NCRI – Leon Panetta, Obama’s Secretary of Defense nominee designated to replace Robert Gates said in a Senate hearing that the extremist groups affiliated with the Iranian regime were among the major challenges in Iraq and stressed the necessity of continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.
According to the Senate’s web site, Panetta said the Iraqi leaders and American officials acknowledge that after 2011, there will be a vacuum in Iraqi security forces, especially in the area of defense and that he believed that presence of U.S. forces in Iraq for a certain period of time was necessary to alleviate that vacuum.
