U.S. TROOPS EXPECTED TO BE IN IRAQ AT LEAST TEN MORE YEARS

Will it be ten years, or less than ten years? That is the question that is being asked about how long U.S. troops are going to be in Iraq.

If it were up to President Bush, U.S. troops would be in Iraq for next 50 or more years. Bush plans to circumvent Congress and work with the Iraqi government in establishing a virtual permanent U.S. presence in Iraq.

An Iraqi Minister claims the U.S. troops will be out of Iraq within 10 years, but that is only a guesstimate.

As we have been reporting for weeks on my blog, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, the security situation in Iraq is anything but stable.

There is also a great deal of talk that Iraq has failed to meet most of the 18 benchmarks putdown by the Bush administration. This could mean U.S. troops could be in Iraq as long as U.S. troops have been in Germany, Japan and Korea.

However, there is one major difference between our troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. They are not being fired upon night and day.

By Bill Corcoran, editor and host of CORKSPHERE: http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog devoted entirely to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which the mainstream media no longer covers.

US troops will be gone within 10 years, says Iraqi minister

By Patrick Cockburn in BaghdadFriday, 25 January 2008

http://tinyurl.com/2df8mn

The Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, caused anger among Iraqis this month by saying during the New Hampshire primary that US military forces might stay in Iraq "for 100 years". Mr Zebari, asked by The Independent in Baghdad if the American army would be in Iraq in 10 years, said: "Really, I wouldn't say so."

Mr Zebari is much more confident than he was a year ago that "al-Qa'ida has been crushed, its network has been shattered" though it has not been completely eliminated. He says he thinks it dangerous if the Shia-Kurdish government, of which he is one of the most powerful members, does not pay and absorb into its own security forces the 70,000-strong Sunni Awakening movement which is fighting al-Qa'ida.

"That is the danger," said Mr Zebari. "The Awakening movement is not that well organised and it could be easily manipulated by al-Qa'ida." He added that it was an illusion that the Sunni political parties and their leaders "represent the Sunni community".

Mr Zebari originally made his name as the energetic spokesman and foreign representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party during its long years of resistance to Saddam Hussein. He has been the most successful of Iraqi ministers since he was appointed in 2004, cultivating good relations with the US and Iran. Three years ago, insurgents tried to assassinate him using a vehicle packed with a tonne of explosives, including a naval torpedo, which was detected near his home before it was detonated.

For all Mr Zebari's optimism, Iraq remains an extraordinary violent country. Yesterday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan, the chief of police of Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city. He had been inspecting the ruins of a building in which 20 civilians had been killed and 150 wounded in an explosion the previous day.

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