i realize everyone's obsessing about some kind of election thing, but iraq has a looming crisis over the SOFA. for whatever reason, the SOFA matter has been all but absent from the presidential race. mccain seems to have bamboozled the press into believing that iraq is a nice stable resounding success simply because it's not as big of a fucking disaster as it was 15 months ago. it's strange, daily violence like this would be considered a major crisis if it happened anywhere else in the world. but because iraq was even worse fairly recently, politicians can use words like "peace" and "stability" to describe current conditions without being laughed off the stage.
but the issue isn't going away. the current wrinkle are the remarks of massoud barzani, leader of the autonomous kurdish region in iraq, in which he suggested that kurdistan might sign its own status of forces agreement with the u.s. if the national government can't reach a deal. this caused a major political storm as it sounds a lot like kurdish separatism. alas, it seems it's not a big enough storm to make it to the english language press. (here's an english translation of the article via google translator)
but, you know, the surge worked. so none of this can really be happening.
(via)
