Iraq Reconciliation Plan=Part of Republican Party Plan to Win In November

[kpete]

Iraq plan part of grand strategy
By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

"The "reconciliation" plan announced on Sunday by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is part of a grand strategy by the Bush administration to stabilise Iraq - or to stabilise the perception of Iraq - in advance of the mid-term elections for Congress in November.

Other parts of the plan are an insistence that democracy has arrived in Iraq and must be supported, a refusal to set any date or timetable for a total withdrawal of US troops (presented as a weakness), yet with a suggestion that a reduction might start soon as the effort to transfer responsibility to Iraqi forces gathers pace."

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Mr Cheney's linking of the war in Iraq to Mr Bush's wider war on terrorism is quite a powerful political message in an election year.

But in order to appeal to those Americans who do worry about the open-ended commitment to Iraq, word is emerging from US sources that the general in charge in Iraq, George Casey, has drawn up a proposal under which there would be, in the words of the New York Times, "sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September".

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The combined strategy - reconciliation and resolution yet with the hint of a substantive withdrawal - is what Mr Bush hopes will pull his party through in November.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5115064.stm