Key advisor on Iraq for Obama recommending 60-80k troops until 2010. [View All]

snips -

WASHINGTON — A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center’s Web site as a policy brief.

This is not the first time the opinion of an adviser to the Obama campaign has differed with the candidate’s stated Iraq policy. In February, Mr. Obama’s first foreign policy tutor, Samantha Power, told BBC that the senator’s current Iraq plan would likely change based on the advice of military commanders in 2009. She has since resigned her position as a formal adviser.

The political ramifications of the disclosure are yet to be seen. The perception of a harder line in Iraq could help Mr. Obama combat charges by Senator McCain in a general election that Mr. Obama favors a hasty surrender and retreat in Iraq. But it could hurt the Obama campaign with anti-war voters in the Democratic primaries. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Clinton, has called for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but an architect of the surge has told the Sun that she has been wary of a precipitous withdrawal. In a situation with some parallels to this one, Mr. Obama suffered some political damage on the trade issue when he called publicly for a renegotiation of NAFTA while a policy adviser reportedly met with Canadian officials and downplayed the chances of a NAFTA retreat.

In an interview yesterday, a senior Obama foreign affairs adviser, Susan Rice, said the Iraq working group is not the last word on the campaign’s Iraq policy.



Mr. Obama’s policy to date also allows for a residual force for Iraq. In early Iowa debates, the senator would not pledge to remove all soldiers from Iraq, a distinction from his promise to withdraw all combat brigades. Also, Mr. Obama has stipulated that he would be open to having the military train the Iraqi Security Forces if he received guarantees that those forces would not be the shock troops of one side of an Iraqi civil war.

But the Obama campaign has also not said how many troops would make up this residual force. “We have not put a number on that. It depends on the circumstances on the ground,” Ms. Rice said. She added, “It would be worse than folly, it would be dangerous, to put a hard number on the residual forces.”

http://www.nysun.com/politics/obama-adviser-calls-troops-stay-iraq-through-2010

Has Obama ever answered the question how many troops he plans to keep in Iraq :shrug: