NewDonkey asks the critical questions about Iraqi troop withdrawl.
I raise this point not to annoy people with details, but because the growing obsession of many antiwar folks–and for that matter, of their critics– with calendar dates may miss the more fundamental question that needs to be raised about Iraq: which missions would we be turning over to the Iraqis, and which missions would be continued, and for how long? Isn’t that at least as important as how many months a given proposal would provide for withdrawal of an ill-defined number of troops?
In my day to day job, we call that scope. And scope is one of, if not most often the key, element, to determining how many resources are needed to do a job. If we don’t talk in terms of the missions (i.e. scope) of what the Iraqis will do and what the US forces that remain will do, we’ll have not only botched the war, and the aftermath, but even the withdrawl.