Well, like I said, if I really thought this were our reason for maintaining a postwar military presence in Iraq, I would never have supported doing so in the first place.
I support doing so because I believe it's in our national interest. And it's in our national interest whether or not Iraq's government is good or awful in our opinion. That's why, to someone who is actually focused on our national interest, to say "he better accept our metrics or we're gonna pack up and leave!" just makes no sense. It's like saying to someone who owes you money, "pay me on my schedule or I'm gonna burn all the money in my own wallet!"
If we were going after AQI, we wouldn’t be spending so much time developing infrastructure, we’d have put that on the civilian gov’t.
Well, unless we deemed the civilian gov't incapable of doing so (which it seems to be), and unless we believed that building up Iraq's infrastructure was important to help prevent the conditions that allow AQ to gain a foothold (which is indeed what I believe).
Again: We have independent reasons of our own for wanting a presence there and doing those things, reasons having to do with our national interest. Saying "do XYZ or we're gonna leave, we swear!" demonstrates confusion about why we are there in the first place. We want a military presence there, we're not there out of some kind of weird charity. Again: if this isn't true, then we should get the hell out of there yesterday.
If the only way we're ever going to get out of here is when the Iraqi gov't can stand on its own two feet, then how is Maliki helping anything here? Basically, he and other supporters of the strategy are advocating an unlimited stay here. That's completely unacceptable.