The Iraqi parliament's approval of an election law on Sunday cleared a major potential obstacle to the US military meeting its timetable for withdrawing all combat troops by September 2010. But no one in Baghdad and Washington is celebrating just yet. Their sense of relief is tempered by the knowledge that in Iraq nothing is ever as clear cut as it seems. The timeline for the US pullout could still be affected by any delay in picking Iraq's next government following the election, scheduled to take place on Jan. 21. After Iraq's last national elections in December 2005, Iraqi leaders took months to choose a new government. While political parties jockeyed for position, Al-Qaeda militants took advantage of a power vacuum to launch attacks that ignited a wave of sectarian bloodletting. With that history in mind, the US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, has 60 days after the election to make a recommendation on how the troop pullout should proceed. A number of alliances are contesting the election, and none are expected to win the majority needed to select a prime minister. That means it could take months to form a new government, political analysts say. “Iraq is undertaking a very difficult and complex political labor,” said Hussain Al-Falluji, an independent Sunni lawmaker. “A delay in the announcement of a new Iraqi government under these complex conditions is quite feasible.” In testimony to a US congressional committee in September, Odierno said the US military had built flexibility into its withdrawal plans and was prepared for a months-long wait. “We expect it will take from January to June or so, maybe July, to seat the new government,” he said. US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities in June, closing 200 bases. But questions have been raised about the capability of Iraq's 663,000-strong security forces after devastating bomb blasts in the heart of Baghdad killed scores. Overall, however, violence has dropped 85 percent over the past two years. Under a security agreement drawn up between Iraq and the United States last year, all US military forces have to withdraw by the end of 2011. If all goes according to plan, US combat operations will end by Aug. 31, 2010, although 50,000 troops will remain until 2012 to train Iraqi security forces and conduct targeted counter-terrorism operations. There are about 120,000 troops now and that number is expected to drop to 110,000 by the end of this year. The Pentagon said in October it was scrapping plans to deploy a 3,500-member brigade to Iraq in January. Timetable vulnerable But the vulnerability of the timetable to uncertain events in Iraq was underscored in recent weeks when Iraq's parliament appeared to be deadlocked on a new election law, and it looked, until Sunday, that the vote would have to be postponed. “What we had as a concern, of course, was had these deliberations gone on then, new decisions would have had to be made about the draw-down of the troops,” US ambassador Chris Hill said after Iraqi lawmakers adopted the election law. “So far so good, a lot of bad things can happen in Iraq, but what is important about today is that we are on schedule with the draw-down,” Hill said. President Barack Obama, who opposed the Iraq war and is weighing sending thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan, appears determined to stick to the timetable and end US involvement in the Iraq war as soon as possible. “Ultimately it is going to take a return to the ways of old for us to really consider any kind of shift in the timetable,” an administration official told Reuters, referring to the sectarian violence that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war. “We have not seen any indicators that cause us to believe that we will have to shift that timeline at this point.” Apart from Obama's personal opposition to the Iraq war, other factors make it unlikely for him to consider keeping troops there longer. Delaying the troop pullout from Iraq could make any US military build-up in Afghanistan more difficult, and he has promised Americans that winding down the Iraq war will help to cut the ballooning US deficit over the long term. The state of the economy, which is still hemorrhaging jobs, is Americans' chief concern, and Obama's hopes of savings from the Iraq war has already proved over-optimistic in the short term because of the huge expense of relocating troops and equipment. It is also unlikely the Democratic-majority Congress would endorse keeping US troops in Iraq for a longer period. Leading Democrats opposed the 2003 US-led invasion and had pressed for a pullout timetable for years. “The march out of Iraq ... has taken on an inexorable momentum that is accelerating rather than slowing, and mere Iraqi politics is no longer relevant to it,” said Juan Cole, an author and Middle East expert.
