Obama tells Maliki US will pull out troops on time

US President Barack Obama told Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday that he would pull American troops out of the country as planned, the premier's office said.
"Obama renewed the American commitment to Iraq and to withdraw troops as previously planned," Maliki's spokesman Yasin Majid said, decribing the meeting in which the two leaders also discussed security as "positive."
The US president has ordered an end to US combat operations in Iraq by August 31 2010, but says 50,000 troops will remain under a new mission until the end of 2011.
Hefty support for Obama's Iraq withdrawal: pollMore than two-thirds of Americans support President Barack Obama's plans to withdraw most US troops from Iraq, a new poll said Tuesday as Obama paid a surprise visit to Baghdad.
A total of 69 percent backed the withdrawal plan while 30 percent were opposed, the poll by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. said.
In February Obama announced he was pulling most combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010, although a force of up to 50,000 will remain until the end of the following year. The current deployment is more than 140,000.
A military accord signed last November between Baghdad and Washington requires all US forces to leave the country by the end of 2011.
The poll was released as Obama arrived for his first visit to Iraq since taking office in January, amid a new upturn in deadly attacks blamed by the Iraqi government and US military on the Al-Qaeda terror network.
The president told CBS television late last month that he would not speed up troop withdrawals from Iraq, arguing the war-torn country was "moving in the right direction" but still needed US help.
The CNN poll of 1,023 respondents was conducted by telephone from Friday to Sunday, and has an error margin of three percentage points.