By Anita McNaught, Baghdad Bureau

The Iraqi Parliament is, as a general rule, a lively place. Iraqis are passionate, voluble, combative…

These days, the People’s Representatives relish being able to speak their minds without being taken immediately out the back and shot by Saddam’s Mukhabarat.  Which is not to say it’s a safe job – it’s not… Iraqi lawmakers are still being assassinated – an MP from firebrand Shi’a cleric Muqtada al Sadr’s party was killed barely a month ago.

But today was destined to be more lively than most, as it was the day that lawmakers finally got to see  the long-wrangled-over US/Iraqi Agreement setting out the terms for the final three years of America’s hand-on involvement in Iraq.

This Agreement started out with the comfortingly misleading name of ‘SOFA’ – the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’. It’s now tactfully called the ‘Agreement on the Withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and the Organisation of their Activities during their Temporary Presence in Iraq’.

A more suitable abbreviation for this would be ‘DOOR’, because that’s what the Iraqis have shown their American allies.

With public opinion in Iraq stretched between those who believe America should stay on indefinitely, and those who believe America should go yesterday, unanimity in the Council of Representatives was always going to be an issue.

There is perhaps one area of common understanding among lawmakers – That if the US were to pull out tomorrow, they would all be in danger of being hunted down by their oppostions’ death squads. But even here, there would be a divide between those who would admit to this publicly, and those who would not.

When the US and Iraqi governments began negotiations in March, it was all supposed to be very straightforward. Months later, when the Iraqis had acquired not one but two negotiating teams, plus an Iranian back-channel, it looked like the Agreement was never going to get signed and the American team was despairing of ever reaching formally-acknowledged common ground…

Then, suddenly, the Iranians declared that the Agreement was actually pretty decent, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani – Iraq’s Great Arbiter – gave it a qualified thumbs-up, and the Iraqi government immediately decided to sign up to it.

But the responsibility of passing it into law rests largely with the Iraqi Parliament, and lawmakers were understandably not delighted with being handed what looked like a very bad career move.

While the Americans are unquestionably handy to have around, there are no votes here in being America’s cheerleader.

And Iraqi MP had more reasons to be unhappy. Not only had they not been consulted during the process of drawing up the Agreement – and were largely in the dark about the previous drafts – but they were expected to pass the  deal without being able to alter a word of it.

The most consistent and energetic opponent of US involvement in Iraq – if we can put Al Qaeda to one side for a second or two – is undoubtedly the Sadr Party. And today they did not disappoint, launching objection after objection to what they clearly saw as government railroading of the Agreement.

But here they had allies, because the inconvenient fact is that the Iraqi Parliament lacks the mandate to do what they are being asked to do. There is a piece of legislation that deals with the rights of the Council Of Representatives to pass international treaties – but that law hasn’t been passed through parliament yet either.

So one particularly passionate and famously combative Sadist MP, Ahmed  Al-Massoudi, waved the Procedural Handbook at the Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.. who waved first a finger and then both arms indignantly back at him, and then others piled noisily into the argument and everyone stopped listening to everyone else. Then the Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to intervene, asking for cool heads and pragamatism about the timetable – a plea which everyone felt they could happily ignore.

But then in a final act of terrible provocation, one lawmaker actually began reading from the contentious US/Iraqi Agreement. When MP Al Massoudi went towards him to take it out of his hands, an unseemly scuffle nearly ensued.

It was at this point that the State TV channel, Iraqia, felt it appropriate to suspend its live coverage of Parliament and run a news bulletin instead. By the time is was over, the Speaker had suspended the session and sent everyone home.

‘Had MPs forgotten they were being broadcast live…?’ a wise parliamentary elder statesman pointed out to his mutinous colleagues.

“We’re not supposed to show the world the way we’re acting..”

Too late. Long before then, all of us in the Fox Baghdad Bureau were utterly glued to our TV screens – as doubtless was much of the rest of Iraq.

This drama continues again tomorrow, when Parliament reconvenes.

It’s now must-see TV.

To find out what the fuss is all about, read for yourself! Click here for the text of an unconfirmed copy of the SOFA Agreement.

Watch the events in Iraqi Parliament below! Also, click here for the English translation of the video.