The remaining 46,000 American troops in Iraq are set to completely withdraw from the country by December 31, 2011. Although Washington offered to extend the presence of some of its soldiers should Baghdad request it, such a request has yet to materialize. Kurdish leaders have openly declared that the country very much needs U.S. troops to remain longer, and most Iraqi political leaders secretly agree with Hawler on this.

Without a request from the Iraqi government, which would have to include a revised Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that provides the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to U.S. forces in Iraq, Washington will likely complete the withdrawal in December as planned. The deadline for requesting an extension of the Americans’ presence also comes much sooner than December: due to the complicated logistics of supplying, mobilizing and demobilizing large number of troops overseas, it will become increasingly difficult to change plans after August.

Worry in Iraq thus grows as the de facto Fall deadline for requesting an extension of the American presence looms near. While Iraqi security forces have improved considerably since 2003, they still fail to control Iraq’s borders and they may not prove able to handle a resurgence in civil unrest. Crucially, the Iraqi Army also needs more time to develop into a national army resistant to sectarian divisions. This probably will not happen as long as many leaders in Baghdad continue to act as Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds first and foremost, even while they speak as Iraqis.

Between 2006 and 2011, the Americans and Iraqi leaders working with them developed several strategies to reduce instability and violence. Sunni Arab tribal leaders were convinced, paid and supplied to turn away from Jihadi insurgents and join the American-led effort in Iraq (the Sahwa Councils), a surge of U.S. troops in 2006-2008 further helped establish control in the country, a major Nuri-al Maliki led and American backed offensive against the Mahdi militia of populist Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr led to his group’s withdrawal from armed operations, and a post-2009 focus on keeping the disputed territories calm (spearheaded by the establishment of joint American-Arab-Kurdish forces there) succeeded in diffusing Kurdish-Arab tensions.

None of these initiatives could have succeeded without a significant American military presence in Iraq. So now the question becomes, did Americans and their allied Iraqi leaders accomplish enough between 2003 and now? After U.S. ground troops depart, even U.S. air support for Iraqi troops will not function as well, since no Americans will remain on the ground to site targets and call in coordinates for the planes. Can today’s Iraqi army, with less effective air support than in the past, repeat a feat like the 2007-2008 battle for Sadr City? Can they maintain the same level of effectiveness in their raids against al-Qaeda in Iraq and similar groups?

Most Iraqi leaders seem to think the answer to these questions is still ‘no’ for the time being. However, two main obstacles prevent just about everyone except the Kurds from requestion an extension to the U.S. troop presence: Iran and popular sentiment amongst Iraqi Arabs.

Iran, of course, wants the Americans to leave as soon as possible, and preferably with their tails between their legs. No country enjoys more influence in Iraq today than Iran, and the Iranians can make life very difficult for any Iraqis who would request that the Americans stay. Most Iraqi political groups, whether Arab, Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen or Kurdish, receive some form of Iranian financial support or favours. The withdrawal of such support or favours could cause a group’s eclipse at the hands of rivals who continue to receive Iranian aid. Other leaders fear assassination or some other unfortunate fate if they stop heeding Teheran’s calls. For those political groups that Iran holds a bit less influence with, such as the Kurds, Teheran could also increase its military operations, artillery barrages and even troop incursions along its shared border with Kurdistan – under the pretext of anti-PJAK campaigns, but suspiciously and conveniently timed to coincide with Kurdish calls for U.S. troops to stay longer in Iraq.

Popular sentiment amongst Iraqi Arabs also plays a role. A combination of Arab nationalist sensitivity to foreign troops’ presence, the al-Jazeera effect of constantly labeling the Americans occupiers and depicting them as such, and actual mistakes that the Americans made during the first five years after Saddam’s overthrow, created a situation where the average Iraqi Arab wants them completely out, sooner rather than later. Of course, the average Iraqi Arab also has no understanding of what the Americans did behind the scenes to prevent a civil war in the country, from constantly meeting with leaders from every group and deploying troops each time tensions threatened to explode, to investing large numbers of advisors and resources into the country’s most important sectors. Every Iraqi Arab leader, even if they privately understand that they need the Americans to stay longer, must pay heed to popular sentiment. This is especially true thanks to another American-led change in the country -- elections.

If anything symbolizes the twin-roles of Iran and popular Arab sentiment in preventing an extension of the American military presence, it must be Moqtada al-Sadr. A strident Arab and Iraqi nationalist in his popular discourse, the young Sadr is also a close ally and client of Iran. He used both Arab nationalism and Iranian support to grow his movement into a powerful force in Iraq, including an armed militia that can be re-mobilized at a moment’s notice. Sadr thus gets much of his strength from his anti-American positions, and his movement vehemently opposes an extension of the American troop presence.

It thus falls upon the Kurds, the Sunnis and most of the other Shiite groups, all of whom know they need the Americans in the country a bit longer, to find away through the twin threats of Iran and Arab nationalist sentiment and actually ask them to stay.