Reply #7: Right on target. It's still stay the course. The surge was always an escalation.

[donkeyotay]

The repos are putting the emphasis on a possible draw down to pre-"surge" levels NINE MONTHS from now. Meanwhile, it's still stay the course, still hopes of some meaningful progress on some distant day for some unknown reason for some nebulus goal.

Reid is right. The Republican congress owns this. They could stop it if they wanted to. We stay the course because they refuse to come out from behind the slogan fog lingering from Rumsfeld and Rove.

What gets me is the way the discussion about what to do in Iraq seems to presume that no other country will have any role in events over there (or any where else). If we are going to draw down troops next summer because our military is broken, what would we do if some other, unexpected military crisis arose? Is it smart to max out our military like a credit card and just ASSUME that we get to chose the events we will face? What if someone else - maybe Russia or China - decides to act? What if some other nation decides to go all preemptive? What are we going to do if we've already bankrupted our forces and treasury just so that Bush doesn't have to admit that he's the Worst President Ever?