From Telegraph.co.uk:

The timetable for the US withdrawal from Iraq was set out in the Status of Forces Agreement signed by American and Iraqi officials in November 2008, and endorsed by Iraq’s parliament later that month. It envisaged the departure of all US military forces by the end of 2011. President Obama, who opposed the war from the start, refined this within a month of taking office by saying “as plainly as I can [that] by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end”. The fact that this would neatly precede America’s mid-term elections was lost on no one.

When Mr Obama set the deadline, Iraq was relatively stable, and violence was declining. Today, Iraq has no functioning government, and violence is on the rise: last month, 535 people were killed, the highest total in two years. Little wonder, then, that Lieutenant General Babakar Zebari, the head of Iraq’s armed forces, has warned that an American pull-out would be premature, and that his troops will not be in a position to take control of internal security for a decade. This echoes the words of Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s former foreign minister, who said last week that the Americans were “leaving Iraq to the wolves”. Given that the black and yellow emblem of al-Qaeda has returned to the streets of Baghdad, his lurid language might be justified.

While it may suit the general’s purposes to have American forces available to do the heavy lifting, that does not invalidate his point. Fixing a hard and fast deadline simply puts dissident elements on notice to resume their murderous activities. A phased reduction in combat troops would make more sense, and there is a strong argument for maintaining the current levels until a government is in place in Baghdad. With an identical dilemma about to present itself in Afghanistan, America needs to get this right.

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