1115.org

(1)
The Iraq Study Group is going to recommend not a phased withdrawal, but “a transition from a combat role to a support role” that “could still leave more than 70,000 American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid reaction force in the country”, with “no hard timetable for the proposed U.S. pullback, but … a kind of indication in the report as to when that ought to be completed … sometime within the next year.”

A phased withdrawal, in contrast, would be a plan to gradually reduce the American troop presence in the country, from the present level of 140,000 troops to some lower number (say 70,000).

(2)

Prime Minister Maliki:

“Iraq is for Iraqis. Its frontiers are defended and we will not allow them to be violated or let people interfere in our internal affairs,” he said at the news conference.

Americans, presumably, are not people but some higher form of life?

(3)
Dear Leader himself:

But it’s one thing to put people in uniform, and another thing to have clear command structure, or the capacity to move troops from point A to point B, or the capacity to make sure that the troop carrier from point A to point B has got the necessary air in its tires or oil in its engine. In other words, this is a sophisticated operation to get a unifying army stood up.

A little unclear there, George. What is the sophisticated part again, getting air in the tires, or oil in the engine? And which part is responsible for the Iraqi forces having trouble standing up?

(4)
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, in a pathetically clumsy attempt to redefine “urgency”:

President Bush will take weeks rather than months to start making changes in Iraq policy after he receives high-level recommendations on the conduct of the war, his national security adviser said on Thursday.

Speaking after Bush held crisis talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan, Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said: “There is a real sense of urgency but there is not a sense of panic.”

Hadley is obviously betting that once he feeds us “weeks rather than months”, we will all be so hypnotized by that phrase that it will never occur to us that Bush is taking “weeks rather than days”. The latter formulation, of course, doesn’t uniquely comport with a real sense of urgency.