{"id":12671,"date":"2007-08-26T16:06:01","date_gmt":"2007-08-26T20:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12671.html"},"modified":"2007-08-26T16:06:01","modified_gmt":"2007-08-26T20:06:01","slug":"2016-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/2016-2\/","title":{"rendered":"2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Gen. David Petraeus looks to the future, and envisions the time commitment necessary to implement the president’s goals in Iraq, he’s picturing about another decade<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[T]he real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, he argued, that the troop increase is doing some good.<\/p>\n

Still, the U.S. commander cautioned, it could take another decade before real stability is at hand. [Rep. Jan] Schakowsky gasped. “I come from an environment where people talk nine to 10 months,” she said, referring to the time frame for withdrawal that many Democrats are advocating. “And there he was, talking nine to 10 years.” […]<\/p>\n

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For all the talk about “turning the corner,” the top general on the ground believes U.S. forces should be able to successfully stabilize Iraq — never mind a flourishing democracy that serves as a beacon of hope that transforms the region — by the year 2016<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Or, translated into Friedman Units, Petraeus suspects 18 to 20 more ought to do the trick.<\/p>\n

For every pundit who insists that the Bush policy is finally, after years of failure, on the right track, the assessment creates a helpful contrast. As Yglesias put it<\/a>, “To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Gen. David Petraeus looks to the future, and envisions the time commitment necessary to implement the president’s goals in Iraq, he’s picturing about another decade. [T]he real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving — evidence, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}