Political Quotes

“I want to say in response to something Senator McCain said, somebody in the military said to me: If we are not going to leave enough to do the job, we might as well not leave anybody there. Of course, we don't want that to happen. There are a couple of alternatives here. One is that the 3,000 is not the number. Hopefully we will have clarification. It is more than that. In all our trips to Iraq, talking about repeated teams of leadership, never has there been anyone who said to us that we needed less than 10,000 American troops there to do this job. I want to repeat this; there is a kind of sleight of hand here. Maybe it is 3,000 here and a few more thousand tucked into the civilian workforce at the embassy and a few more somewhere in the special covert operators. If that is the game plan here, it is a mistake. We ought to see exactly how many troops are leaving there. It gives confidence to our allies in the region, particularly in Iraq, and it will unsettle our enemies, particularly in Iran. Dr. Ken Pollack has a piece in the National Interest that is out now about this situation. He is concerned about the small number of troops that may be left there and agrees that there may be some Iraqis who might be pushing for a smaller post-2011 force with a more limited set of missions. Dr. Pollack says: That would be a bad deal for the Iraqi people and for the United States.…”