WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says he won't consider speeding up the troop pullout from Iraq even though security has improved and violence has decreased.

"I think the plan that we put forward in Iraq is the right one" because it calls for "a very gradual withdrawal through the national elections in Iraq," he said in an interviewed aired Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Good news out of Iraq is becoming almost a daily event: In just the past week, we learned that U.S. combat fatalities (five) dropped in July to a low for the war, that key leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq have fled to the Pakistani hinterland, that troop deployments will soon be cut to 12 months from 15, and that Washington and Baghdad are close to concluding a status-of-forces agreement.

Now this: Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr plans to announce Friday that he will disarm his Mahdi Army, which was raining mortars on Baghdad's Green Zone as recently as April. Coupled with the near-total defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq, this means the U.S. no longer faces any significant organized military foe in the country. It also marks a major setback for Iran, which had used the Mahdi Army as one of its primary vehicles for extending its influence in Iraq.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish ground troops crossed into northern Iraq in their hunt for Kurdish PKK rebels, the military said on Friday, describing the start of a campaign one report said could last 15 days.

We have lost cities and afterwards villages.... We got away from people and found ourselves in a wasteland desert

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.

...when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

...when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur...

Between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis died violent deaths between the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and June 2006. That's the conclusion of a study by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization (WHO) published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The new estimate throws fresh doubt on a controversial study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, published in The Lancet in 2006, that estimated a death toll four times higher (Science, 20 October 2006, p. 396).

"The improvements in security produced by the courage and blood of our troops have not been matched by a willingness on the part of Iraqi leaders to make the hard choices necessary to bring peace to their country," Sanchez said in remarks to be aired Saturday for the weekly Democratic radio address.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a $50 billion Iraq war bill that included a troop pullout plan, killing the latest Democratic attempt to end the war while keeping up the fight over its funding.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats who lead Congress likened President George W. Bush on Thursday to a bully on Iraq war policy and vowed to spend no more on combat without a deadline for bringing U.S. troops home.

The day nobody was killed in Iraq

Tom Baldwin and Deborah Haynes | November 05, 2007

IT is whispered about at the margins of meetings, and discussed in Washington parties where rumour is passed around with the wine and canapes.

It even appears, fleetingly, to be fact.

"The day nobody died from violence in Iraq" is a date that has been much anticipated in the White House - where US President George W. Bush is desperate to hail the success of his surge of 30,000 troops this year.

But no one can quite say when this event occurred.

"It was some time this week, wasn't it?" says a senior military source. "Or maybe last week."

Another diplomatic official confidently asserted that there were "at least two such days this month". When, exactly? "Not sure," he replied.

Such vagueness may be concealing a truly significant transformation on the ground in Iraq.

There have certainly been several days in the past month when no US or British soldiers were killed.

BAGHDAD - In a dramatic turnaround, more than 3,000 Iraqi families driven out of their Baghdad neighborhoods have returned to their homes in the past three months as sectarian violence has dropped, the government said Saturday.

BAGHDAD - October is on course to record the second consecutive decline in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian deaths and Americans commanders say they know why: the U.S. troop increase and an Iraqi groundswell against al-Qaida and Shiite militia extremists.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch points to what the military calls "Concerned Citizens" — both Shiites and Sunnis who have joined the American fight. He says he's signed up 20,000 of them in the last four months.

"I've never been more optimistic than I am right now with the progress we've made in Iraq. The only people who are going to win this counterinsurgency project are the people of Iraq. We've said that all along. And now they're coming forward in masses," Lynch said in a recent interview at a U.S. base deep in hostile territory south of Baghdad. Outgoing artillery thundered as he spoke.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey will defy international pressure on Wednesday and grant its troops permission to enter northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels based there, though it has played down expectations of any imminent attack.