1 Boring Old Man

The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home

George W. Bush
September 13^th, 2007

We obviously are not going to hold the Iraqi Government to any "benchmarks" in the Iraq War. If last week was about anything that mattered, that was the only real clear message. Well maybe there’s a second message. One to our own soldiers. They can come home when they’ve won the [obviously unwinnable] War. It’s kind of interesting. Everyone – Bush, Petraeus, Democrats – starts every speech by talking about how magnificently our soldiers have performed in Iraq. I wish Mr. Bush meant it. Now we have Mr. Bush essentially blackmailing the soldiers – you can come home if, and when, you win. Ergo, not winning is your fault. Sounds like he’s setting a pretty high benchmark for them. At least that’s how I’d hear it were I still a soldier.

— it would tie the hands of our generals who are trying to move troops around; that it might mean longer troop deployments for some troops; that it would impede his stated policy and the President’s stated policy of trying to get to a more predictive and stable rotation schedule — for active Army for example, one year on, one year off; and for National Guard Reserves, one year on, three years off. That is the goal that everyone is working towards. And Secretary Gates strongly believes that the Webb amendment would not be able to achieve these — would impede them from achieving these goals, amongst other problems that he sees with the bill. So he would recommend a veto.

Fred Kagan yesterday went to National Review — home to countless tough guy warriors like him who fight nothing — to argue against Senator Webb’s bill. There is no need to give our troops more time away from the battlefield, Kagan types. Besides, doing that would be too administratively difficult ("this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home").

If troops want more time at home, Kagan says, there is an easy way to achieve that: "win the war we’re fighting." Of course, that would not even work, because Kagan and his friends at the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute have many more wars planned beyond Iraq for other families’ sons and daughters to fight. For that reason, Kagan actually had the audacity several months ago to type this: "The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation."