Senator John Warner’s call yesterday for an "orderly and carefully planned withdrawal" from Iraq is being read in Washington as yet another devastating blow to President Bush’s Iraq policy. Certainly Warner’s latest statement, coming just a few weeks before the much-awaited "progress report" from General David Petraeus, is not good news for the President. But it’s not entirely bad, either.
Warner did not call for a timetable to end the war. He did not push for US troops to leave in a reasonable amount of time, such as a year. He only asked President Bush to begin a "symbolic" pullout of 5,000 troops by Christmas.
It’s worth remembering that the US had 130,000 troops in Iraq last fall before adding 30,000 more in the "surge." So withdrawing 5,000 troops doesn’t even come close to getting the US back to pre-surge levels. If Bush followed Warner’s advice, he could brag about having a plan to end the war while doing nothing of the sort–like Nixon did in Vietnam. You can imagine this White House, Nixonian in so many ways, drawing up such a head fake as we speak.
By this point in time, Warner should know that President Bush is likely incapable of ending the war he started, especially if given wide latitude on how and when to do so. If Warner was serious about getting our troops out of harm’s way, he’d make his symbolic withdrawal number far more concrete.
