ALISON STEWART, host:
The next American president will not only have to deal with an economic crisis but will have to decide the fate of American troops in Iraq. NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr has these thoughts about the negotiations with Iraqi leaders.
DANIEL SCHORR: At his first news conference in January 1961, President Kennedy announced the release of two American airmen whose reconnaissance plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union the previous July. This was taken as a gesture to the new president from Nakita Kruschev, who was been on bad terms with President Eisenhower since the shooting down of a U2 spy plane resulting in the collapse of the Paris Summit.
I recall this because something of sort, a first start with a new president, may be happening again. The Bush administration is in terrible trouble trying to negotiate an agreement with the Iraqi government covering the stationing of American troops. A tentative agreement months in the making is hung up in the Iraqi cabinet, and it is unlikely that there will be any agreement by the time the current United Nation's mandate expires on December 31st. There has been talk of extending the U.N. mandate for another year.
But there has recently been bad blood between the Bush administration and the Kremlin over issues like the Russian invasion of Georgia. And it looked as though Russia would use its veto in the Security Council to block an extension, leaving the American Forces in Iraq with no legal underpinning, stuck between Iraq and a hard place, you might say.
To most everybody's surprise, Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has announced that Russia will support an Iraqi request that the U.N. mandate be extended. He said that Russia was convinced that a complete pullout of international forces would be inadvisable. That will take some of the pressure off as Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki tries to negotiate an agreement in the face of widespread Iraqi opposition.
Iraq's political leaders say that no deal is likely before the American election on November 4th. Iraqi leaders, having written off the Bush administration, are presumably counting on the election of Senator Barack Obama, who has shown willingness to accept a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops. You get it? Foreign leaders placing their bets on the American election race all over again. This is Daniel Schorr.
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