Cross posted from Iraq Insider

Peter Galbraith, a top Iraq expert and former ambassador to Croatia, issued a statement today on the status of forces agreement (SOFA) recently signed by the United States and Iraq.

Galbraith serves as senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the Council’s sister organization.

He said:

“The agreement represents a stunning and humiliating reversal of course by the Bush administration, which had vehemently opposed any timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. For the last two years, President Bush has pretended that Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki is a democrat and an American ally. In fact, Maliki is a sectarian Shiite politician who heads a government dominated by pro-Iranian religious parties. The U.S. presence now no longer serves the interests of Iraq’s ruling Shiite religious parties or their Iranian allies, so we are now being asked to leave. While U.S. withdrawal is made easier by the fact that both the Iraqi government and the new U.S. administration want American troops out, the confluence of events leading to the agreement underscores the folly of President Bush’s lost Iraq war.”

Of course, we timed this statement to come out this morning because the Iraqi parliament was supposed to vote on the SOFA today. Now, however, it appears that not only has the vote been postponed until tomorrow, but the Shiites and Kurds also have acquiesced to a Sunni demand to hold a national referendum on the SOFA next year. Even if the SOFA is approved by parliament tomorrow, it could still be rescinded if it is rejected in the referendum next year.

I don’t know if this is democracy, but the lack of any clear schedule and the multiple layers of caveats does remind me of the United States Senate. Now, if only we could get these guys to brawl the way the Iraqis have recently.

Yesterday we posted a new analysis of the U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement on the website of the Council’s sister organization. The takeaway, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing (it’s kinda long), is that a research and advocacy organiza…

Arms control advocates finally felt like part of the popular group back in 2007 when 4 of the most respected former foreign policy officials made their “global zero” debut with a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It’s kind of like when the book nerd got invited to the cheerleader table – finally someone was accepting them for all they had to offer. And while the “No Nukes!” chant may still draw an image of protesting hippies for the most conservative of minds, in reality, the idea is making its way to the main stage – and with the approval of big-player Democrats and Republicans alike, including a nod from President-elect Obama.

In this recent piece from the Boston Globe, writer Drake Bennet highlights the progress that the “world free of nuclear weapons” movement has made just in the last two years.

The highlight (in my eyes) is below, or click here for the full article.

“Total nuclear disarmament – “getting to zero” in the arms-control argot – has become a mainstream cause. Voices from the heights of the American foreign policy establishment have begun to argue that, in a world of inevitably unruly globalization, increasing interest in nuclear energy, incomplete alliances, ambitious suicide terrorists, and ever-present human fallibility, it will never be enough to improve controls on the world’s nuclear weapons, or to reduce their numbers. We have to commit to eliminating them altogether.

These arguments are being made not by popes and mahatmas and Greens but by former secretaries of state and secretaries of defense, by generals and nuclear scientists, Democrats and Republicans. The leaders of the new no-nuke movement are George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, four of the most respected figures in American foreign policy circles. Over the past two years, they have, in speeches, at arms-control conferences and, most prominently, in two widely circulated op-ed pieces, lent their authority to an idea that is still seen as fairly radical.

And there is evidence that these arguments are being taken seriously by the people who are going to be making decisions about nuclear policy in the new administration. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama repeatedly committed himself to a nuclear-free future. One of his key foreign policy advisers, Ivo Daalder, coauthored an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, a leading foreign policy journal, laying out a plan for how to get there.

No one is arguing that this is a goal that will be reached in the next eight years, but there’s a sense that for the first time in a long while, real and significant movement in that direction is possible.”

Again, full article here.

LATEST UPDATE: Coleman’s lead shrinks from about 215 votes to 174 votes. Latest on Huffington Post. ———————– UPDATE: Huffington Post reports that a recent political study shows that if unrecorded ballots are counted, Al Franken is high…

Thanks to all of you who entered our 2008 Elections Contest! Out of over 1,000 entries, we have our winners!

Congratulations to Tyler Wigg-Stevenson (see photo to the left), our first place winner who scored 24 out of 25 possible points for the contest. (Note: we took out the Minnesota Senate race and Ohio’s 15th district race from consideration, as both have still not been called.)

As with a lot of races this year, the results from our contest were close and our top two winners tied for the general questions, but Tyler came out on top after scoring the tiebreakers.

It’s no surprise that Tyler is a supporter of the Council. He’s the director of the Two Futures Project, a Christian-based organization that promotes multilateral nuclear disarmament, and Policy Director at Faithful Security: the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger.

When asked what he hopes for with the results from all the election, he said that: “I’m hopeful that with this administration and Congress we can sow the seeds of a forward-looking American security policy for the 21st century, wherein the multilateral global elimination of nuclear weapons is the organizing principle for our national nuclear weapons policy.” Us too Tyler!

Also, we’d like to say congratulations to our second place winner, Richard Faust of Minneapolis, Minnesota AND a handful of people that deserve, at the least, an honorable mention for their savvy politico skills.

Pamela Greenwa, David Staley, George LaRoza, Wendy Binnie and Jill Linzee all scored very close to our first and second place winners. And, Jason Arnold was the only person to guess the exact number of electoral votes that Obama would win by Nov. 15 (you might have even beat CNN experts with that one).

Thanks to all who entered! Here’s to January 20, 2009.