Despite the obvious touchiness of extending the presence (however limited) of an occupying army whose invasion eight years ago devastated the country, it’s not surprising that Maliki is siding with the most pro-American elements in Iraq’s politics (Allawi and the Kurdish parties) to keep us around… and it’s for the same reason that his on-again, off-again ally Sadr is objecting.

I think we’re reaching a semantic game with respect to the US military presence in Iraq. The political community just won’t ask for an extension of military troops. But the leadership appears to be falling back to allowing trainers to work with Iraqi security forces. That’s what Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari seemed to be saying today.

Here we go. The bipartisan PR campaign to extend our military presence in Iraq has begun at the legislative level. Military officials already were making loaded statements about how Iraq would have to inform them soon if they wanted the troops to stay. This never materialized, so I guess you could see this as Plan B.

An announcement of an extension to the US presence will not only lead to the dissolution of the Maliki government, but intensify attacks directly on US personnel. Service members will die, and the purpose of that spilled blood is inscrutable. And the US would take the position of Hosni Mubarak with a mass popular movement arrayed against them, demanding that they exit.

We keep seeing this spectacle of top US military officials going to Iraq for meetings with the political leadership, and saying loudly that if they want US troops to stay in the country beyond the December 2011 date, they’d better make up their minds soon. Mind you, no Iraqi official has said publicly – or, reading between the lines of all the statements, privately – that they want the US to stay.

I don’t think there’s a bigger campaign promise that Barack Obama made than getting troops out of Iraq. His opposition to the war is the reason he won the nomination; I don’t even think that’s a controversial statement. And of the many advances he’s touted in his first week as a candidate for re-election, there hasn’t been a bigger one that getting our troops out of Iraq. The final phase of that process is scheduled for the end of 2011, a year before the election.

Or is it?

Demonstrations continue across Iraq as people in more than a dozen cities march to demand an end to corruption and the most basic services.

Iraqis are planning to take to the streets this Friday in a mass Day of Wrath. Demonstrations from Sulimaniyah and Mosel in the North to Fallujah, Baghdad, Kut and Basra have called for an end to corruption and the provision of essential services as well as protection for the rights of journalists.

The US may not be so upset that Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs late last week. For one, the logs mainly implicate the previous Administration in various crimes and atrocities. More important to this White House, the revelations contained in the documents may make it impossible for Nouri al-Maliki to run the government.

You’d think the American government would be happy that Iraq’s post-election political process — which has been a perpetual-immobility machine since last spring’s parliamentary elections — is finally starting to inch forward.

But you would be wrong.