hdgreene: Declaring an end to “Major Combat Operations” was a way out of the trap.

It may have been a way for the President to get out of a rhetorical trap, but what about the 4,000 Americans who found Iraq, AFTER that speech, to be a fatal trap? And by trap, this is what I mean: The President sent them there, sometimes for three or four tours of fifteen months each, and the only door out was not military success on the ground, but political success between the three main factions in Iraq. Yet now that they have their political success, and the duly elected Prime Minister is asking for a formal timeline for the US to withdraw their troops, Bush and McCain are conditioning that withdrawal on military success on the ground in Iraq. So now we’ve made the switch from political back to military. It’s apparent the neocons just want to stay in Iraq at all costs, and they will invent justifications to do so.