Opponents find new snag in US-Iraq accord

Say pact doesn't guard oil assets; Lawmakers still split as vote nears

Children look at a picture of themselves on the camera of a US Army soldier at the Nablus Primary School in Baghdad yesterday. (Karim Kadim/ Associated Press)

BAGHDAD - Iraqi lawmakers opposed to the proposed security agreement with the United States have seized on a new argument that had emerged only in recent days: the accord does not explicitly protect Iraq's vast oil wealth and other assets from seizure to satisfy billions of dollars in legal claims against the former government of Saddam Hussein.

An extension of this protection, which is guaranteed in the soon-to-expire UN resolution that the security agreement is meant to replace, will have to be negotiated separately, a wide range of Iraq and American officials who support the agreement acknowledged yesterday. They also acknowledged that such a move will be crucial to protecting Iraq's assets, or the government's main source of revenue - oil exports - could be thrown into disarray when the UN resolution expires Dec. 31.

Despite the complexities of protecting the assets, members of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet continued to push yesterday for approval of the security agreement. It appeared doubtful that the newfound hole in the agreement would create enough additional opposition in Parliament to defeat final approval in a vote scheduled for Wednesday. Supporters of the agreement expressed confidence yesterday that it would still pass by a significant margin and that ways to extend the protection of Iraqi assets would be found.

But to Iraqi critics, the failure of the agreement to protect those assets reinforced their doubts. They said the defeat of the agreement, which would become the legal basis for the continued American military presence in Iraq after more than five and a half years of war, could not be ruled out.

"There is no respectable government that would sign such an agreement," said Mahdi al-Hafedh, a member of Parliament who opposes it and was among the first to raise the issue of the expiring protections. Given all the unknowns, he said, the original UN resolution - not just the protection clauses - should be extended six months to enable further study of the security agreement.

The issue first emerged Saturday when parliamentary opponents pointed out that the agreement could not, by itself, ensure that Iraqi assets would continue to be protected against claims that could not only consume billions of dollars but also make it difficult for Iraq to sell oil and move the proceeds through banks around the world, where courts could "attach" - in effect, seize - money to settle legal judgments.

Those judgments have been granted in everything from basic claims of damages by Americans who were badly treated as prisoners of war or used as "human shields," against American bombardment in the 1991 war, to more fanciful assertions that Hussein was, for example, behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 or the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Yesterday, in response to the criticism in Parliament, where both Iraqi and American government officials have labored mightily to win votes for the security agreement, the Iraqi minister of finance, Bayan Jabr, told a news conference that the Iraqi government "was not able to achieve all of its wishes" in sections of the agreement relating to the protection of Iraqi assets.

But he said that the agreement was well worth supporting because in it, the United States pledged to press the Security Council to continue the protections if Iraq produced a plan for resolving all legal claims on its assets. Two senior US officials said the agreement contained assurances that the United States would work to extend the protections by the Security Council.

"It is the highest level of assurance in a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq that they're ever going to get," one said. The officials said that if Iraq devised a strong plan to resolve outstanding legal claims on its money, they believed the Security Council was likely to extend the protections for a year.

Iraq has already started talks with the State Department to consolidate and resolve some of the cases, said Fadhil Mohammed Jawad, a legal adviser to the prime minister, but progress was slow.