The top official heading the Iraqi negotiating team, Mohammad al-Haj Hammoud, said on Friday that U.S. President George W. Bush has already approved the draft agreement, which states that American combat troops will pull out of Iraqi cities by June 2009.

Hammoud told AFP that negotiators from both sides have finalized their job of drafting the agreement, but "now it is up to the leaders" in Iraq to endorse the deal that Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had hoped to conclude before the end of last month.

The Iraqi official's remarks came a day after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit to Baghdad, during which she and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zibari declared that the two countries were very close to finalizing the pact.

After a three-hour meeting between Rice and Maliki, the Iraqi foreign minister said all the issues had been addressed and that the draft would be submitted on Friday to the Political Council for National Security, a security body of Iraqi leaders that include Maliki and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

The council, however, did not meet on Friday, which Zibari had said would be a "very important day," because some of its members said they had not been informed that they would convene and questioned why they would do so if the draft had not yet been finalized.

Since March, negotiations to arrive at a pact that specifies the role of the U.S. forces in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires on Dec. 31 have been bogged down by problems.

Among them, a growing demand by key Iraqi political parties for a specific deadline to end the American occupation as they resisted any deal they saw as compromising Iraqi sovereignty.

While the White House says the deal will not need the approval of U.S. lawmakers because it is not a treaty, it still needs the ratification of the Iraqi parliament, which is currently in recess and is due to reconvene on Sept. 9.

Although the negotiations themselves have been held in top secrecy, Maliki has promised no deal would be signed in secret, especially one that is required as a legal basis if the U.S. forces are to remain in their country.

Despite Zibari's remarks that the pact was very close -- a comment he has made on several occasions in recent months -- and Hammoud's declaration on Friday that negotiations have been concluded, there were indications that the loose wording of the text might not pass by the Iraqi political leaders so easily.

Hammoud implied that 2011 was not necessarily written in stone.

"There is a provision that says the withdrawal could be done even before 2011 or extended beyond 2011, depending on the security situation," he told AFP, adding that even if the pullout is completed by then, some U.S. troops could remain "to train Iraqi security forces."

The top negotiator also said the number of military bases the United States would retain in Iraq depended on the number of troops left behind, and that committees would look into offenses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq.

Iraqi analysts expect that if such a text does not specify an airtight deadline for a full withdrawal, if Iraqi courts are not authorized to prosecute U.S. troops' violations, and if the U.S. bases are not kept to a bare minimum, the pact will not likely be endorsed by parliament.

They say the draft may appear to be meeting both Iraqi and U.S. demands, but that the American conditions seem to be the more dominant force in maintaining the upper hand; an imbalance they think will not be accepted by the majority of the 275-member National Assembly.

Maliki, coming under domestic political pressure from his own Shiite partners in the government as well as from other sectarian-based groups as local autumn elections near, has refused a deal without a specific timeframe for withdrawal, after scores of demonstrations in May protested a deal they denounced as an attempt to legitimize the occupation.

Although most of these protests were led by maverick Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, other political groups who normally disagree united against the pact.

Rice's visit to Baghdad Thursday was also condemned by the Sadrists, who said the "occupation's secretary of state arrived in Iraq to try to put pressure on the government to accept terms dictated by the occupation to sign this ominous treaty."

Seeking to accommodate Iraqi government demands to ease the pressure on Maliki, U.S. officials resorted to terminology such as "time horizons" and "general aspirations."

U.S. diplomats said that negotiations in recent weeks revolved around striking a balance between Iraq's demands for a scheduled withdrawal of the 144,000 U.S. troops and the American insistence on linking the withdrawal to "conditions on the ground."

The little information revealed about the pact, however, implies a deal heavily favored toward leaving the door open for withdrawal if conditions permit -- something that Iraqi politicians are widely expected to defy.