BAGHDAD (AP) - Tens of thousands rallied in several cities Friday against a proposed U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, raising doubts that negotiators can meet a July target to finalize a pact to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after the current U.N. mandate expires.

Although U.S. officials insist they are not seeking permanent bases, suspicion runs deep among many Iraqis that the Americans want to keep at least some troops in the country for many years.

Now where do you suppose those presumptive Iraqis ever got a silly idea like that?? Here Maybe?

“We denounce the government’s intentions to sign a long-term agreement with the occupying forces,” Asaad al-Nassiri, a sheik loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said during a sermon in Kufa. “Our army will be under their control in this agreement, and this will lead to them having permanent bases in Iraq.”

President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed a statement last December on the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations, saying they planned to finalize a new security agreement by July 31 - in time for Iraq’s parliament to approve the deal before a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

Maybe they’ve been reading McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington, the cat is out of the bag and the Iraqis know they’ve been had once again…

You can tell people over and over and over again, ‘we’re the USA and we’re here to help you, stay the course, you’ll see’, you can BS them just so many times, after a while they want to see results, and it would appear that our ideas concerning freedom and democracy just aren’t catching on in Iraq, and those ideas never will catch on, I don’t care how much smoke Bush and Company blow up your skirt, it’s not about hearts and minds, it’s not about Iraqi Freedom, and it’s not about WMDs, it’s about G.W. Bush getting a hard-on for Saddam, his threats against ‘Daddy’ and his defiance, I mean, how dare Saddam think that he could run his country HIS way, the shame of it all…

And by the way, exactly where do we, and by we I mean the Bush and Company, where do we come off telling ANY nation how to run themselves?? Bush has managed to pretty well screw up this nation over the last 7 1/2 years, he’s considered to be weak and ineffectual as a military leader and has no idea of foreign policy or how it works, he sends Condi into the Arab world and that in itself is a horrendous mistake, he is the laughing stock of the global leaders that he wishes to be the leader of, and in MY opinion when Prescott and G.H.W. Bush put their stock into George as being the chosen one to lead a One World Government, they got the short end of the stick…

I personally believe we need to take care of the War on Terror where that war really is, and we need to take care of our own domestic problems before we traipse off to Iraq and try and settle their problems…

Before the Friday protests, al-Sadr’s office in Baghdad issued a statement branding the negotiations as “a project of humiliation” aimed at turning Iraq “into a small stooge of the United States.”