- QUOTATION OF THE DAY – As seen in the NY Times
“The situation in Iraq remains complex, difficult, and sometimes downright frustrating. I also believe that it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time, although doing so will be neither quick nor easy.”
- GEN. DAVID H. PETRAEUS, the senior American commander in Iraq.
Nothing new here. The quote “over time”, really bothers me, what does he mean, 5 years, 10 years? As I think of it, “our objectives in Iraq” is also a worrisome phrase. I feel that those objectives are really falling short when it comes to ending a seemingly never ending conflict. If I really knew what those objectives were, they may not be the objectives of many Americans. There is a huge gray area that we home folks are not privy to and it really scares me. One looming problem is Iran and the way Bush keeps poking at it. He keeps that up and the problem may turn around and bite him in the ass and we’ll all be caught in the middle.
Yesterday General Petraeus proposed an American presence that would be longer and larger than many Democrats have hoped for and would also have a larger American combat role in protecting the Iraqi population. It’s more than time for the Iraqi military to do the protecting. I think that we are being used by an Iraqi military that doesn’t want to step up and do the hard dangerous job, on their own, that our military is doing. A firm timeline for withdrawing the bulk of our troops seems to be out of the question for Petraeus and he also has very different ideas of the way the remaining troops will be used after the “surge” 30,000 eventually return home. The idea that we won’t be at the “pre-surge†level of 15 combat brigades until mid-July ’08 is totally unacceptable. In my opinion, we need to redeploy the combat troops and spend more time on training the Iraqis.
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