Well, Is It Victory Or Humiliation?

摘要

Who would have thought, when John McCain and Barack Obama were going head-to-head on Iraq during America's election campaign, that the Iraqis would decide for themselves when to sling the Americans out? That, however,rnis precisely what they did this week when Iraq's parliament approved a troop-withdrawal agreement which the government of Nuri al-Maliki had spent a year squeezing out of its reluctant American interlocutors.rnThe agreement under discussion stipulates that American troops will withdraw into their bases by the middle of next year and leave Iraq altogether by the end of 2011. This is, on thernface of it, a firm timetable. It contains very few ifs and buts and no clauses that give America the right to linger on uninvited. Iraq, it seems, will not be a home for the permanent military bases that some Americans wanted and many Iraqis feared. And even during the transition America has now promised not to use Iraq as a base from which to attack neighbours such as Syria (which it has raided openly at least once from Iraqi territory) or Iran (which it may also have attacked covertly).