By Anita McNaught, Baghdad Bureau

We were ready from late morning.

I’m chained to the satellite dish at the Baghdad Bureau, ready to go live at any second, while my Iraqi colleagues are penned into the media area in Parliament, trying to stay afloat while strong political currents swirl around them.

One of them phones me, to describe the melee in the building… five different kinds of security forces.. too many journalists.. harried Parliamentarians.. and negotiations of the finest Machiavellian kind still going on.

The session is meant to start at 1pm.. the Big Vote is scheduled for 3.

An hour or so later, another colleague who’s been working the phones comes over to report:

- They’ve decided what law to use. They can’t pass the new International Treaties and Agreements Bill in time, so they are going to use one – oh the irony! – dating back to the Saddam era. It requires only a simple majority – 51% – to pass.

Well, that’ll please the Sadr-ists…

We find out why the building is bristling with paramilitaries. Both PM Maliki and President Talibani are due to arrive. To do some last minute arm-twisting? To deliver victory speeches? No-body knows.. because the deals are still being negotiated.

This is a game of political pass-the-parcel. No-one really wants to be left holding this Agreement when the music stops. Too few ordinary Iraqis understand what’s in it, what the implications are, and why so many lawmakers might be inclined to sign up.

It is, after all, the point at which the Americans are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government. And the UN justification – such as it was – ceases to exist.

Then we hear about the Referendum Initiative. This is the amendment the so-far unco-operative Sunni Parties want added. Six months after Parliament passes the Agreement, it goes up for a yea or nay vote to… the Iraqi people.

So if it all goes horribly wrong, and Maliki thought he could share the blame with Parliament for agreeing to it… now Parliament can shift the responsibility off onto the Iraqi people. When the music stops.

From time to time, my Iraqi colleagues manage to catch lawmakers on the hoof and persuade them to share their views.

One, from the Iraqi National List – the ‘Allawi Party’ associated with former PM Iyad Allawi – secular-ish and pragmatic – says that personally he is against the Agreement because it will create more problems between Iraqis.. but he thinks his bloc might be prepared to sign up to it. He wants that referndum.

Then – to his evident delight – my Iraqi colleague manages to buttonhole Sadr Party book-banger-desk-smasher Ahmed Al-Massoudi. “We will use all means, political and legal, to fight this Bill,” he declares. Al Massoudi mentions taking the issue to the Federal Court.

But would the Sadr Party take up arms again – would they ask JAM to fight?

“No,” Al Massoudi says, “… I don’t think so”.

Now we hear the session has been delayed till 5pm, with the vote perhaps at 6pm.

My colleagues in Parliament have had no food for hours. There’s a kiosk selling tea and coffee – but they need sustenance, not stimulants. They’ve had enough of those already.

A spokesman for the UIA, the governing Shi’a coalition declares that they have the numbers. It’s a “comfortable margin’ – “a landslide” even.

A Turkoman MP from their same group gives a speech declaring this “an historic moment in Iraqi history”..

But we hear the Sunni Parties are still negotiating hard with the Iraqi President. Neither he, nor PM Maliki have yet showed. The words ‘chickens’ and ‘count’ come to mind..

An update. The vote is at 5pm. A show of hands. Covered live on TV.

At 20 minutes to 5, they adjourn Parliament for the day.

No Vote. No deals closed today.

We reckon they’ve got around three working weeks left to sort this.

My American colleagues are now beside themselves. The Vote is scheduled for tomorrow? On Thanksgiving? Are they nuts?

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By Anita McNaught, Baghdad Bureau

The Iraqi Parliament held another session today…Unwisely, here at the FOX News Baghdad Bureau, we thought we knew the agenda.

It’s simple. Lawmakers have to pass the ‘International Treaties and Agreements Law’. Without this law, they cannot vote on the US-Iraq Withdrawal and Cooperation Agreement. (That’s the one that gives the deadline for US troops to leave in 2011).

Parliament has, of course, had nine months – while the US and Iraqi negotiating teams drove each other up the wall  – to pass this Treaties Law. But they didn’t. They started debating it last week.

So today, they voted it in, right?

Wrong.

Today they passed resolutions condemning violence against women and new laws on returning refugees and immigrants.

In fact, since Saturday’s unprecedented open-access debate on the US-Iraq Withdrawal and Coooperation Agreement, they haven’t discussed  the single most important issue on the Iraqi political agenda at all.

Which is not to say they haven’t been talking. Across Baghdad and beyond, there are some furious meetings going on. Wrangling, horsetrading and political brinkmanship. The Maliki government wants a ‘yes’ vote from lawmakers – it’s a fine time to make a deal.

Very few of these meetings are, quite understandably, seeing the light of day… TV cameras were allowed into a meeting the Prime Minister had with the Shi’a Coalition the UIA (United Iraqi Alliance) that put him in power in 2005.. But these MPs aren’t the problem – they were always going to vote as their leader asked.

Also on the weekend, our long-suffering Speaker Mahmoud Al Mashhedani popped up in Amman. Caught on the front pages of the Jordan newspapers, shaking King Abdullah’s hand. Perhaps he needed a break from the stresses of keeping Parliament on the rails.. More likely, he was brokering deals as well.

Meanwhile, the Prime Ministerial bluster level is rising. At the end of the UIA meeting, he warned that America might throw in the towel if Parliament said  “no” , pulling all troops out forthwith and plunging Iraq into terrible chaos.

Well, what he said was: “It would not be in Iraq’s best interests at the moment”. But everyone knows what he means.

But according to my colleagues

And tomorrow, the Vote is meant to happen. Sometime after 1pm Iraq-time.

Does the PM have the numbers? That’s the question tonight.

Many Parliamentarians have already gone overseas.. some to Mecca. On Saturday they didn’t even manage to achieve a quorum (138 members present out of 275) to hold a parliamentary session.

Staunch supporters of the agreement – the large Shi’a and Kurd blocks – should in theory combine to give the government a simple majority .. IF enough of them show up.

But even if they were to all be there tomorrow, a simple majority is not enough. The Great Arbiter Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani gave his qualified go-ahead on condition the Agreement had widespread support. A ‘yes’ vote so slim it lacks political legitimacy will just cause more trouble.

But the Sunni blocks are divided between those who believe the deal is so deeply flawed (though fundamentally a good idea) that the ‘benevolent and protective’ UN Chapter 7 mandate needs to be renewed for 3-6 months so a better deal can be hammered out with the US.. And those who can live with the deal, but aren’t going to vote ‘yes’ without some major favours from the Shi’a government.. Freeing thousands of Sunni prisoners in jail topping their list.

The government daren’t risk rejection. Or do they?

The UN are running around with the option of renewing the Chapter 7 Mandate.. like firemen with a blanket at the bottom of a burning building.

Face-saving compromises are very much the Iraqi Way, in these explosively delicate  times. Watch for UN Iraq Chief Staffan di Mistura to step elegantly into the fray in the coming days.

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By Anita McNaught, Baghdad Bureau

So you have a near-mutinous Parliament, seething with resentment and frustration, holding in their hands an International Agreement with the US that most of them, in one way or another, have ‘issues’ with.

What do you do?

You let them get it out of their system.

This was the stroke of genius at the weekend. The Word came down from the Presidency Council to let the lawmakers talk… Let them talk, and talk, as much as they wanted. Open the floodgates, let no holds be barred, no fulm be unfulminated.

So, Saturday morning, the long-suffering (but distinctly mischevious) Speaker of the House, Mahmoud Al Mashhedani invited his parliamentary colleagues to lay it all out for the world  – and their voting constituents – to hear.

Well, not quite all. Our old friend from the Sadr Party, Ahmed  Al-Massoudi, instantly decided to pick a fight over whether the Speaker had a quorum to proceed.

The Speaker’s enormous eyes narrowed.

“Please. Don’t waste our time…”, he snarled.

Then off the lawmakers went, making some fine arguments along the way.

Early on, former Mininster of Planning, Mehdi Al Hafedh, popped up. He looks like a tired mathematics teacher, but his quiet assurance silenced the room. He’d been looking into the US/Iraqi Agreement and he was worried.

There’s a lot of Iraqi money – more than $US 60 billion by his reckoning – from oil revenues piled up in international bank accounts, all under the protection of the United Nations under Resolution no. 1483. That means that money can’t be touched by any of Iraq’s many creditors, and can only be spent on reconstructing Iraq.

But when the UN Chapter VII Mandate comes off on December 31st, it’s potentially open season. Creditors dating back 20 years or more, to the Iran/Iraq war, to massacred minorities like the Kurds, to the Kuwaitis .. Russia, China for broken deals.. all could have claims for compensation.. and many of Iraq’s neighbours have not forgiven Saddam’s development debts either.

Any of Iraq’s assets could be seized as security. The Mininster of Defense worried this weekend that Iraq’s navy can’t keep Iraq’s oil shipments safe from pirates.. or its army stop Turkey from invading. That could be the LEAST of his worries.

Where in this Agreement, asked Al Hafedh, were the guarantees that Iraq’s badly-needed savings wouldn’t be grabbed? There was little that explicitly guaranteed American protection. This was a recipe for disaster.

“Our days of special treatment are over”, he mused. “International relations are getting more complex and unpredictable every day. We cannot rely on continued American support ”.

The Prime Minister had so far been deaf to all entreaties to amend the agreement, he explained. So Al-Hafedh pleaded for an extension to the UN mandate, to give Iraq time to work out how to protect itself.

His views were echoed and endorsed by another eminent speaker, Adnan Pachachi, former Iraqi Foreign Mininster and one of the architects of the present UAE.

But by then, the fun had really begun.

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By Anita McNaught, FOX News correspondent

You could call it a political hangover. The Iraqi Council of Representatives was all remorse and contrition today.

Chastened Parliamentarians sat around, engaged in muted mutual admonition.

They made quiet speeches. “We regret the behaviour yesterday”.. “This is not how we want the world to see us”.. “We went over the top..”.

Speaker of the House Mahmoud al-Mashhadani (shown below) was presiding again from his big desk at the top of the room. His enormous eyes scanned the delegates. Eyes that look like they have seen too much.

But he wasn’t buying into the communal repentence. Finally, he intervened.

“You’re all wasting time wringing your hands, “ he scolded. “Let’s just get on with passing the legislation, like you are supposed to do.”.

But here we discovered that the Bad Boys of the Sadr Bloc had won their point of order. Yesterday, they had quite persistently pointed out that they couldn’t pass an international treaty until Parliament had passed the law.. enabling it to pass international treaties. And that, pretty much, was where it all came apart.

Today – clearly after some furious back-room consultation – they were allowed that argument, and the session resumed with another reading of the International Treaties and Agreements Bill. Round One to the Sadrists.

But having ticked the boxes, the Speaker then turned back to the burning issue – this US/iraqi agreement. He delivered a speech to his Parliamentary colleagues..

“The Iraqi people have been kept in the dark about this Agreement and what it means. If you vote to approve it, you must explain fully to the Iraqi people why. And if you reject it, you must also fully explain your reasons..”

And, he went on, he wanted to notify Parliament that members of the Tawafic Sunni bloc have a number of demands for the government on detainees and amnesties.. and if those demands were not handled well, the government could not count on Sunni support.

Let’s stop and count the numbers here.

– There are 275 members of the Iraqi Parliament.

– The Sadrists say they won’t support the deal. That’s around 30 votes.

– Another small Shi’a party, Fadilha, came out earlier in the week and said they won’t either – that’s another 17 votes.

– The various Sunni parties control around 74 votes. Tawafic have 44 of those.

– The Kurds, 53 members.

– And the other major Shi’a parties in coalition have 85 between them.

– Then there are independents and one-member parties, which come to about 13.

IF the Agreement comes to a vote on Nov. 24 as was originally intended, then there is another issue to deal with: does it need a 51 percent majority or a two-thirds majority to pass?  That, too, is yet to be decided.

Now if the House were full, which it almost never is, a rough calculation suggests.

Two-thirds means roughly 181 votes in support needed… and 95 votes to defeat it.

Fifty-one-percent means the Iraqi government needs only 138 votes to pass the Agreement. Or the same on the other side for them to dump it.

The Sadr and Fadilha parties alone cannot scupper this Agreement, however much  noise they make. If a significant number of Sunnis decide to bail, then the government could be in trouble.

But  right now, notwithstanding the posturing in Parliament, the government looks like it still has the numbers.

Prime minister Maliki today at a press conference was bullish – defending the Agreement and saying there would be no further tweaking.

And supporters of the Agreement took to the streets yesterday around Iraq. In speeches not entirely flattering to the US, the marchers said ANY deal which got America out of Iraq by an agreed date was better than none.

This afternoon, State TV channel Iraqia engaged in its own act of contrition – running in FULL the coverage of Parliament’s near-riot yesterday, which they had so shyly cut away from just as the situation threatened to get out of control.

You can watch part of it here. done

It was quite reassuring, in a perverse way, to see female opposition MPs pile into the fray with equal gusto. I worry that they are too quiet, most of the time

Actually, we have all seen far worse in debating chambers over the years in places like Korea and Taiwan. There, politicians have actually managed to land a few punches, broken chairs over each other’s heads.

For every Iraqi voter disgusted by what they are seeing this week, there’ll be another pleased their point of view is being defended.

Click here to read more of Anita McNaught’s ‘On the Scene’ blogs!

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…

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