Will Obama’s speech tonight echo Bush’s endless declarations of success in Iraq?
Iraq: Finding the Diamonds?
Last week’s briefings for the press by U.S. civilian and military officials in Baghdad were uniformly upbeat, cautious, and predictable.
Counting Troops in Iraq
This past week, both the House and the Senate debated and voted on legislation affecting the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq. In the Senate, the issue was the length of time soldiers and Marines would have at home between deployments to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the House, Ike Skelton (D-MO) introduced a bill requiring the secretary of defense to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within 120 days of the legislation becoming law and complete the drawdown to a “limited presence” – a heretofore unknown parameter – by April 1, 2008.
The Sins of Walter Reed
The U.S. military lives by the rule: “Leave no soldier behind.” The Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) seems to have operated according to a different principle: “Out of sight, out of mind.”