Bush, Maliki Break Iraqi Law to Renew U.N. Mandate for Occupation

On Tuesday, the Bush administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council extending the mandate that provides legal cover for foreign troops to operate in Iraq for another year.

The move violated both the Iraqi constitution and a law passed earlier this year by the Iraqi parliament -- the only body directly elected by all those purple-finger-waving Iraqis in 2005 -- and it defied the will of around 80 percent of the Iraqi population.

Earlier in the week, a group representing a majority of lawmakers in Iraq's parliament -- a group made up of Sunni, Shiite and secular leaders -- sent a letter to the Security Council, a rough translation of which reads: "We reject in the strongest possible terms the unconditional renewal of the mandate and ask for clear mechanisms to obligate all foreign troops to completely withdrawal from Iraq according to an announced timetable."

We don't know if it was even read by members of the Security Council, but we do know that it, like previous communications from the Iraqi legislature, was completely ignored.

James Paul, director of the Global Policy Forum, which follows the United Nations' intrigues, said that while "there's concern in many delegations at the United Nations about what is going on," Security Council delegates "are under instructions from their governments to lay low and pass the U.S. resolution." According to Paul, the move "shows the despotic power of the U.S. government to force everyone to knuckle under, no matter how much the law is violated."

It was an egregious assault on Iraq's nascent democracy, as well as its supposed "sovereignty," and can only encourage more bloodshed. Yet the commercial media has so far ignored the story entirely, reporting only that "Iraq" had requested that the mandate be renewed. Alternet