Iraq's senior military chief says US forces should stay until 2020

From Aljazeera.net, Thursday, August 12 -- Iraq's most senior military officer, Lieutenant General Babaker Zerbari, has said that his security forces will not be able to secure the country until 2020 and that the US should delay its planned withdrawal.

The US government plans to withdraw its combat troops by the end of August, and to remove all remaining troops, to number 50,000, by the end of 2011.

Zerbari said the planned withdrawal will create a "problem" and increase instability in Iraq -- "I would say to politicians: the US army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020."

Hours after Zerbari's comments, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, told reporters that the US is still "on target" to withdraw troops from Iraq. He said only "dozens" would remain at the US embassy in Baghdad after 2011.

Here is a video report:



The US pullout of Iraq is only linked to a deadline and a timetable, rather than an actual strategy, an American expert said in a recent interview with Xinhua, as reported by Liza Jansen at English.xinhuanet.com.

Jooset Hiltermann, an expert on political issues in Iraq, made the statement only days after US President Barack Hussein Obama had announced that the withdrawal of thousands of American troops from Iraq would "as promised and on schedule" be done by the end of this month.

But the hebrew prophet Jeremiah foresaw an abandoning of the "land of the Chaldeans" by her occupiers, not according to a negotiated timetable, but motivated by a realization of failure in all attempts at reconstruction, mitigated by fires that ravage her cities --

"I shall set fire to his cities, and it will devour all his environs... Her high gates will be set on fire, so the peoples will toil for nothing, and the nations become exhausted (because of the) fire... Suddenly Babylon had fallen and been broken; wail over her! Bring balm for her pain; perhaps she may be healed. 'We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed. Forsake her now, and let us each go to his own country, for her judgment has reached to heaven and towers up to the very skies,'" (Jer 50:32b, 51:58b, 51:8-9).

If the cities of Iraq do not burn before the total withdrawal of US and other coalition reconstruction personnel, then we can know for sure that the current events in Iraq are NOT the fulfillment of Jeremiah's 2,600 year-old prophecy of total desolation on Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans.