Say Anything Blog

This probably isn’t as significant as it sounds.

WASHINGTON - U.S. military officials are narrowing the range of Iraq strategy options and appear to be focusing on reducing the U.S. combat role in 2008 while increasing training of Iraqi forces, a senior military official told The Associated Press on Monday.

The military has not yet developed a plan for a substantial withdrawal of forces next year. But officials are laying the groundwork for possible overtures to Turkey and Jordan on using their territory to move some troops and equipment out of Iraq, the official said. The main exit would remain Kuwait, but additional routes would make it easier and more secure for U.S. troops leaving western and northern Iraq.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because internal deliberations are ongoing, emphasized that the discussions do not prejudge decisions yet to be made by President Bush. Those decisions include how long to maintain the current U.S. troop buildup and when to make the transition to a larger Iraqi combat role.

It is widely anticipated that the five extra Army brigades that were sent to the Baghdad area this year will be withdrawn by late next summer. But it is far less clear whether the Bush administration will follow that immediately with additional drawdowns, as many Democrats in Congress are advocating.

Bush has mentioned publicly that he likes the idea, first proposed late last year by the Iraq Study Group, of switching the emphasis of U.S. military efforts from mainly combat to mainly support roles. But he also has said that this should not happen until Baghdad in particular is stable enough to enable Iraqi political leaders to make hard choices about reconciling rival interests among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

The idea that our military is planning for eventual withdrawals from Iraq isn’t surprising in the least.  We have “surge” troops in Iraq who will need to be coming out relatively soon.  And left-wing rhetoric aside, the war in Iraq isn’t going to last forever.  The military strategists and planners at the Pentagon know some or all of our troops will be leaving within the next couple of years.  That they’re planning for that already is as it should be.

I’d be worried if they weren’t laying such plans.

As for Bush’s apparent preference for refocusing our mission on training Iraqi troops while said troops take the lead in combat operations, this isn’t exactly surprising either.  Going back to the beginning of the Bush administration’s rhetoric on Iraq, he’s always said that our troops will “stand down as the Iraqi’s stand up.” The big news out of Iraq for a while now is that the surge is causing some major changes.  The terrorists are on the run, and Iraqi’s are stepping up.  That the President would want to capitalize on this progress by stepping down the involvement of our troops in preparation for an eventual withdrawal is, again, hardly surprising.

Again and again Bush tells us what he’s going to do in Iraq, and then he does those things.  He tells us that he will reduce the involvement of our troops as the security situation gets better and as Iraqis take a bigger role in the fighting.  That is happening now, yet the media plays it as though we’re on the edge of defeat.

It’s amazing to watch.