Iraqi foreign minister: US military in Iraq at Baghdad’s request
Hakim also explained that the US military presence did not involve combat troops, but “only military advisors and trainers, who are helping our army.”
“So I wonder why some people in Iraq want to make this subject a big issue,” he said.
Increasingly, members of the Iraqi parliament, including those from the bloc of the popular cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as the pro-Iranian bloc of Shi’ite militias, led by Hadi al-Ameri, are calling for a vote to terminate the US military presence there.
The two blocs represent the top two winners in last May’s elections. As Michael Pregent of the Hudson Institute recently explained, the leading parties in Iraq’s parliament are anti-American, “and they’re asking for the immediate exit of Americans from Iraq.”
In contrast to the problematic nature of the US military presence in the Arab areas of Iraq, the US is welcome in the Kurdistan Region, where it now has a major military facility at Erbil International Airport.
In fact, that has pretty much been the case since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq’s Kurds, protected by Operation Provide Comfort, succeeded in throwing off Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical and cruel regime.
In 1993, the two leaders of the Kurdistan Region—Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—told this reporter in separate discussions that a US air base in the Kurdistan Region would be most welcome.
Twelve years later, Talabani became President of Iraq (something unimaginable in 1993.) In 2005, Talabani visited Washington, meeting both President George W. Bush and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
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