US Military Defiant on Key Terms of Iraqi Pact
By Gareth Porter
"US military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the US-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete withdrawal of all US combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops.
The scheme to engage in chicanery in labeling US troops represents both open defiance of an agreement which the US military has never accepted and a way of blocking President-elect Barack Obama's proposed plan for withdrawal of all US combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office.
By redesignating tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, those officials apparently hope to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to insist on getting all combat troops out of the country by mid-2010......
Further evidence emerged last week that Gates is a central figure in that effort. In a Washington Post column Dec. 11, George Will quoted Gates as saying that there is bipartisan congressional support for "a long-term residual presence" of as many as 40,000 US troops in Iraq, and such a presence for "decades" has been the standard practice following "major US military operations" since the beginning of the Cold War.
Those statements evidently represent part of the case Gates, Mullen and the military commanders are already making behind the scenes to get Obama to acquiesce in the subversion of the intent of the US-Iraq agreement. "
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