Diplomatic agreements are meant to be broken and should not be held to the same standards as financial contracts between business partners. The global problem has been that the world always expects the USA to be above repute when adhering to treaties, while the other parties are breaking treaties even before they are signed.
If the United States felt the need to remain in Iraq, we would have stayed in Iraq regardless of any prior agreements.
As I said elsewhere, we're still in South Korea since the 1950s and Germany since the 1940s, so why the rush to vacate Iraq?
-PJ
I don't know why anyone would deal with Iraq in this manner. The status of forces agreement signed between the U.S. and Iraq in 2008 wasn't a "diplomatic agreement" at all ... it was a formal agreement to lay out the terms under which the U.S. military would operate in Iraq, and then leave Iraq. The whole purpose of signing the agreement was to establish the legitimacy of the Iraqi government. If the U.S. intended to break the agreement for any reason, then we would have been in the position of overthrowing the elected government we had established after the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein had been toppled.
The U.S. never would have done this, for two reasons:
1. It would have destroyed our credibility all over the world.
2. It would have been a disaster politically here in the U.S. How do you p!ss away thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars for a military campaign to "promote freedom and democracy" in Iraq, only to turn around less than a decade later and decide that you didn't like the results of that "freedom and democracy?"
The examples you give of Korea and Germany are old, tired, and irrelevant. Korea and Germany were modern states before the U.S. ever got involved with them, and our presence in those countries doesn't even meet the basic definition of a military occupation. Iraq was never a viable modern state. It was cobbled together from the remnants of the British empire, and the U.S. was delusional if we really thought we could depose Saddam Hussein, paint a bunch of purple fingers over there, and call it a modern democracy.
History will remember George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson as the two @ssholes from Texas who were responsible for disastrous military calamities in Third World dumps.