Word: maliki
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...should come as no surprise that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been quick to endorse emerging plans to hasten the departure of U.S. forces from his country. Maliki, after all, had opposed the Bush Administration's decision to increase U.S. troop levels in the surge of 2007, and he had forced a reluctant Washington to accept a hard deadline for withdrawal in the Status of Forces Agreement adopted late last year. The growing abilities of the Iraqi security forces and the strengthening of his political position after last month's provincial elections have added to Maliki's confidence...
...Friday morning in a speech at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was greeted with shrugs of contentment by most Iraqi political figures, largely because the Obama plan appears to be in step with what Iraqis had expected as a result of the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the Maliki government and the Bush Administration last December. That agreement requires most U.S. combat troops to be off the streets of Iraq by this summer and all U.S. troops to have left the country by 2011. (See pictures of Basra's return to normality...
...most powerful political factions in Iraq would prefer to see U.S. forces leave sooner rather than later. Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated government and security forces have faced down their biggest foe, the Mahdi Army militia of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And Sadr's movement, which remains a political force in Iraq, was the first of the Shi'ite groups to agitate for a U.S. withdrawal. Only two camps in Iraq remain uneasy about seeing U.S. troops move offstage over the next 18 months - the minority Sunnis, who remain fearful of a revival of sectarian violence against them...
...meetings that day, the city's electricity - or "Maliki power," as the residents call it after Iraq's increasingly powerful Prime Minister - occasionally went down. No one was ever surprised; we would continue talking in darkness until a generator started up. According to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, in January this year average Baghdadis were getting 13 hours of electricity per day, up from seven in 2008. A lot of statistics suggest that life in Iraq is improving - though, in the case of electricity, the same index estimated prewar levels to be 16 to 24 hours...
...That reality was on show during the French President's Iraq visit. Maliki used Sarkozy's presence and words of support to respond to comments by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden that Washington would be "more aggressive" in demanding political reform from Baghdad. Delivered as Biden left for an international security summit in Munich, the sentiment apparently annoyed the Iraqi Prime Minister. "The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over," Maliki said during a Baghdad press conference with Sarkozy. That must be music to Old Europe's ears...