SubscribeIraq’s Foreign Minister Wants US To Remain
From those terrorist enablers at Reuters:
Spc. Eric Leon, a U.S. soldier from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, mans a machine gun while providing overwatch security for Iraqi soldiers who are searching houses for weapons in Diwaniya, 112 miles south of Baghdad.
Iraq asks troops to stay as U.S. death toll spikes
Mon Oct 30, 2006
By Ibon Villelabeitia
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The killings of two Americans took the monthly U.S. death toll in Iraq on Monday to over 100 for the first time in nearly two years, just a week before elections that could cost President George W. Bush's Republicans control of Congress.
Pressure has mounted ahead of the November 7 congressional poll to extract U.S. troops from the bloody turmoil afflicting Iraq since Bush ordered the invasion three and a half years ago. But the Iraqi government, despite open friction with Washington this past week, said it wanted their U.N. mandate extended by a year.
Speaking shortly after a bomb killed 28 people in a Baghdad Shi'ite slum on a day that saw at least 70 Iraqis killed across the country, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters: "The presence of the Multi-National Force is indispensable for the security and stability of Iraq and of the region at the moment."
Iraq has become central to the congressional election campaign and Bush is rallying his Republic supporters, defending his policy and accusing opposition Democrats of lacking a plan:
"The Democratic goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq," he told a rally in the state of Georgia. "This election is far from over."
A marine killed on Sunday in western Anbar province, where troops are fighting Sunni insurgents, and an unidentified member of the military police shot dead by a sniper in east Baghdad took the U.S. military death toll to 101 so far in October.
It was 71 last month, and last passed 100 in January 2005. In all, 2,814 Americans have died in the Iraq conflict.
Commanders say October's increase is partly due to attacks in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Since militants released a video during last week's festival for the end of Ramadan showing U.S. soldiers being shot, apparently by snipers, the military has also been looking more closely at shooting incidents…
Despite mounting suspicion among the dominant Shi'ite Islamists about Washington's rapprochement with the minority Sunnis dominant under Saddam Hussein, Maliki has set no deadline for U.S. troops to leave. When he took office six months ago, he spoke of reviewing the terms on which they were in Iraq.
But his foreign minister, Zebari, made clear Baghdad was now about to ask the U.N. Security Council to extend by a year the mandate, which runs out on December 31 : "At the same time, the Iraqi government is … willing to take more security responsibilities from these forces to do its part."
He also said Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem had agreed to visit Baghdad, possibly in November. Washington accuses Syria of fomenting rebellion in Iraq.
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington warned the United States against leaving Iraq abruptly.
"Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited," Prince Turki al-Faisal said after a Washington speech.
He added that any nothing of dividing Iraq would result in "ethnic cleansing on a massive scale". …
If the US were to leave Iraq at this point, the media would never stop harping about how we "cut and ran" and left so many who had depended upon us to a horrible fate.
This is not conjecture. The media said exactly the same thing after the US left Iraq at the end of the First Gulf War.
Though all of those articles have been scrubbed from the internet and apparently everyone's memory.
Speaking of memories:
[The Iraqis want the presence of US troops under] their U.N. mandate extended by a year.
Our media and their DNC bosses tend to forget that we are in Iraq under a United Nations mandate.