Odierno worries: What if the Iraqi election stalemate isn’t resolved soon?

While General Odierno said he believed negotiations had picked up and would prove successful, he predicted politicians still needed “four to six to eight weeks.”

“That’s a guess,” he said in an interview at his headquarters, whose plaster roof is still engraved with the initials of Saddam Hussein. “If it goes beyond 1 October, what does that mean? Could there be a call for another election? I worry about that a little bit.”…

“The longer that takes, the more frustrated they might get with the process itself,” General Odierno said. “What I don’t want is for them to lose faith in the system, the democratic system, and that’s the long-term risk, do they lose faith in the process.”