Word: drawdowns
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...After the meeting ended, I remember walking out of the Pentagon shaking my head and wondering how in the world Rumsfeld could have expected me to believe him. Everybody knew that CENTCOM had issued orders to drawdown the forces. The Department of Defense had printed public affairs guidance for how the military should answer press queries about the redeployment. There were victory parades being planned. And in mid-May 2003, Rumsfeld himself had sent out some of his famous "snowflake" memorandums to Gen. Franks asking how the general was going to redeploy all the forces in Kuwait. The Secretary knew...
...some traces of al-Qaeda; Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success?" Crocker, semi-speechless, chose to misinterpret the question, saying a precipitous drawdown to 30,000 troops would be disastrous. But Obama's question was more diabolical. He was saying, Hey, al-Qaeda's on the run, and Iran is probably more interested in harassing the U.S. military than having another war with Iraq. How much better does the situation need...
...Some Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had hoped to continue the drawdown in order to relieve the strain of repeated combat tours on U.S. troops and their families. But Gates recently sided with Petraeus on the wisdom of a period of "consolidation and assessment" expected to last at least several weeks, and possibly months. Gates and Admiral William Fallon, the outgoing chief of the U.S. Central Command and Petraeus's direct superior, have expressed concern that leaving 140,000 troops in Iraq will continue to erode U.S. military readiness. But President Bush, mindful of the centrality of Iraq...
...Committee - the other two will question him sharply. "Essentially, what we've seen both from the Administration and from John McCain," Obama said Friday, "is a trumpeting of improvements from a horrific situation to simply a unsustainable and intolerable situation." Both Obama and Clinton have called for a faster drawdown. How they will joust with Petraeus could offer insights into their commander-in-chief bona fides...
...struggle is all the more fierce because Obama and Clinton are not terribly far apart in their foreign policy approaches. For all the shouting over Iraq, both Democrats propose a limited and ultimately hard-to-deliver drawdown of U.S. troops there. Both want to talk with America's enemies--give or take a few crazy heads of state--and both want to boost foreign aid to win back goodwill around the globe. "You've got a split in a tribe of like-minded people," says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution. But if Democrats have none of the deep...