The Iraqi government's defense minister lays out the specifics of US military presence Iraq for at least a decade. His projections throw into relief just how "successful" the Bush administration has not been. Abdul Qadir, during a visit to Washington this week, presented his "shopping list" for the hardware and personnel needed over the next ten years but "no specifics on a timeline for reducing the number of American troops in Iraq."
... His nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018.
Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad. And they suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated.
Pentagon officials expressed no surprise at Mr. Qadir’s projections, which were even less optimistic than those he made last year.
This is as good a measure of how the surge is going as anything we have. The administration and its supporters are indignant at how easily what they see as a successful "surge" is dismissed as wishful thinking by the rest of us. Yesterday William Kristol, the New York Times' latest idiot savant-in-chief, declared that he thinks those who don't see the surge as responsible for peace in Iraq are "out of touch with reality."
The latest statements from Iraq's own defense minister, with concurrence of the Pentagon, would seem to prove Bill Kristol badly wrong. Again.
