Bush officials wanted Obama to help close troop deal with Iraq
Outgoing George W. Bush White House officials privately urged Barack Obama in November 2008 to support talks with Baghdad that would allow U.S. troops to remain Iraq for several years, but the incoming president's team demurred, new emails published by WikiLeaks show.
The agreement, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, has become a fiercely contested topic in recent years, with Bush’s team insisting that Obama could have further extended it once in office, and the president’s supporters insisting that was not possible.
But at the time of the post-election exchange, which featured Bush’s top national security council aide for Iraq, Douglas Lute, and senior Obama adviser, and now chief of staff, Denis McDonough, the Bush administration was still negotiating terms with Iraq’s government to keep tens of thousands of American soldiers in the country for three more years.
According to Lute’s Nov. 11 email, the talks were clouded by the Iraqi government’s uncertainty over where Obama, who had campaigned on a gradual U.S troop withdrawal from Iraq, stood on the question.
Saying that the U.S. had sent the Iraqis “a text we consider final,” Lute — who said he was following up on a prior conversation between McDonough and Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley — wrote that the Iraqis were “keenly interested in understanding President-Elect Obama's position on the SOFA.”
“Indeed, a number of senior Iraqi officials - including a number of Prime Minister's most senior advisors -- are claiming that Mr. Obama will not support a SOFA signed by President Bush and interpreting the few messages publicly available as a pretext to reject the agreement on the table,” Lute wrote. “After the transition team has had time to review the SOFA text, we ask that the Obama team express support for the SOFA, lest the Iraqis use previous positions or the absence of comment to scuttle the deal.”
The pact was needed because U.S. troops were acting under a United Nations mandate due to expire on Dec. 31, a few weeks before Obama would take office.
Lute even offered a proposed language for an Obama statement, which included the vow that the president election would “respect the agreement as negotiated and not insist it be ratified by the US Congress.”
McDonough passed along Lute’s email to several other top Obama foreign policy advisers, including Susan Rice, Mark Lippert, and James Steinberg. John Podesta, then an Obama transition adviser, was later added to the email chain; the exchange was contained in his email account, which U.S. officials have said was hacked at the direction of the Russian government.
“I think we should be cautious about getting in the middle of this,” warned Steinberg, a former Bill Clinton administration official who would become Obama’s deputy secretary of state. “We have one President at a time and we don't propose to get into the middle of the negotations [sic]. If we get briefed now and we don't like it, what do we propose to do -- tell Hadley we can't support it? I think they should do the deed and hopefully its something we can support. The alternative puts us in a position [where] they're using our clout without [us] having any influence on the conduct of the negotation [sic].”
“Good point,” McDonough replied, adding that another transition official was scheduled to attend another unspecified briefing the next day. “We can see where we are then.”
Obama did not weigh in publicly on the details of the talks until the deal was formally concluded several days later, on Nov. 17. It allowed for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, with legal immunity there, until December 31, 2011.
"President-elect Obama believes it is critical that a status-of-forces agreement that ensures sufficient protections for our men and women in uniform is reached before the end of the year. We look forward to reviewing the final text of the agreement," an Obama spokesperson said at the time.
As president, Obama honored the agreement, which he did not submit to the U.S. Congress for approval. He also did not extend the SOFA, for reasons that are still the subject of dispute, and removed all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
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Originally Posted by TYLERTECHSAS
