Iraqi Parliamentarians Against Permanent Occupation

Now this is really starting to get interesting. Tomorrow at 2 p.m., for the first time, Congress is going to receive testimony from two Iraqi parliamentarians opposed to the impending Bush-Maliki long-term-occupation deal. (Perhaps we should rename it the John McCain 100-Or-Maybe-Make-It-1000-Years Deal.)

Live from the Rayburn building, Rep. Bill Delahunt‘s (D-MA) Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight will hear from Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan of the Sunni Accordance Front and Nadim al-Jaberi of the Shiite (and anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki) Fadhila Party. Both men oppose an open-ended U.S. troop presence, which is a rather popular position among the Iraqi people. Last fall, Maliki’s own mouthpiece told me that the Iraqi parliament would have to approve any open-ended troop presence deal, so it’s possible that Ulayyan and Jaberi’s perspective might actually matter. That, of course, would contrast starkly to that of our own Congress, since President Bush decided long ago that he can commit the U.S. to an indefinite war no matter what Congress thinks.