Reply #19: I don't think he said two years....subject line misleading.

[madfloridian]

I posted what he said, and I don't see how the media interprets it that way.

"Dean: Everybody gets to march to their own drummer in this party. What we need to do is have a real plan for strategic redeployment. We need not to have 150,000 troops that are being attacked every single day in Iraq. We shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and the fact is we’ve made a big mess over there. We’ve created more of a danger than there was in the first place, and probably one of the results is that we did something that Iran couldn’t do, we helped them win their objectives in the Iran-Iraq war. So, we’re in a lot of trouble in Iraq, and John Murtha’s right, we ought not to be hurting more Americans, and having more American wounded kids come home.

Leno: So what would your plan be?

Dean: I think withdrawing immediately is not the right thing to do, but there is a plan that was authored oddly enough by a guy who worked in the Reagan defense department by the name of Lawrence Korb. Where we would withdraw the National Guard troops over 2006, and even Joe Lieberman voted for 2006 being the year of transition there. We would withdraw the Guard troops, move 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, where they are needed, keep a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq, because we are going to have to deal with the terrorist threat that Bush created by going in there in the first place. And then the rest come home over the period of 2006 after this election. That gives us a redeployment opportunity, it doesn’t show weakness, and it does show the ability to continue to deal with the problems in Iraq without having our guys be the targets."