So, remind me again why they were so all-fired hot to have this surge? Even if it had worked, they couldn't support it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/world/middleeast/24policy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sloginsnip//
The reality, officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort. By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment. The latter, said one White House official, “is not something the president wants to do” and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Advisers to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and senior members of Congress who have discussed the issue with Mr. Gates have described one of his central goals as trying to turn down the heat in Iraq, transforming the war from the central national security crisis confronting the nation to an important but manageable long-term foreign policy and military issue. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed similar views, but it is unclear whether Vice President Dick Cheney or President Bush will try to squeeze every possible month out of the troop increase.
It is difficult to predict how the assessments will play out in the next three months. Congressional Democrats, who wrote the Sept. 15 deadline into war-financing legislation, envisioned General Petraeus’s report as the moment they would have enough solid information to decide whether to continue financing for the so-called surge. They say that it could provide the opportunity to peel away enough nervous Republicans to create a veto-proof majority in favor of a withdrawal. An earlier report, due next month, is expected to be less significant.
But
with the proliferation of assessments, there may also be a proliferation of contradictory views. That is exactly what the White House sought to create last December, when it ordered other studies to offset the findings of the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Representative Lee H. Hamilton. Mr. Bush rejected much of the group’s advice — until recently, when he declared that it was his intention to get back to the group’s plan. He did not say which parts, but the plan includes a call, filled with caveats, for gradual withdrawal of all combat brigades by the end of March 2008.
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