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Thadius -> RE: Barry's big flip (8/31/2008 10:43:09 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: bipolarber
Yup... leaving responsibly. Which is the word you have to use when your political opponents accuse you of just "cutting and running." Measured pullout. Within the 16 month timeline the Maliki government has demanded. (Which even the Bush administration has adopted, only they call it a "time horizion" so as not to appear to be the two faced weasles they are.)
Which, I might add, was first discussed when candidate Obama was on his Iraq visit, which John McCain suggested (nay, demanded) he take. Why do you suppose Malaki waited until then to ask for the pull out? You don't suppose he's learned that you don't get anywhere dealing with Bush/McCain, and their ilk, do you?
Thanks for the concern over our "wound", but like a narrow minded, straight vanilla at a play party where you don't belong, it appears you got squicked out by a little blood play.... :)
Hi,
So all of this just came out of the blue because Obama discussed it and visited eh?
quote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/91651
Sorry, Barack, You’ve Lost Iraq.
Bush's efforts to negotiate a long-term U.S-Iraq pact may remove troops as an '08 election issue for Obama, Clinton.
Jan 12, 2008 | Updated: 11:49 a.m. ET Jan 12, 2008
In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: "We're putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington," he told reporters. "The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process." The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush's Iraq coordinator in the White House—in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president. It will become just another piece of the complex global security framework involving a hundred or so countries with which Washington now has bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements.
Asked whether he and the Pentagon were considering a larger drawdown than the current one—which would shrink the U.S. presence to a pre-surge level of about 130,000, he added: "Certainly there is a possibility of that." In fact, one Pentagon contractor who is working on the long-term U.S. plans for Iraq says that the administration is considering new configurations of forces that could reduce troop levels to well under 100,000, perhaps to as few as 60,000, by the time the next president takes office.
The upshot is that the next president, Democrat or Republican, is likely to be handed a fait accompli that could well render moot his or her own elaborate withdrawal plans, especially the ones being considered by the two leading Democratic contenders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama, undeterred by the reported success of Bush's surge, is pushing ahead with his plans for a brigade-a-month withdrawals that would remove the U.S. military presence entirely. If current Defense Secretary Robert Gates can draw down to, say, 12 brigades by 2009, a senior Obama adviser told me Friday, "then we can get the rest out in eight to 10 months."
I know, Thank God that Bush and Maliki listened to the Obama plan. [8|]
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