Give me permanent bases, I'll give you a drawdown

[Ronald Reagan]

WSJ: Gates Trades the Surge for Permanent Iraq Bases
By Spencer Ackerman | bio
Guantanamo isn't the only issue on which Defense Secretary Bob Gates is seeking a middle path. Gates made headlines during a trip to Hawaii a month ago when he called a decades-long U.S. troop presence in Iraq "a great idea." Now, reports the Wall Street Journal, Gates figures the path to Congressional assent for an enduring, South Korea-style stay in Iraq is to come up with near-term troop reductions. It's basically a trade-off: cut the surge short in order to stay in Iraq indefinitely.

Gates's fear is that President Bush intends to extend the surge until the end of his term. But the longer the surge lasts, the greater the likelihood that political support for the entire Iraq war will collapse, as evidenced by last week's high-profile defections of GOP Senators Dick Lugar and George Voinovich. Coupled with rising sentiment that the Democrats aren't doing enough to end the war -- the basis for next week's crush of antiwar amendments to the defense bill -- and Gates sees the war drawing to a too-rapid conclusion, leaving behind a terrorism-exporting failed state. His answer? Cut off the surge, probably by next spring, and convince Congress to accept a reduced-but-enduring mission in Iraq.

What Gates intends for U.S. forces to do in Iraq over the course of several decades is hardly clear. But how he figures an increasingly anti-war Congress would accept a permanent commitment to Iraq of tens of thousands of troops is a mystery. A senior Army official told the Journal that by the spring, six Army brigades will probably need to depart Iraq due to "manpower and materiel strains," which means overdeployment will bring the surge to a close without any assistance from Congress. (Due to the troop rotation schedule, it will be very difficult to send replacement units to relieve those forces.) The Defense Secretary may simply be holding a losing hand here, offering a near-inevitability in order to secure support for an unpopular idea.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/election...ent_iraq_bases

Better have some troops there to help with the oil production, I mean democracy promotion.