Political Quotes

“this weekend many of us learned that the Bush Administration may have a plan for a phased drawdown of coalition forces in Iraq in the next 12 to 18 months. Unfortunately, we did not learn about these plans from the Administration's legally mandated yet unfulfilled reporting requirements to Congress. We learned about it from news reports of a leaked memo circulating in the British government. The memo outlines the Administration's plan to cut the size of our force in Iraq from 140,000 down to 66,000 by the middle of next year, and describes a ``strong U.S. military desire'' to hand over control to the Iraqi security forces in most of Iraq. In January I released a white paper in which I proposed a timetable for a phased drawdown of the majority of American troops by the end of 2006. If the information in the British memo is true, then the Administration may be planning similar plans, despite its public claims to the contrary. Ironically, the British memo, reportedly written at least a month ago, broke in the American press at exactly the same moment that the Administration missed a very important deadline to share precisely this sort of information with this Congress. There is something wrong when we are learning about the Administration's plans for our troops, not from the President, not from the Pentagon, but from leaked foreign memos.…”