US drags its feet in Iraq

[xchrom]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH06Ak03.html

After days of wrangling, leaders of the main political parties of Iraq agreed on August 2 to hand a joint mandate to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to negotiate with the United States on whether some Americans troops will stay on in Iraq to "train" Iraqi forces beyond the end of this year.

United States forces, according to President Barack Obama's withdrawal plan, are scheduled to vacate Iraq by the end of year deadline. It's also an "open secret" however that the long-established American preference is not to leave Iraq entirely. Pentagon pundits in Washington, and some of their fellow-travelers in Iraq, have long been thinking aloud that some American troops ought to stay on beyond the deadline, if only to train the Iraqis in keeping peace and ensuring security once the


Americans are gone.

The ostensible justification for the Americans to still have their boots on the Iraqi soil is that the Iraqi security forces are, as yet, not quite ready to guarantee that the country will not slide into anarchy and lawlessness once the Americans disappear from the land.

[DesertFlower]

1. we've been training these guys

for years. shouldn't they be training their own? enough already. we've got enough problems at home.