SHIITES PROTEST AGAINST U.S. PACT

BAGHDAD — More than 10,000 Iraqis, mostly supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, gathered in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on Friday to protest the security agreement with the United States that is scheduled for a vote in Parliament on Monday.
A crowd in Baghdad rallied Friday against the security pact with the United States, which still awaits consideration by Parliament and the Presidency Council.

Demonstrators hanged a black-hooded effigy of President Bush from a column with powerful symbolism: it supported the statue of Saddam Hussein that was toppled by American troops in April 2003, after Baghdad fell.

Removing the hood to beat the effigy with a shoe, a particularly deep Iraqi insult, they put a whip in its right hand and in its left a briefcase on which was written, “The security agreement is shame and dishonor.”

The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has signed the pact, which places new limits on the powers of American troops in Iraq but provides for them to stay in the country up to the end of 2011. The final steps are parliamentary approval, and affirmation by the country’s three-man Presidency Council.

But opposition has been heated, particularly from the Sadr political bloc. And even if Mr. Maliki’s ruling coalition secures the necessary votes, Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has indicated that he believes the deal will be acceptable to the Iraqi people only if it achieves some degree of consensus.

This means Mr. Maliki must somehow calm the opposition’s fury, as well as get some support from Iraq’s minority Sunnis, many of whom are nervous about seeing American troops depart, fearing Iran and its Shiite allies in Baghdad.

In Firdos Square, protesters sat in rows of 50 stretching back more than half a mile. They filled Sadoun Street, beside the Palestine Hotel and in front of the colonnaded traffic circle where five years ago American troops pulled down the dictator’s statue in scenes televised around the world.

While the rally was billed as a cross-community effort, to be attended by Shiite and Sunni clerics, the vast majority of those in attendance were Sadrists. Many had come from Mr. Sadr’s stronghold of Sadr City, and the chants the crowd took up were “Moktada, Moktada,” “No, no to America,” and “No, no to the agreement.”

Sadrist officials said they opposed the security agreement because they did not believe assurances that the Americans would ever leave. They depicted the pact as a successor to colonial-era treaties with Western powers in the last century that, they said, had “sold the Arab and the Muslim lands into occupation.”

Reading from a statement by Mr. Sadr, one of his followers, Sheik Abdelhadi al-Mohammedawi, said: “America has not and will not be useful. It is the enemy of Islam.”

To cheers and cries of “God is great” he continued, “The love of Iraq calls us not to let the foot of the atheists on our ground and to not permit them to stay three minutes, not three years.”

Quteiba al-Nadawi, a Sunni preacher, told the crowd: “We have rejected this agreement from the beginning. We are supporting our brothers the Sadrists, and we are supporting all honorable Iraqis who reject this agreement. We need freedom for our people and unity for Iraqis.”

Members 0f Iraqi security forces took up positions on rooftops and a mosque overlooking Firdos Square, with snipers and machine gunners keeping an eye on the crowd. There was no sign of American forces, and the protest was peaceful throughout.

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Obama - It is time for our civilian leaders to acknowledge a painful truth: we cannot impose a military solution on a civil war between Sunni and Shiite factions. The best chance we have to leave Iraq a better place is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political solution. And the only effective way to apply this pressure is to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2009 -- a date consistent with the goal set by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. This redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the Iraqi government meets the security, political, and economic benchmarks to which it has committed. But we must recognize that, in the end, only Iraqi leaders can bring real peace and stability to their country.