NYT: Troop Cuts in Iraq Won't Meet Goal This Year, Officials Say

Troop Cuts in Iraq Won't Meet Goal This Year, Officials Say
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 9, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 8 — Senior administration and military officials now acknowledge that there is little chance the United States can reach the milestone of reducing American troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by December, a goal that earlier in the year had seemed within reach.

The subject of future troop levels is certain to be an important part of President Bush's two-day war cabinet meeting, which will start Monday at Camp David. Senior American commanders in Iraq will take part by a video link. In preparation, military planners in Iraq and at the Pentagon have been refining troop-rotation proposals that, in the best case, would reduce levels to 110,000 to 120,000 troops by the end of December, from current levels of about 130,000, administration and military officials said.

Any decision to delay the informal timetable of reducing American troops to 100,000 would signal that the field commanders responsible for securing and stabilizing specific regions across Iraq had prevailed in the military's intense internal discussions of the road ahead. Many of these commanders have said privately that now is not the time to draw down American troops, given the continuing violence and the need to give the new Iraqi government time to prove its competence and to garner popular support....

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Last fall, two senior White House officials said they hoped significant reductions would be under way by this summer, so that Republicans returning to their home districts could, in the words of one official, "show that we are on a glide path out" before the Congressional elections in November. Similar expectations were raised by officials after Iraq elected its government in January.

Those hopes were based on an expectation that the new Iraqi government would be fully in place by March and that political progress would calm the population, energize Iraqi security forces and undermine the insurgency....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/world/middleeast/09troops.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

"The slog toward victory in Iraq has turned out to be longer and harder than we might have thought — or hoped," one Pentagon official said. "We've found it pretty difficult to move off of the steady state, one-for-one troop rotation. That's why we keep bouncing around at the 130,000 mark."

What's happening here is that we don't have nearly enough troops in Iraq, so every time Gen. Pace says "hey, we are gonna rotate 10,000 troops out of your sector and not replace them," the officer in charge of that sector says "Jesus no!!! We'll get slaughtered, if you can't send us more troops at least keep things constant!" Which Pace then has to do.

And this will continue until we don't have any more troops to rotate in.

The corporate cabal wants a neverending war for profits, and any troop reduction will be nominal, temporary, and calculated for political gain. Our troops are pawns in this awful qugmire and Bush is responsible.

The troops are pawns in the game of stay in Iraq for 20 years. They tell us what they want us to hear, and then tell us it ain't gonna happen.

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Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5875405,00.html

there's one drop of oil under that sand.