WASHINGTON -
Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned
at signs that Barack Obama's national security team will be dominated
by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on
other important foreign policy issues.
The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be
in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other
short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go
to war.
BAGHDAD - The status of forces of agreement between the United
States and Iraq is now called the withdrawal agreement, and that's
exactly what it is: an ultimate end to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
BAGHDAD - Followers of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr were making a bid on Monday to kill a controversial Iraq-US
military pact passed by the Iraqi cabinet by trying to block it in
parliament.
The Sadrist movement has vigorously opposed the
wide-ranging agreement, which would replace a UN mandate that expires
at the end of the year and allow US forces to remain in the country
until the end of 2011.
WASHINGTON - The promotion of Robert M. Gates as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of defence appears to be the key element in a broad campaign by military officials and their supporters in the political elite and the news media to pressure Obama into dropping his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in as little as 16 months.
BAGHDAD - Two days after the election of Barack Obama, Iraq's chief spokesman said with unusual forcefulness Thursday that his government will continue to insist on a firm withdrawal date for U.S. troops, despite American demands that any pullout be subject to prevailing security conditions.
"Iraqis would like to know and see a fixed date," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an interview in which he also reiterated Iraq's position that American forces be subject to Iraqi legal jurisdiction in some instances.
