Word: drawdown
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...these moves suggest--but hardly guarantee --a course correction on Iraq by September, when the patience of even GOP lawmakers will probably run out. Talk of a partial U.S. drawdown or a new acceleration of Iraqi-troop training increases with each day. A senior Administration official who participates in foreign policy meetings chose his words carefully last week: "It will be easier to execute a change in direction if the people who have to decide on it do not feel bound by things they have said and done in the past...
...high ground, and negates their claims to be acting on the behalf of the best interests of all Americans. Politics seems to have supplanted reason on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We hope that both the president and Congress realize what hangs in the balance and commit to a drawdown without a strict timetable...
...Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East military expert and former national security aide to John McCain , says London's drawdown only cements Shi'ite power in southern Iraq. Shi'ite police in the region have been conducting sometimes deadly sect-based operations against Sunni residents for months, he says, and local politics have devolved into "a fractured mess" delinked from national political parties. "The coming British cuts in many ways reflect the political reality that the British `lost' the south more than a year ago," Cordesman, who has traveled to the region frequently, writes in a Wednesday analysis from his office...
...According to a spokesman for Britain's Ministry of Defense, any troop reductions themselves still represent "an aspiration." Blair made clear to the Commons that the speed of the drawdown would be determined by ongoing assessments of the security situation. Certainly, he knows that he won't be there to oversee the final departure of British forces from Iraq. The former Europe Minister Denis MacShane, leaving the chamber at the end of the question-and-answer session, welcomed "the reduction of British troops in Iraq" and "a mission partly accomplished in Basra," but suggested that aspects of the insurgency...
...appears that president Bush, the self-described "decider," has elected to ignore the well-respected, bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended the drawdown of American troops from combat in Iraq. He is also ignoring 80% of the American people, who want him to bring the troops home. He has decided to do just the opposite, with a "surge" in troops, which is just spin for escalation. We tried that in the Vietnam War, which ended only when the American people finally woke up and demanded a halt. We must do the same now with this Iraq fiasco because...