Iraqi general to US military: Stay longer!

First Tareq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s former deputy, said that the planned U.S. troop withdrawal was "leaving the country to the wolves." Now, the chief of staff of the Iraqi military, Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari, says that the U.S. pullout was "too soon" — and that his forces might not be able to secure the country for another decade. Well, at least the representatives of Iraq’s old guard and its new regime are able to agree about something.

Zebari, who I’m going to go out on a limb and assume is a Kurd, undermines his case by calling for U.S. forces to stay in Iraq for another 10 years. But it’s hard not to sympathize with him: When I interviewed former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker in March, following Iraq’s parliamentary elections, he gently opposed Obama’s plan to draw down to 50,000 troops by Sept. 1, reasoning that, because of the time-consuming government formation process, the Iraqi government may well not have made much progress in resolving its pressing political issues. Crocker said that the negotiations over government formation could take "two or three months" — a suggestion that struck me as pessimistic at the time, but now, over five months into the process, turned out to be wildly optimistic.

"[T]hings aren’t going to be much further along come August than they are right now," Crocker also said. Boy, was that prescient. But the bigger conundrum is this: Iraqi politicians must realize that U.S. forces are pulling out, whether they like it or not, and that their only hope of holding on to power in the aftermath is to reach some sort of modus vivendi with their domestic rivals. Given that reality, it’s a tremendous failure of Iraq’s political elite that they haven’t agreed to bury the hatchet and form a government – while some of them, like Zebari, are calling on the United States to pay the price for their intransigence.