WASHINGTON — President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki signed a joint declaration Monday that sets out principles for a broad agreement to be negotiated in the next year that would define a future relationship between their countries and guarantee a U.S. troop presence in Iraq for at least a few more years.
Iraqi and U.S. officials said next year would be the last in which both countries ask for a United Nations Security Council resolution that tasks America with guaranteeing Iraq's security.
The new joint declaration calls for future political, economic and security relations between Baghdad and Washington to be negotiated in 2008. Baghdad also will ask the United Nations to remove it from Chapter 7 status, a legal designation that has in effect classified Iraq as a pariah state since ex-dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"The United States has promised that the multinational forces will stay under a United Nations mandate only until the end of 2008," Maliki said in a televised address. "The final extension for the multinational forces under the U.N. mandate will finish in 2008."
Still, Shiite Muslim parliament member Haidar Abadi, who serves as an advisor to Maliki and belongs to the prime minister's Islamic Dawa Party, said Iraq envisioned a need for the U.S. military to stay longer than the end of 2008.
"It will help Iraq protect its borders against foreign aggression and it will help the Iraqi government fighting terrorists: Al Qaeda, the Saddamists and the outlaws, those outside the law," Abadi said.
Iraq will want the U.S. to continue training Iraqi troops for the foreseeable future, Abadi said, but he made it clear that Iraq did not envision a relationship in which U.S. bases remained in the country half a century after they were established.
"No military bases will be offered for long terms like in South Korea," Abadi said, adding that what was being discussed was a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces in the next few years.
"If the current security improvements are safeguarded and continue, we are hoping a huge number of U.S. forces are withdrawn. . . . It depends in the next year whether the Iraqi security forces have the confidence to carry on their task without any help from them," Abadi said.
Another important element of the declaration for Iraq's Shiite-led government is that it commits the United States to backing the democratically elected Maliki government, which some U.S. military commanders and politicians have criticized as ineffectual.
