From the Independent:
Iraq and the United States have finally agreed on a security pact which would mean that US forces would withdraw from Iraq by 2011, American and Iraqi officials said yesterday.
This UK paper is leading with the headline that "Obama's Iraq plans vindicated..."
The article rightfully points out that the Bush White House will attempt to spin this as a "victory" in Iraq:
The US administration will present the pact as a sign of its success in Iraq but in fact the accord is very different from originally envisaged by Washington which would largely have continued the occupation as before.
What this means to me is that McCain's camp might try to say: "Look, we've won in Iraq, restored peace. If we'd pulled out as Senator Obama wanted us to, we would have left in defeat," when in fact, the current plan (which still needs final approval on the Iraqi side) is exactly the kind of measured withdrawal Obama has been advocating.
The article is quite pointed in the White House's goal in spinning this, or perhaps of even signing the accord NOW:
Iraqi politicians have always assumed that Washington's insistence on signing a new accord before the presidential election was motivated by the White House's hope that the accord would be seen as a sign that its Iraq policy had at last produced a success. The Republican contender, Senator John McCain, started off his campaign by saying that US troops might stay for 100 years and there should be no date for their withdrawal. The Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama, wants combat troops home by the middle of 2010, which was also the date originally proposed by Mr Maliki.
If this makes it into the mainstream news stream, we must make sure that the truth of what this agreement is gets out there and that everyone knows that this is what Barack Obama has been calling for all along; that the Bush administration's agreement to it is a sign that they could no longer ignore the most prudent solution to the war in Iraq. We cannot let them spin this as a "victory" in Iraq.