Just days after key Iraqi leaders said they'd rather wait to negotiate with President Obama than with Bush, White House propagandists are desperately trying to prop up the corpse of the Bush-Maliki "Agreement." The anonymous article by Reuters quotes an anonymous US official:

A senior U.S official said on Monday that the United States still hopes to reach a new security agreement with Iraq by July, even though Iraqi officials say negotiations are at an early stage...

A senior U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President George W. Bush's goal of completing the negotiations by July still stood.

"The consultations on all these issues are quite intense. We certainly intend to work -- and the Iraqi side has not told us anything to the contrary -- towards the idea of moving forward ... by July on this," he told reporters.

Oh really? Then why is an un-anonymous Iraqi spokesman saying the opposite?

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Sunday that talks on the deal were still at an early stage and that Washington and Baghdad differed over what should be in it.

According to AP's Robert H. Reid, the Iraqis have drafted an entirely different document!

Chief government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the Iraqi negotiators have a "vision and a draft that is different" from the Americans but that the talks, which began in March, were still in an early stage.

"There is great emphasis by the Iraqi government on fully preserving the sovereignty of Iraq in its lands, skies, waters and its internal and external relations," al-Dabbagh said. "The Iraqi government will not accept any article that infringes on sovereignty and does not guarantee Iraqi interests."

How different are the Iraqi and U.S. documents? According to the NY Times,

The Americans want to continue to have “a free hand” to arrest Iraqis and carry out military operations, and they want authority for more than 50 long-term military bases, Mr. Adeeb said. He said that he doubted that a security pact along the lines sought by the Americans would pass in the Iraqi Parliament.

Mr. Abadi, another senior member of Dawa, said Americans were insisting on keeping control of Iraqi airspace and retaining legal immunity for American troops, contractors and private security guards. 

Those differences are vast and it's hard to imagine how they can be bridged. And the crucial issue - as I keep saying - is immunity. Iraqis are adamantly opposed to immunity, and they refuse to be rushed into an agreement by lame-duck Bush.

Of course the Bush Administration refuses to accept the reality that U.S. troops and contractors will lose immunity on January 1. According to Walter Pincus, the State Department and the Pentagon recently proposed new contracts that extend for years.

Which raises a key question Congress needs to ask before they vote on spending $163 billion more to occupy Iraq well into 2009: what exactly are the termination provisions for those contracts if U.S. contractors lose their immunity? Will the taxpayers - you and me - have to pay for uncompleted work when the contractors' lawyers insist on bringing their immunity-less personnel home?