Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and George Bush in a file photo.

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki have agreed to include a “general time horizon“ for a US troop withdrawal in a broad contract currently under negotiation between the two governments, the White House announced Friday.
“The president and the prime minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals--such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of US combat forces from Iraq,“ said White House press secretary Dana Perino in a statement e-mailed to reporters, “Washington Times“ said.
The White House did not give any more specificity to define this “time horizon.“
“The president and prime minister agreed that the goals would be based on continued improving conditions on the ground and not an arbitrary date for withdrawal,“ Perino said.
The announcement comes at a time when Maliki and other top officials in his government have begun to publicly call for a hastening of the US removal of troops in Iraq. The White House and others have said that the statements by Maliki’s government are a positive sign that they are gaining confident in their ability to self-govern.
Signals have been mixed, however, as to whether or not the Iraqis are calling for a fixed withdrawal date. The Bush administration has insisted that their Status of Forces Agreement, which ends at the end of the year, is supposed to replace a United Nations mandate authorizing US forces to be present in Iraq, will not include a deployment timetable.

Brown in Baghdad
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has held talks with Iraqi leaders less than a week after the announcement of expected British troop cuts in southern Iraq, AP reported.
Brown was greeted in Baghdad’s protected Green Zone by Maliki, whose office later released a statement saying the meetings “stressed the necessity of establishing a long-term Iraqi-British relationship.“
Brown also met with top Iraqi advisers and President Jalal Talabani. Brown made no public comments.
Wrong War
In other News, many adults in the United States regret their government’s decision to launch the coalition effort, according to a poll by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
59 per cent of respondents think going to war with Iraq was the wrong thing for the United States to do.
When asked what the next president should do about Iraq, 51 per cent of respondents want him to keep troops in Iraq until the situation is more stable and then begin to withdraw them without a fixed date for full withdrawal, while 43 per cent would want to immediately begin a withdrawal of American troops with a fixed date to have them all out within 18 months.

Worsening Conditions
Amid this, millions of Iraqis displaced by sectarian conflict are still struggling to get sufficient food, shelter and basic services like water and health care, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
In a mid-year review distributed late on Thursday, the Geneva-based aid agency said fewer Iraqis were fleeing their homes, but the roughly 2.8 million Iraqis who were already internally displaced faced worsening living conditions, Reuters reported.
Nearly three quarters of them were unable to access regularly the government food rations they depend on, one third could not get the medicines they needed and 14 percent had no access to health care at all.
“The deteriorating conditions facing ... (Iraq’s) internally displaced persons (IDPs), as well as the limited returnee population, remain one of the most serious humanitarian crises in the world,“ the IOM said. It added that although the rate of displacement had slowed sharply and some refugees were coming home, most were still too terrified of sectarian attacks to consider returning.
“Some face increasing rent prices, others squat in public buildings fearing eviction, or live in simple mud huts.“
Many of those who returned faced conditions at least as miserable as they experienced when displaced. Around 40 percent of displaced Iraqis had tried to come back home, only to find their property occupied or destroyed.

Thousands of people have attended a memorial service in Beirut for eight Hezbollah fighters killed in the 2006 war with Israel.
The bodies of the men were returned to Lebanon as part of an exchange deal with Israel, “Al-Jazeera“ reported.
About 5,000 people gathered in a convention hall in the capital’s southern suburbs on Friday for the memorial, which was attended by grieving relatives and supporters of the Shia movement.
Eight coffins, draped in yellow and green Hezbollah flags and decorated with floral wreaths and pictures of the deceased, were placed in the hall.
“These martyrs have defeated the enemy ... our enemy who was humiliated yesterday will remain so, by the grace of God,“ Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, told the mourners.
“The brothers of these martyrs will confront the enemy if it ever thinks of making the mistake“ of attacking Lebanon, he said.
The eight men were among almost 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters returned to Hezbollah on Wednesday, along with five Lebanese men released from Israeli prisons.
Meanwhile, one person was killed and six were wounded in clashes early on Friday in Lebanon’s northern port city of Tripoli, a security official said.
He said the person died and two people were wounded when a vehicle refused to stop at an army roadblock in the largely Sunni district of Bab Al-Tebbaneh.
Soldiers opened fire after the driver refused to stop. An exchange of fire between fighters from Bab Al-Tebbaneh and troops of the internal security forces resulted in four soldiers wounded, one seriously.