Military want delay in Iraq troop reductions

NY Times:

Senior military commanders have presented the Bush administration with proposals to put off any plans for further reductions of troops in Iraq at least until the end of summer. At the same time, the proposals would limit new deployments to 12 months, instead of 15 months now, military and administration officials said Friday.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met for a second day in closed sessions with the Pentagon’s top officers to outline recommendations to be presented to President Bush on Wednesday.

Mr. Bush is to discuss the proposals with the senior commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a videoconference on Monday and is expected to make a decision about any additional withdrawals before he leaves on April 1 for a five-day trip to Ukraine, Romania and Croatia, the officials said.

...

“A pause of some duration is worthwhile to figure out the impact of the rapid withdrawal of the last four surge brigades,” Mr. Morrell said. “So losing those four brigades over the course of four months is going to require some assessment of the impact that has.” He declined to discuss in detail the proposals that Mr. Gates heard in the meetings in recent days.

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I think the Democrats may be inadvertently responsible in part for the delay. The military knows it will be difficult to send them back if they are needed so it is prudent to keep them there for now and hope they can further attrite the enemy forces so that if Democrats are elected and chose retreat over victory, they damage should not be as great. It is a prudent move anyway. We are not yet halfway through the average time it takes to defeat an insurgency. We are making great progress and it would be foolish to throw it away by moving to quickly in withdrawing our forces. The Democrats are clearly that foolish, but in the time the Bush administration has left, the wise use of troops should continue.

As I noted last night in the post on Colombia, it has taken around 40 years to bring the FARC to the brink of implosion. That is a long counterinsurgency operation but most of the progress has been made in the years of the Bush administration's closer cooperation with the Colombian forces. The Democrats seem determined to roll back the progress against the narco terrorist too. That should also be an issue in the coming election for Congress and the Presidency.