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.

So, Mike Mullen’s contention here is that Iran is arming Shiite militias to attack Americans in Iraq.

These things never seem to have direct evidence attached to it, but OK. I’ll give that to you. Let me offer a suggestion for stopping these well-armed militias from killing US troops.

US troops could leave Iraq.

The Administration, hoping to counteract that graphic showing twice as many troops in Afghanistan by September 2012 as when President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, offered a different graph in a White House blog post by Ben Rhodes. This one blends troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan and shows a consistent reduction in troop levels over time.

Since Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung broke the suspense, I guess I’m free to say now that the President will announce tonight the removal of all 33,000 second surge troops from Afghanistan within 14 months, by September 2012. This would include a reduction of 10,000 troops by the end of the year, with the other 23,000 to be removed next year.

The Obama Administration is floating a steeper drawdown in Afghanistan than they contemplated in previous weeks, due to new “strategic considerations.” While they call the considerations the war’s cost and the killing of Osama bin Laden, the fact that 204 House members just voted for a quicker pullout, and the fact that there’s an election coming up in 2012, are probably the more likely ones.

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?