c h a n g e - 12,000 U.S. Troops to Leave Iraq

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BAGHDAD, March 8 -- The U.S. military announced Sunday that 12,000 American soldiers would withdraw from Iraq by September, marking the first step in the Obama administration's plan to pull U.S. combat forces out of the country by August 2010.

In setting the deadline last month, President Obama declared that the United States would restrict itself to achievable goals before departing. The timing of Sunday's announcement underscored that Iraq is likely to remain dangerous, turbulent and vulnerable to major acts of bloodshed during an American withdrawal. Only hours before the announcement, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle plowed into a crowd gathered at the entrance to the police academy in Baghdad, killing 28 people and wounding dozens more. Survivors recounted scenes of mayhem and carnage in the bombing's aftermath, as ambulances tried to force their way through snarled traffic and police fired in the air -- either in confusion or, fearing a second bomb, to try to disperse the crowd.

By afternoon, there was little sign of the attack, save for the shattered glass that littered the asphalt. A tattered poster left over from January's municipal elections hung from a bridge pillar. "With the blood of our martyrs, Iraq is liberated," it read.

Under the administration's plan, major reductions in the more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq would be postponed until after elections scheduled for December to choose a new parliament, a vote that nearly everyone in the country sees as a potential watershed moment. A U.S.-Iraqi agreement negotiated last year requires all U.S. troops to depart by the end of 2011, a deadline that Iraqi officials reiterated Sunday. "The Iraqi government has no intention to accept the presence of any foreign troops or bases after 2011," said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030800397_pf.html