I understand time constraints, and don’t expect you to come up with a citation. There are certainly more important things in life than discussions at CAF.
But I don’t agree with your claim that the Iraqi government was eager for the US to stay, and that President Obama ignored that desire. Here are a couple news articles from last year:
Brett McGurk, who was the negotiator with Iraq at the time, stated that the Iraqi government very much wanted an agreement for U.S. troop retention confirmed, on the Iraqi side by executive order. I did not read an explanation why, only that Maliki wanted it, and repeatedly requested it. Possibly it related to the fact that Maliki did not, at that time, have a majority coalition in the Iraqi parliament. Obama insisted that the agreement had to be ratified by the Iraqi parliament or no deal. Time ran out according to the 2008 agreement and Obama put the withdrawal into motion.
Unfortunately, Maliki later obtained a working majority by cutting a deal with Al Sadr and the rest is as we know it now to be.
Now, one might make the argument that somehow only a parliamentary ratification would be acceptable for (what would seem to me, arcane) legalistic reasons. But at the time, the Iraqi parliament was not capable of much in the way of concerted action of any kind. The executive ran the country. It does not seem out of the realm of possibility to me that Obama insisted on the parliamentary ratification as a face-saving way of getting out and laying the blame on Iraq’s doorstep.
But the U.S. was not thrown out, and there was no sticking point in the negotiations McGurk considered intractable other than the executive order vs parliamentary approval issue. In short, negotiations didn’t fail because of extraterritoriality, they failed because there were never serious negotiations.
“When the negotiations did start, they were premised on an unrealistic demand communicated by President Obama to Prime Minister Maliki. Obama wanted the Iraqi parliament to ratify whatever agreement was reached, despite the fact that Maliki had requested an executive agreement that would not be subject to legislative approval, and the lead U.S. negotiator, Brett McGurk, had recommended taking this approach. Maliki offered an executive agreement several times, Gordon notes, but the Obama administration stuck to its original demand. President Obama did not exert himself to smooth the negotiations, confining his communications with Maliki to the initial conversation in June and a discussion in October during which the U.S. president told his Iraqi counterpart that the negotiations were over and U.S. forces were leaving.”
nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/328692/losing-iraq?pg=3
