Iraqi Leader Anticipates U.S. Pullout in 2007

Iraq’s president said Friday that U.S. forces might not be needed in his country two years from now.

President Jalal Talabani said he believed Iraqi forces would be able to gradually assume more responsibility for protecting the main cities and roads, while the number of U.S. troops would be scaled back.

If those plans can be implemented, “within two years there will be no need for U.S. forces,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

Talabani is a veteran leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two principal Kurdish political parties in the country. He is also well acquainted with U.S. officials.

President Bush has declined to estimate how long the 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq will need to stay, saying only that their departure will be determined by how soon Iraqi forces can deal with the insurgency by themselves.

But U.S. political analysts have said that with support for the war declining in the United States, many Republican officials will not want to face the 2008 election with a large U.S. military contingent still in Iraq, five years after the invasion.

Army Gen. George W. Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, has said he believes it will be possible to begin withdrawing a “substantial” number of U.S. troops early next year.

Talabani emphasized the need to keep U.S. troops in the country for now, both for internal and external security.

“We are not only in need [of the] American forces for fighting against terrorism,” he said. “We are in need [of] American forces to frighten our neighbors and prevent them from interfering in our internal affairs.”

Talabani said a withdrawal of U.S. and multinational forces “in the near future could create grave threats to the region” as well as to the United States.

“Lose in Iraq, and then all of the gains that democrats and dissidents have made across a vast swath of the Islamic world, not just the Middle East, will be lost,” he said.

Talabani, who will meet Bush at the White House on Tuesday, thanked Americans for their efforts in his country. He said he wanted to tell Americans with family members in Iraq, “Thank you for their courage, thank you for their fortitude.” He described the struggle as another war against fascism, as in World War II.

The Iraqi leader defended his nation’s draft constitution, which critics say will benefit Kurds and majority Shiites at the expense of the Sunni Arab minority. He said it was good news that no one was wildly enthusiastic about the document.

“If anybody was completely happy with the new Iraqi Constitution, then there would by necessity be others who were completely unhappy,” he said.

That, he added, would mark a failure.

Talabani said he was willing to make concessions to the Sunnis but would not “bend so far that we break apart Iraqi democracy.”