Will Troops Be Coming Home Sooner?
Given recent Iraqi demands for a timetable of U.S. troop withdrawals from their country, and the Bush administration's continued opposition to any timetable, it was notable that some press reports indicated the White House may be softening.
Iraqi opposition to the adminstration's stance, coupled with increasing disfavor among the public over the U.S. occupation of Iraq, may be tipping the administration to seek ways to get more American forces out of Iraq before the November election.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., favors such a move, calling it "long overdue.
"We should insist that there be a timetable because there is no other way to force the Iraqi government to work out those political settlements which are absolutely essential to end the conflict," he told Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer.
"And when they're willing to have that kind of a time line, it seems to me, for heaven's sake, why should we be resisting that? We ought to be insisting on it rather than resisting it."
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said such a pullout is likely because of the intense strains being put on the U.S. military. "The demand for troops out there is intense. The battles on the border with Pakistan, with the al Qaeda forces assisted by the Taliban, are a source of more killing of American troops right now than anything occurring in Iraq.
"The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, has indicated we need troops in Afghanistan," said Lugar, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "But he has no troops to send to Afghanistan. So it is logical in the military sequence that we are going to move troops out of Iraq, not immediately perhaps to Afghanistan, but at least to relieve the strain, which is intense right now upon our armed forces."
However, in response to today's reports in The New York Times (that the White House is planning to increase the number of troops pulled out of Iraq) and the Washington Post (which reported that Iraq's resistence to a permanent U.S troop presence has all but scuttled a security agreement between the two countries), White House Counsel Ed Gillespie was noncommittal about the administration's plans.
Gillespie noted the scheduled return of the additional "surge" troops - what he called the "return on success" brigades - who are credited with helping to strengthen security in Baghdad. But he said that such returns would be followed by "a period of pause, strategic evaluation, and we're in that period now, which is why I suspect you're starting to see some reports show up in the media from unnamed sources that this period of evaluation is coming to an end and there may be some additional recommendations coming."
Read the full "Face the Nation" transcript here.