Word: drawdowns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What conditions need to be met to begin a troop drawdown...
...think that American forces need to be [in Iraq] in the numbers that they are now for very much longer," she told Fox News. Although Pentagon officials bristled at Rice's venturing into military policy, they too have started discussing in public just how steep the drawdown should be from the 160,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq...
...this stage, almost no one is talking about a rapid, large-scale troop drawdown. Inside the Pentagon, officers privately caution that troop levels could even rise if Iraqi security forces don't shape up as expected, if the insurgency grows more fierce or--of greatest concern--if civil strife evolves into full-fledged civil war. In fact, a senior Pentagon official tells TIME that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his planners last week to make sure they have a contingency option if things go very badly in Iraq next year...
...weight behind democracy elsewhere, the Bush Administration has helped other freedom movements in the region. In Egypt, for example, President Hosni Mubarak relented and this year allowed the country to hold its first ever multiparty presidential election. But if Iraq ends up in chaos after a U.S. military drawdown, the instability could spread to its neighbors--and snuff out any hopes of freedom flowering elsewhere in the Arab world...
Even as it confronts an enemy determined to keep fighting past Jan. 30, the Administration is facing the most serious erosion yet of public support at home. A range of polls show almost half of Americans support a drawdown of U.S. forces after the Iraqi election. And despite the increasing potency of the insurgents and the inadequacy of U.S.-trained Iraqi forces to deal with them, only 4% of Americans believe that more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. For now, however, there's no timetable for reducing their ranks. Deputy Defense...