LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Iraq: U.S.-Iraq
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On January 8, 2008, Parliament passed the Justice and Accountability Law, which will allow many Baathists to resume the government jobs they lost after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It ... will pay pensions to many former Baathists who will not be permitted to return to their positions. The measure creates a new committee to determine if lower-level Baathists, former members of Saddam Hussein's party, are eligible to be reinstated to their previous posts. Passage of the law, which must be approved by the presidential council, would be the first major benchmark of political progress reached by the Iraqi government. The law, however, was criticized for being quite vague and confusing, and its many loopholes may exclude more Baathists from government jobs than it allows.
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Rice and Gates, Washington Post, on the U.S.-Iraq strategic deal. They note that the UN authorization will run out at the end of the year, and its time for normalized relations between two sovereign nations with closely tied interests. Here’s what it will be and what it won’t be:  Â
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[One] U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, reaching Baghdad by April 9, and capturing Hussein on December 14. However, militants continue attacking coalition forces and terrorizing Iraqis working with the new government. Coalition forces administer Iraq until June 30, 2004—the scheduled date for transferring authority to an Iraqi transitional government. Plans call for UN-assisted elections for a national assembly to be held by the end of January 2005.
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In recent years there has been a dramatic turnabout in relations between the United States and Iraq. For more than two decades following the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in l958, U.S.-Iraqi relations were marked by suspicion and hostility. By l982... the Iraqi government was beginning to rethink its stand toward the United States. Iraq had suffered serious reverses in its war with Iran and was still smarting from the Soviet decision at the beginning of the war to stop supplying heavy arms to it. In l982 and l983, Iraq put out feelers to Washington.
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In Oct., 2003, the UN Security Council passed a British-American resolution calling for a timetable for self-rule in Iraq to be established by mid-December. Events... led the United States to speed up the process, and in November the Governing Council endorsed a U.S.-proposed plan that called for self-rule in mid-2004 under a transitional assembly, which would be elected by a system of caucuses. However, many Shiites objected to this because it would not involve elections; they feared a diminished voice in the government and greater U.S. influence if caucuses were used to choose the assembly. Hussein was finally captured by U.S. forces in Dec., 2003.
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U.S.-led coalition forces drove the Iraqi occupation army from Kuwait in 1991 and patrolled no-fly zones over Iraq from 1992-2003—protecting Kurds and Shiites from Iraqi warplanes. The Kurdish community, defying the Iraqi army, established its own self-governing region in the early 1990s. Iraq ended cooperation with UN weapons inspectors in 1998, creating concern that Iraq was again developing nuclear or chemical weapons.
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