Bush-Maliki agreement a treaty, must be ratified or it's void

Here's a link to the Register's somewhat angry editorial on the agreement between Bush and Maliki calling for a contingent of 50,000 U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. We argue that that kind of a commitment is a treaty under the constitution, and requires Senate consideration and retification to be valid. I don't know if the commitment will actually be put in place, especially if the next president has a lick of sense. But it certainly shows what the Bush administration's preferred course of action is -- to stay in Iraq, perhaps as long as we've stayed in Germany or Korea.

Along the same lines, here's a link to the piece I did for Antiwar.com last week on the same subject.