what's this I hear about bush pulling out 50% of troops by sept ?

[blues90]

Was this another ploy to make the dems fold and look weak while knowing bush had these plans or is it a ploy to pull out troops before bush enters Iran with the new funding where who knows where the funding will be spent ?

[wakeme2008]

1. that is Sept 2008

for the election... my guess..

[zbdent]

2. If the media were truly liberal, then the headlines would read

"WTF??? Bush OKs troop pullout after months of saying Dems were unpatriotic for suggesting such a thing!"

[radfringe]

3. wait for the Faux-spews headlines

BUSH DECLARES VICTORY IN IRAQ, TAKES CRAYONS AND GOES HOME

[poverlay]

4. We should send the body of your post to every blog, paper and station.

It should be out there in everyone's mind...

[Dhalgren]

5. Where have you heard this?

That might make it easier to decide what is going on...

[blues90]

8. capital news scroll on friday and Miller talked about it today

I think it's a bluff to take the pressure off this failing occupation , I can't trust anything because it changes from day to day depending , and I certaily don;t trust the news . I was hoping someone else maybe knew more .

[kenny blankenship]

6. Every so often--about a Friedman Unit iirc--a WH mouthpiece says "big drawdown coming in 12-18 mos."

that's to say, about every 6 months, someone in the whitehouse or someone connected to it by Fascist ectoplasm --like Lieberman for example-- feeds the pundit mill and news bunnies an "insider's scoop", alleging that the Big Plan which Bush and the Pentagon are following calls for large scale troop draw downs to begin 12 months from that moment--or maybe 18 months. Just like the fabled Friedman Unit (F.U.), which states that Iraq has only a critical 6 month window to turn around and improve or else, the recurring "insider's scoop" about Bush withdrawing the majority of our troops never turns out to be true.

There's no special reason to think this latest "leak" is anything but another version of the usual "insider scoop" about withdrawal. You might think they'd stop building those permanent bases and gargantuan embassy if they had decided on--or were even seriously considering--a phased abandonment of Iraq.

Glenn Greenwald noticed this phenomenon for us in his Salon blog entry of May 26:

For four straight years, the same set of war supporters have constantly and repetitiously given the same exact false assurances about Iraq -- virtually verbatim -- in order to protect themselves politically. It is hard to know what is more amazing about this ritual -- (a) how stupid they believe Americans are that they can make the same commitments over and over which never transpire, or (b) that the press jumps each time to proclaim the imminent troop reductions as though it never happened before:

(He then gives several citations from MSM publications, Generals, politicians--which I will cut down to one to remain within DU's 4 paragraph rule for excerpting):
The Hill, May 3, 2006:

The withdrawal of 20,000-40,000 U.S. troops from Iraq this fall would greatly help Republican chances in the November election, Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) said at a fundraiser Thursday at the National Rifle Association. . . .

About 130,000 U.S. service personnel are stationed in Iraq. It is unclear if some of those troops will be withdrawn, but senior military officials have said they hope to reduce that number below 100,000 by the end of the year if the insurgency does not worsen and if Iraq makes more political and military progress.

What exactly could war supporters do that they have not already done in order to lose complete credibility? Americans have clearly tuned them out, but they continue to be the highly respected war experts upon whom the media relies. If and when U.S. troops ever leave Iraq, these statements, issued time and again over the course of many years, are going to be compiled and it is going to be retrospectively mystifying how this truly wretched and ignoble spectacle was allowed to continue for so long.

[JHB]

7. When you read those claims carefully...

...you usually discover they don't say "of troops", they say "of combat troops" (i.e., not counting support units), so (naturally) it's fewer than they imply.

And I wonder how many "support" troops are getting combat duty thanks to so many functions being contracted out?