Bush delayed a timetable to withdraw from Iraq in an attempt to give an electoral advantage to his heir-apparent, John McCain.
Initially, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said US troops should withdraw from Iraq "as soon as possible" and the Iraqi PM even to seemed to endorse Sen. Barack Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan. However, the Iraqi government was later pressured by the Bush administration to allow more time for a withdrawal, even though the Bush administration’s official line was "if they were to say, leave, we would leave."
So why was the withdrawal date extended? During an interview last week, the Iraqi PM hinted that the US election was the reason behind the extension.
According to an Open Source Center translation, Maliki suggested that the US presidential elections played a role:
Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date.
The Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, actually claimed that Bush wanted an even longer extension of the US occupation of his country:
It was a U.S. proposal for the date which is 2015, and an Iraqi one which is 2010, then we agreed to make it 2011," Talabani said.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
The Bush administration feared that the Iraqi government’s endorsement of Obama’s withdrawal timeline would hurt McCain in November.
The irony of this revelation is that the NY Sun smeared Obama last week, claiming he tried to stall his own withdrawal plan. Got that? Man, the neocons still think we are stupid enouh to believe their lies.
http://www.nypost.com/...
The GOP's lying machine, it keeps going and going, and going....