of democracy in Iraq — and argues those years were not that bad relative to Saddam’s decades of repressive autocratic rule, something the press seems oblivious to:

The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis, consumed huge reserves of money and resources and eroded the global stature of the United States, even among its closest allies.

In point of fact, the cost of this war both in lives and by percentage of GDP was relatively small, much smaller than the cost of Vietnam or Korea, but no press account will ever give that kind of context.  It should also be pointed out again that Iraqis died at a much greater rate under Saddam than they have from April 2003 to present, which is probably why a greater proportion Iraqis say the invasion was the right decision than do Americans (having direct experience of the former situation, which is rarely mentioned in the press, and lacking our press coverage of the latter).

Also note the Associated Press formulation: “the war” has claimed American lives, killed Iraqis, and etc.  A much more accurate statement would be something like “The effort to liberate Iraqis from a repressive dictatorship that killed millions and assist them in building a democratic state where citizens enjoy basic rights that most Westerners take for granted was burdened by the emergence of a brutal Al Qaeda-backed insurgency that deliberately killed as many people as possible even as U.S. troops took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties.” But again, that would require having a moral perspective more considered than “war = bad.”

Finally, it bears mentioning that our “global stature” is driven largely by how the media reports on our actions.  When much greater proportions of the people in the country we invaded approve of our actions there than in countries that were unaffected by the invasion, that should tell you there is a problem with how the media is covering the war.

Hey, guys?  I’m available for editing.  Call me!