Decius wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:
Problem 5, aside from Richardson and Kucinich, all of the Democratic candidates have said they expect there to still be troops in Iraq through at least the end of their first term.

I think we may be talking past eachother on this point, and this is the key reason why the democratic feild isn't looking attractive to me right now, so its a key aspect of the question I raised. Hillary says:

The most important part of Hillary's plan is the first: to end our military engagement in Iraq's civil war and immediately start bringing our troops home. As president, one of Hillary's first official actions would be to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, her Secretary of Defense, and her National Security Council. She would direct them to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days of her Administration.

Obama says:

Obama has a plan to immediately begin withdrawing our troops engaged in combat operations at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of next year.

If by "troops in Iraq" you mean "sure there'll be one or two units," then thats not really what I'm talking about. I don't support immediate withdrawl, and I'm not aware of anyone in the Democratic feild who doesn't support immediate withdrawl. I think calls for immediate withdrawl are driven by domestic people who are concerned about the safety of friends and family in the service and are no longer under the impression that Saddam was connected with 9/11 or whatever fantasy 'caused them to buy into this in 2003. Its not driven by whats going on in Iraq. In fact, its the same tune the Democrats were singing a year ago in spite of the fact that the situation on the ground in Iraq has changed substantially in that time.

I'm concerned about my friends' safety too, but the problem is that we made a commitment when we went in there in the first place and we have to meet it. In the past few months we have managed to improve the security situation there and we have a fragile chance of successfully deescalating the violence. Pulling the rug out from that will simply create a power vaccum that will beget a tsunami of killing. It is extremely irresponsible to do that. In my mind its just as stupid and immoral as the decision to preemptively invade in the first place.

So I feel stuck between people who want to expand the use of tortue and people who want to pull the rug out from Iraq. McCain is perhaps an exception. There are obviously other reasons why I don't like him but I think whoever is president next needs to get Iraq right first.

No, by troops in Iraq, they're talking 30-50,000 guys still there in 2012. Kucinich and Richardson are both talking full withdrawl, the rest are talking gradual drawdown, and immediate change in the mission to training, border control and targeted missions as opposed to roving patrols, general checkpoint work and whack-a-mole.

And your improving security situation is a mirage. Where you once had mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, they are now one or the other. The groups have segregated themselves and so the immediate killing may have gone down, but that is not anything resembling an improved situation, it just means there are actual battle lines, drawn block by block across Iraq.

The point of "the surge" was to but time for a unified government to come into existence. Not only has that not happened, if anything, the government is even more fractured now than when the surge started. In the meantime, the Turks and Kurds are ready to go to war to add yet another layer of disaster into place.

You can enjoy Sy Hersch in September here, who backs up what I say above, do a search over at the Washington Post of recent articles by Tom Ricks, or a quick search of the Google on any of the things I've said backs up my assessment.

Leaving may start a bloodbath, but staying keeps the pot at boiling, and if leaving at any point starts the bloodbath, then we've committed ourselves to staying in Iraq forever? No. The stupidity of going there in the first place cannot go on to infinity. It's time to do something like Biden's partition or something. Pushing ourselves and the Iraqis into the meatgrinder an inch at a time is not an option, and that's what you seem to be advocating here.

RE: The meaning of the NIE...