Comments on: Obama’s troop levels

By: neil

neil — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:27:51 +0000

As it turns out, it goes beyond not being in touch with their base: they are openly contemptuous of their base. Somehow I just can’t visualize John Boehner telling a blogger that he’s mad at the base because they keep asking for lower taxes.

By: eye

eye — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:53:47 +0000

I should add that force protection will require more MPs. So some combat forces will be replaced by MPs.

By: eye

eye — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:59:22 +0000

My point is a political one. I don’t think that, in the end, if Romney is the nominee, that is going to be that much of a difference from Romney.

McCain and Giuliani are different. And God only knows where Thompson is.

By: neil

neil — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:51:02 +0000

On that Petraeus chart it appears that over 100,000 troops are in combat roles. Hardly a ‘limited number.’ And even granting that point, “begin to withdraw troops now” is fundamentally different from “do not begin to withdraw troops until later.”

I take your point that neither of these two options overlap with “remove all troops soon” which is what the anti-war left wants, though. I just don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference.

By: eye

eye — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:38:46 +0000

The Petraeus proposal is to withdraw troops too.

My point is that “combat troops” is a very limited number. And he has made it clear that he is totaling a pretty small number of people.

By: sampo

sampo — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:30:42 +0000

“If Romney is the nominee, which is, at least, very plausible, what are the Democrats going to do if they can’t differentiate on Iraq?”

Americans have more faith in Dems on every issue except the war on terror/national security. When Chris Wallace essentially accused Romney of being to the left of Clinton on Iraq he didn’t fully reject it. Bottom line, if Clinton and Romney’s Iraq plans are the same, Hillary wins. Let alone if Romney truly is to the left of her.

By: neil

neil — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:58:14 +0000

Is this for real? You want to know how different it is really?

Obama wants to “immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now.” Petraeus wants to eventually begin to remove some combat troops starting no sooner than six months from now and possibly later.

That’s pretty different, if you ask me.