You can't listen to politicians, whether American or Iraqi, they are self-concerned.

Sure thing, throw em out. Who do you prefer to be our benign dictator? And does your truism apply to McCain, the ultimate politician?

However the military is unconcerned with politics. They do not care about how long the US is in Iraq, only that the mission is a success. Patraeus wants out ASAP, but not at the cost of a mission failure.

Then Presidente Generralissimo Patraeus better start the draft - ASAP.

The legal grounds for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq is about the expire, making our presence in the country a crime (technically, an actual domestic crime under U.S. law, since the Constitution makes international agreements the supreme law of the land alongside actual federal statutes), and the Iraqi government is refusing to negotiate a bilateral status-of-forces agreement to make continued U.S. presence in Iraq legal.

Solution: The United States should negotiate the new status-of-forces agreement with General Patraeus, who knows what the Iraqis really want.

People just want it done fast, but nation building has never been fast.

Especially since we believed Bush when he said:

Oct. 11, 2000, Bush said: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. . . . I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not."

"I wouldn't have sent troops to...?...," Bush said.

" It was a nation-building mission. And it was not very successful. It cost us billions, a couple of billions of dollars, and I'm not so sure democracy is any better off in...?...than it was before."

The General serves at the pleasure of the President. He takes his orders from him. He is subordinate to him. He can be fired by him if he does not obey his orders. He's a tool.

Until you overthrow the gov't and install him as Presidente...