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• Thursday, November 24, 2005 06:52 AM

  When will the troops come home?

  [Please pass to Tim Grieve]

  Dear Mr. Grieve:

  I think you may have missed some of the discussion that is coming both out of the Pentagon and from retired senior officers, as happened on the Lehrer show a couple of days ago. The consensus appears to be that we have to withdraw troops no matter what because (1) we have abused the reservists with multiple and extended tours in Iraq about as much as the country will tolerate, and since Bush won't call for a draft (way too late in the game for that), and since being a reservist has lost a great deal of its appeal in light of the treatment of those sent to Iraq, it is becoming impossible to maintain present strength in Iraq, and (2) as a result of all that, the nation is far too vulnerable to a real threat to its homeland to allow the Iraq adventure to continue at present troop levels.

  In short, no amount of politics is going to stop those troops from coming home.

  And the reason those Pentagon officers didn't want to speak on the record is that they were leaking stuff the White House didn't want people to be looking at. Bush and Cheney want to exploit the "cut and run" criticism of Democrats as much as they can, even though they know the truth about inevitable withdrawals of troops. They want the Iraq story to be dictated by them and no one else.

  So when the Pentagon types tell the truth like this, in what to me is an expression of concurrence with the retired officers being interviewed by the media, it angers the White House because once again it makes it appear that the Bush team was so incompetent it couldn't even keep troops in the field in a war they wanted to prolong (bearing in mind that their original strategy was for a large American garrison to occupy those 14 bases we built for decades to come).

  A year ago the White House would be chasing the leakers in the Pentagon with white fury, and Congress would have joined in. No longer. That zeal has been transferred to self-preservation. It is all unraveling, day by day.

  Sincerely,

  Douglas L. Wilson

  Naples, Florida

  —DouglasWilson Read DouglasWilson's other letters
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