The Daily Background
| When is an Iraq Timeline not a Timeline?
by Arlen Parsa
The President is claiming he’ll withdrawal all troops from Iraq by the end of the year.
No, that isn’t what he’s saying. He’s saying he’s going to “turn over most of Iraq” to Iraqis. Whatever the hell that means. I don’t know, and you don’t know either. Nobody knows what the hell that means. Which parts of Iraq are troops going to stay in? How does this fit into the permanent American bases in Iraq issue? What is the strategy for readying Iraqi security forces? We already saw the Iraqi fighting groups ready for combat go from 1 to zero. How does this fit into the Administration’s view of things looking up in Iraq? And what about the elephant in the room: this civil war?
This may sound like a lot of questions, and it is. But we have to ask these questions. Because we can’t trust this Administration. They’ve deceived us before, mislead us before, and outright lied to us before.
Just because the President claims he’s got a “timeline” (and this isn’t a timeline at all, it’s a vague “vow”), does not mean we should accept what he says as what we want him to say, or what we’re hoping he’ll say. Nobody knows what this means. I doubt even the Administration knows what this means. And we need to ask what it means. And we need to keep the pressure up. Otherwise they’ll get away with this non-timeline. We need details.
Washington Post: “Bush Sets Target for Transition In Iraq”
