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Morgan Neil
AC360° Contributor

After Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki met with Barack Obama on Monday, his spokesman dropped a bombshell: Iraq had a vision, Ali al-Dabbagh said, that most US combat troops would withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2010.

Here in CNN's Baghdad bureau, producer Jomana Karadsheh caught Dabbagh by phone as he boarded a plane with Maliki heading for Germany. Yes, he told her, the Iraqi Government's "vision" is that most US combat troops would be out of Iraq by 2010.

And, he added, this was nothing new.

Well, not so fast.
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