Bush: We will stay in Iraq unless asked to leave
President Bush said Thursday that American troops would stay in Iraq unless its government asks them to leave.
“I know there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq,” Mr. Bush said during a joint news conference in Amman with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, referring to the final report by the Iraq Study Group that is expected next week. “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there.”
The president, who returned to Washington later on Thursday, sought to play down tensions between him and Mr. Maliki, calling the prime minister “the right guy for Iraq.”
Mr. Bush also said he and Mr. Maliki would oppose any plan to partition the country, which is increasingly divided by sectarian violence. The two appeared together after an hourlong breakfast meeting with aides at the Four Seasons Hotel here that was followed by a 45-minute one-on-one session.
Mr. Maliki later asserted that his country’s police and military forces would be ready to take over responsibility for Iraq’s security next year. “I cannot answer on behalf of the U.S. administration but I can tell you that from our side our forces will be ready by June 2007,” he told ABC News.
In Baghdad on Thursday, the pressures on Mr. Maliki continued to grow. An aide to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric whose followers have boycotting the Iraqi Parliament, to protest Mr. Maliki’s meeting with Mr. Bush, announced an effort to form a political alliance across ethnic and religious lines to push for a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops.
nytimes
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