California Conservative

In an interview with FNC’s Jim Angle, Secretary of State Condi Rice said that “the United States will probably not need to maintain its current troop levels in Iraq “very much longer, though she declined to provide a precise timetable for reduction in U.S. forces.”

“I do not think that American forces need to be there in the numbers that they are now because, for very much longer, because Iraqis are stepping up,” Rice told Fox News in an interview Tuesday. “This is not just a matter of training numbers of Iraqi forces, but actually seeing them hold territory.”

It’s encouraging when we hear of the increasing size of the Iraqi security forces but Dr. Rice is right in saying that the key is whether these security forces are proficient in their jobs.

This is the key difference between the Bush administration’s plans and the Democratic plan. I’ve tried pointing out those differences on this blog (here and here) but it’s great to hear someone with the gravitas of Dr. Rice speaking out on the issue. In fact, I hope the White House plans on using Dr. Rice more to enunciate their plans for Iraq and to argue against the Democrats’ arguments while giving a context as to why we’re doing what we’re doing. If the Bush administration does that, they’ll soon have the public back on their side.

The Washington Post reported in Wednesday’s editions that the Pentagon tentatively plans to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Iraq early next year by as many as three combat brigades, down from 18 there now. There are now almost 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Actually, this isn’t news anymore since SecDef Donald Rumsfeld told Chris Wallace that they’d be pulling people out after the elections, citing the fact that there’s 160,000 troops there now and that the plan was to bring it back to near the “baseline of about 138,000 troops.” The Post can be forgiven, though, because they likely don’t watch FNC because they think of them with the same disgust as snake oil salesmen.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 11:23 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Middle East, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.