NYT: ROME – Italy will withdraw its nearly 3,000 troops from Iraq by the year’s end, the defense minister said on Thursday. The announcement came during a fiercely fought election campaign in a nation where the presence of Italian troops in Iraq is not popular.

“This is not a retreat, a word that is not part of our vocabulary,” the defense minister, Antonio Martino, told a parliamentary commission. Rather, he said, it is a “dignified and just return.” | story
Does this mean that Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing” is ready to call those 2,000 mine-detonating Moroccan monkeys into service?

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