US offers $3'000'000 brides to Iraqi MP for SOFA agreement

Press TV reports: 'US bribing Iraqi MPs to sign deal'

The US has offered bribes to Iraqi MPs to lure them into endorsing a security deal that critics believe would make Iraq a US colony.

Sources in Iraq's parliament told Press TV on Thursday that Washington has offered three-million dollars in bribe to the lawmakers who sign the "framework accord."

Under the agreement, the US would be allowed to set up at least 13 permanent military bases in Iraq and US citizens would be granted immunity from legal prosecution.

Iraqi lawmakers, however, vowed that they would never sign the agreement which would turn their country into 'a US colony'.

The accord has faced strong objections from religious and political figures inside and outside Iraq.

Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has also protested the deal, calling on the people to hold demonstrations after every Friday prayers against the accord.

The country's most revered Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has formerly objected to the deal, saying he would not allow the government to sign such a deal with "the US occupiers" as long as he was alive.
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Commentary: what is amazing here is not that the Empire would try to bribe Iraqi MPs into accepting the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) but that the Imperial High Command does not seem to realize that the entire project was stillborn as soon as Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani condemned it. Ditto for Moqtada al-Sadr.

Once al-Sistani and al-Sadr declared their absolute opposition to the deal, even a unanimous vote from the Iraqi Parliament would be utterly meaningless. It appears that the Empire has not come to grasps with the fact that the Maliki regime and the Iraqi Parliament only matter inside the Greene Zone (just like Karzai is, as the Afghans call him, nothing more than the Mayor of Kabul). From an American point of view, bribing the Iraqi MPs is nothing but an outrageous waste of taxpayer's money which simply cannot bring any useful results.

I marvel at the utter stupidity and blindness of the folks in the USA who are running the Iraqi dossier (or, for that matter, the entire Middle-East). Instead of preparing rooftop evacuation from the Green Zone (yes, like the ones in Saigon), they are wasting their energy, time, and ressources on some meaningless SOFA agreement.

That is truly the pathetic hubris of an Empire in the last throes of agony.