Word: sofas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...import of the deal, known as the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), is inarguable: after nearly six years, it would mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation. Under SOFA's terms, the U.S. would withdraw nearly all 150,000 of its troops by New Year's Day 2012, leaving Iraq's security in the hands of its own army...
Meanwhile, the parliamentary drama has united Iraqis of all persuasions into a nation of SOFA potatoes: not since Saddam Hussein's trial have so many been transfixed by a legal debate. In restaurants and cafés across Baghdad, TV screens normally featuring music videos and Arabic soap operas were instead tuned to Iraqi news channels that seemed at times to be devoted exclusively to the story. It was democracy as reality TV. Iraqis watched as politicians denounced each other across the parliament floor and as Maliki griped at a press conference that failure to ratify the pact would leave...
Opponents of the SOFA want the U.S. military to leave Iraq sooner than the 2012 deadline that al-Maliki is pushing for. But many of the sheiks are leaders of the Awakening Councils, the U.S.-funded paramilitaries that helped drive al-Qaeda out of Anbar. They - and thousands of their men - receive salaries from the U.S. military, and they don't want their paymasters to leave any sooner than absolutely necessary...
There's another political motivation behind their support of al-Maliki and the SOFA. The agreement is opposed by the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), the Sunni party loathed by the sheiks. The IIP won control of the Anbar provincial government in the last election, when most of the sheiks boycotted the vote. Now the chieftains want to supplant the IIP as the main voice of Iraq's Sunnis. Backing the SOFA and al-Maliki allows them to distinguish themselves from the IIP. The sheiks, in short, are playing democratic politics...
...time for the main event. A portable dais is hauled into a corner of the quadrangle, and a series of sheiks troop up to it and make brief speeches. Their political inexperience is revealed by their language, which is absurdly over the top. Opponents of the SOFA are denounced as "enemies of Iraq" and "antinationals." There are ad hominem attacks on some of the politicians opposed to the agreement. The IIP is not mentioned by name, but nobody here is in any doubt that most of the vitriol is aimed at it. Some of the speakers come out of left...