Word: iraqi
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This transfer of responsibility would be unimaginable had it not been for the success of the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq, the deployment of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces and the uprising of armed Iraqi civilian groups--the so-called Awakening--against jihadist insurgents and sectarian militias. Violence in Baghdad is down 90% from its height in 2006 and down 80% in the country as a whole, according to Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "In 2006, Iraq was a failed state, and in 2008 Iraq is a fragile state," he says. But the surge...
...next U.S. President will discover, however, that one thing unites most of Iraq's politicians. Awkwardly, that is opposition to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the understanding that would formalize and legalize the continued presence of U.S. forces on Iraqi soil. In late October, when the Bush Administration leaked a draft of SOFA that it had worked out with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government, his Cabinet demanded a renegotiation. No particular provision seems to be objectionable so much as the agreement itself: it is practically political suicide for an Iraqi politician to be seen authorizing...
However long U.S. soldiers stay in Iraq, they will largely be out of the war-fighting game, focusing mainly on training the Iraqi army. Will that be enough to prevent Iraq from slipping back into sectarian civil war? Cautious optimists hope so. "Iraq is well on its way to becoming a normal Middle Eastern country, with all the good and the bad that that implies," says John Nagl, a retired Army officer who helped General David Petraeus draft the Army's new counterinsurgency manual. "As long as Iraq stays Page 26 news, that's O.K." But if anything goes wrong...
Both the success of the surge and the challenges awaiting Iraq are visible in Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that was the scene of some of the worst urban violence during Iraq's dark days. When Lieut. Colonel Ali Abbas Hamad, deputy commander of an Iraqi police brigade, first deployed in Dora in the summer of 2007, most of the neighborhood's Christians had been driven from their homes by jihadis and militias, and the residents that remained didn't dare leave their homes. "There wasn't a car in sight," Hamad told TIME. "The only person...
...troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan will help to stabilize Afghanistan and restore some sense of stability in the midst of an ongoing civil war. We find Obama’s plans for a relatively rapid withdrawal from Iraq to be sensible, especially considering the fact that the Iraqi government is running a massive budget surplus while the American treasury is suffering from record budget deficits...