Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, warned Saturday the US should not withdraw too quickly from Iraq and leave the country "in chaos." "The question is, is Iraq today ready with a national army, a national police force, a national judiciary, a national educational system," Moussa told The Associated Press. "If they are ready, the troops have to leave," he said. "If they are not ready and the Americans are there anyway and the mistake has been committed, I am not of the view that we just call on the Americans to leave ... It would be another mistake to create chaos in the country and then leave it in chaos." US President George W. Bush will announce his decision on future troops levels in Iraq next week and is expected to largely follow the recommendations of military leaders to reduce the number by up to 8,000 by mid-Jan. The closely held plan forwarded by senior Pentagon advisers calls for keeping 15 combat brigades in Iraq until the end of the year, according to senior defense officials. Moussa said US troops should scale back, but "it has to be done in a reasonable way." Moussa spoke on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum, an annual gathering of political and business leaders at which he clashed a day earlier with Israeli President Shimon Peres over the Jewish state's non-response to the Arab League's 2002 proposal for comprehensive Middle East peace. The proposal calls for an Israeli withdrawal from virtually all the territory it occupied in the 1967 war, and Peres bristled at what he turned the "take-it-or-leave it" nature of the offer. Moussa disputed this, noting that the proposal did call for talks on the fate of Palestinian refugees and left some border issues slightly open to negotiation. Asked if the proposal was be forever on the table, Moussa replied: "I do not propose that we rescind it ... but I do not exclude the possibility, the strong possibility, that at a certain point we will rescind it for lack of results. ... The game has become so repetitious. There is no end in sight. No real peace in sight .. They (the Israelis) are good at talking, good at processing, good at propaganda, but they are not good at peace." Nine killed in Iraq violence At least nine people were killed in three attacks in Iraq on Saturday, including a car bomb in a northern Iraq market that claimed six lives and wounded 50, police and security said. The deadly blast in Tal Afar came at around 11 am (08H00 GMT) and targeted a busy market in Al-Wehda, a central area of the city about 450 kilometers (280 miles) north of Baghdad. Among the wounded 20 in a serious condition were rushed to a hospital in the Kurdish province of Dohuk.
