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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (178199)	12/19/2005 10:00:33 AM
From: briskit	Respond to of 281500

Good point, Dennis. It's prudent to have a contingency plan that takes into consideration a successful outcome in Iraq, regardless of how unlikely. Suppose a viable democracy takes root, and even has a greater impact on the ME? Not impossible. Ultimately, western historians, and certainly pragmatic politics, will concede positive results. One doesn't want to have been positioned solely against a positive outcome. At least one would follow Pelosi's advice and espouse a variety of positions, and not be perceived as having solely a monolithic opposition. A forward-looking position is called for as well.

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (178199)	12/19/2005 12:58:03 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

Iraq: When Can We Go Home? Continuing casualties prompt calls for Bush to spell out the cost, duration and purpose of the U.S. mission there By TONY KARON Posted Thursday, Jun. 26, 2003 President Bush faced a call this week from a senior member of his own party's foreign policy establishment to "level" with the American people about Iraq. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar was not harping on the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction; he was urging the president to give the electorate a more realistic picture of the scale and duration of the U.S. occupation mission in Iraq, and to impress on them the importance of staying the course. Fresh from a visit to Baghdad, Lugar warned: "The idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more — we've got to get over that rhetoric. It is rubbish! We're going to be there a long time." A similar warning came from Thomas Pickering, who had served the first President Bush as UN ambassador and had headed up a Council on Foreign Relations study on Iraq which concluded that the U.S. mission had lacked "vision and strategy." Pickering, too, urged Bush to make clear that the current U.S. deployment of some 200,000 troops in and around Iraq would have to be maintained for a long time to come. Or, as General John Abizaid, who will assume command of the Iraq mission from the retiring General Tommy Franks next month, put it in congressional testimony this week, "for the foreseeable future." For obvious domestic political reasons, the Bush Administration going into the war had downplayed the scale and duration of a post-war occupation mission. When then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told legislators that such a mission would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, his assessment had been immediately dismissed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark." Wolfowitz explained that "I am reasonably certain that (the Iraqi people) will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." Six weeks ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still suggesting the U.S. force in Iraq could be reduced to 30,000 by the end of the year. But the prevailing assessment in Washington appears to be shifting to the idea of a figure closer to Shinseki's.... time.com ========= People have been talking about the 'broken' army for years now and the recruiting situation isn't any better. The Shiites are doing goodness knows what to the Sunnis and the Kurds have taken 'their' oil and gone home. Plus Iran is getting ever dicier. It's a bad situation if we have to hope and pray for others to behave themselves until we get our house in order.