skippy the bush kangaroo

Monday, December 26, 2005

spade work

rummy sleight of hand:

no date is set for troop withdrawal from iraq - general says insurgency affects timing; powell calls current levels unsustainable - as american troops marked their third christmas in iraq since the war began in march 2003, the highest-ranking u.s. military officer said their number could decline in 2006 but that there is no specific target for withdrawals. he cautioned that more troops could be needed to cope with insurgent activity. [snip]

secretary of defense donald h. rumsfeld said last week that the number could drop to 130,000 by march. president bush and other u.s. officials have also indicated that u.s. forces will increasingly shift to training iraqi troops. [snip]

separately, former secretary of state colin l. powell warned that u.s. force levels are unsustainable, and he predicted that this would cause withdrawals to occur.

speaking on abc's "this week," powell said: "i don't think we can sustain this level of presence with the size force that we have. . . . so i think the numbers will come down for that reason."

rummy’s “promise” will be the base of much red propaganda as we approach the 2006 elections, unless the civil war in iraq explodes in an untimely fashion from the republican point of view. if it does, then rummy will point to pace’s statement and say, "well we never actually promised to withdraw the troops." by the by, it looks like civil war is about to explode in iraq.

what powell’s statement suggests is that rummy’s gambit can’t work – we should fear not simply an explosion of civil war in iraq, but an implosion of military capability in the u.s. it would be nice if wapo actually explored the tensions between these various statements, but it does not appear that work or thought were topics covered in the stenography school their reporter and his editor attended.

posted by Pudentilla at 6:38 AM |