Obama’s Iraq plan about to meet reality

[unhappycamper]

Barack Obama talks with a tribal sheikh through a translator in Ramadi when the president-elect toured Iraq in July.


Obama’s Iraq plan about to meet reality
By Charles Levinson - USA TODAY
Posted : Wednesday Nov 12, 2008 20:48:49 EST

BAGHDAD — Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, will never forget Nov. 20, 2006. That was the day Barack Obama declared Iraq was “descending into chaos” and called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, in a speech that would define the war policy Obama carried into his historic run for president.

Eskander remembers it for a different reason: “That was the saddest day of my life.”

That morning, mortars and gunfire echoed outside Eskander’s office in downtown Baghdad. Then, just before noon, he learned that one of his staffers had been shot dead by a sectarian militia while on his way to work.

The slaying bolstered Eskander’s belief, shared by most Iraqis during that bloody era of the war, that America was part of the problem in Iraq and U.S. troops should leave.

Since then, Iraq has changed dramatically — and so has Eskander’s opinion. Such killings in Baghdad largely have ceased, and Iraqi politicians have resolved some of the sectarian differences that fueled violence. “So much has changed,” says Eskander, who fears there could be renewed chaos if Obama withdraws U.S. troops too quickly.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/11/gns_obama_iraq_111208/%2e