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Monday, July 09, 2007

It won't be a withdrawal, it'll be a "post-surge redeployment"
Posted by Jill | 5:25 AM
It seems the White House, faced with an increasing number of Republican defections on support for endless war in Iraq, may want to cut off these defectors and Democrats at the pass by changing its own plans. Of course, such a save-face move for the perpetrator of this clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks can't be called a "withdrawal" or "retreat", so they're calling it a "post-surge redeployment":

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

[snip]

Last week, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called in from a brief vacation to join intense discussions in sessions that included Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime strategist, and Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff.

Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”


Ah, buck up, George. You'll always have Joe Lieberman.

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