Leaving Iraq - Will Bush really pull troops out?

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed Friday to include a “general time horizon” for U.S. troop withdrawals as part of a pending bilateral security agreement (SOFA - Status of Forces Agreement), the White House said.

“Improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals - such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq,” the White House said in a statement.

In recent weeks, Bush and senior officials have hinted that they would be open to “aspirational” goals for removing U.S. troops, as Maliki and other Iraqi politicians have voiced increasing discontent with the idea of an open-ended U.S. troop presence in their country.

The White House has also been under pressure from top military officers to make more U.S. forces available for the war in Afghanistan, and that would be possible only by reducing the number of troops in Iraq, administration officials said. U.S. troop levels there have been decreasing in recent months, as they return to the 15 combat brigades present before Bush ordered a troop increase last year.

Senior military officials have made clear that they expect troop levels in Iraq to drop even further this fall, following a 45-day period of assessment by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. In a statement issued yesterday, after the conversation between Bush and Maliki, the White House went further than it has in previous official statements to indicate that it shares that expectation.

“In the area of security cooperation, the president and the prime minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals,” the statement said. It said those goals include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and “the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel downplayed the notion that the administration was moving towards the long-held Democratic position on troop withdrawals.

“Discussions about timeline issues previously were from Democrats in Congress who wanted to arbitrarily retreat from Iraq without consideration of conditions on the ground,” Stanzel said. “All of the discussions that we have always had have been based on conditions on the ground and making progress in the country, and we are doing just that.”

He declined to specify exactly what the conditions or schedule for further troop withdrawals might be and would not discuss the scope of the agreement currently being negotiated by the two governments. But he said “we still have the end of the month as a goal for reaching this agreement.”

Maliki and other senior Iraqi officials have demanded that withdrawal timelines be included in any security pacts.

The U.N. mandate under which coalition forces operate in Iraq expires at the end of this year. The two governments have been negotiating a bilateral agreement under which U.S. forces would remain in Iraq; the withdrawal timeline would be a part of that deal, the White House said.

Bush has insisted such a deal would not need congressional approval, but Democrats have demanded a say in the agreement.

The House version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill (HR 5658) would require congressional authorization for any agreement between the United States and Iraq that obligated the U.S. military to defend Iraq. That has drawn a veto threat from the president.

The version of the defense bill approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee (S 3001) has no provision requiring congressional approval of a U.S.-Iraq pact, but Carl Levin , D-Mich., the panel’s chairman, said a similar amendment could offered when the bill comes to the Senate floor.

More from this category

• Patriotism, Service to the Nation, POWs, and Torture
• GAO upholds Boeing’s objection to Air Force Tanker award to Northrup
• UBL free because of GOP policies, and “Tigger” too…

More from this author

• Poor Obama - The New Yorker outed him…
• Unwinding Mess - IndyMac, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae
• What would Iran’s nuclear weapons mean for the United States?