McClatchy news service reported on Friday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki will not sign the recently completed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which would govern the presence of U.S. forces.

“The SOFA is dead in the water,” one Iraqi politician said, according to the Sunday Times of London.

The recent developments signal a “crushing defeat” to administration plans in Iraq and the region, Gareth Porter wrote for the Inter Press Service. The final version on the SOFA contains clear language for withdrawal of all U.S. troops by 2011 and holds U.S. troops and contractors accountable for “major and intentional crimes” while in Iraq — an unprecedented concession never before offered to another nation, Porter said.

Still, many Iraqi leaders oppose the pact, considering the SOFA a violation of their sovereignty and see its approval as tacitly legitimizing the U.S. occupation.

Tens of thousands recently marched in opposition to the deal, according to the New York Times.

Press coverage of the devastated nation has been steadily decreasing. A Pew poll earlier this year found that only 28 percent of Americans knew that the true number of U.S. forces that had died in conflict was about 4,000.

Last year, an Associated Press poll found that Americans were even more misinformed about the number of Iraqi deaths due to the invasion.

A median of those surveyed believed that about 9,800 Iraqis had been killed. In reality, a sophisticated study released months before showed that the number of Iraqis killed violently after the invasion was closer to 650,000.

The study, published by the prestigious medical journal, Lancet, and co-authored by veteran researcher Dr. Les Roberts, was instantly attacked by the administration and its allies.

Mainstream media coverage of the study was biased in many cases, obfuscating the enormous human toll of the conflict, Roberts said in a talk at the UW last week.

In the ’90s, Roberts published a series of studies using similar methodology on the conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and the Congo — all of which were lauded by leaders such as Colin Powell and Tony Blair.

To date, most credible scientific estimates, including one of the latest by Opinion Research Business, place the amount of Iraqis violently killed at more than one million.

Some 310,000 were probably killed by U.S. forces, the majority in bombing raids, Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, estimated in June on his Web site, juancole.com.

Since the United States is 11 times more populous than Iraq, Cole wrote, the effects here would have been equivalent to bombing everyone to death in Pittsburg, Pa., or Cincinnati, Ohio.

Estimating three persons wounded for every one killed, Cole said it would be equivalent of 33 million Americans injured by violence — or the entire state of California.

The roughly five million refugees created — nearly the same number of citizens in Jordan, or Jews in Israel — would be comparable to the combined populations of New York and California — 55 million people — having been expelled from their homes.

Reach columnist Aditya Ganapathiraju at news@dailyuw.com.