The American Prospect hits the nail on the head in Spencer Ackerman's discussion of continued American-military presence beyond the so-called war on terror.
The story on Iraq keeps changing precisely none of the stories hold up: WMDs, Humanitarian Motives, Stabilization of the Middle East, Iran etc.
Even if Hillary, Obama, and everyone else were to take the hardline approach like Richardson and call for zero residual troops... there is the still the issue of what they would do with all the bases being built there.
Without clear guidance from the Defense Department about the duration of their stay in Iraq, U.S. military commanders began constructing enormous bases capable of garrisoning numerous brigades for an indefinite period. By last year, four of them had sprung up along strategically important points throughout Iraq: in Balad, Tallil, Rawah, and Baghdad. The complex surrounding Baghdad International Airport resembles a county rather than a military base, comprising five camps connected in an efficient confederation and passable through a system of buses over about 25 square miles.
No matter Bush's story, he never claims that our motivation is continued power, presence, or strategic bases. This is partly because such a story would prove his critics right: this is an imperlialist war, not just a war on terror.
The experience of the last four years suggests that anger at the U.S. presence is a durable commodity both in and out of Iraq. "Any extended U.S. force presence, even a reduced one, clearly validates the al-Qaeda storyline," says Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College in Alabama. "Every Arab Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to express outrage at this crusader intrusion into the Arab heartland is going to go after those forces, as we are seeing now." If so, that renders Petraeus' draw-down plan untenable: Five Army brigades is too large a force to merely monitor Iraqi forces, as Petraeus' plan envisioned, yet it's vastly too small to make a difference if those Iraqi forces are overwhelmed.
What is the Democrats response? Well we know they have sponsored multiple bills in support of chaning direction in Iraq. However it seems clear that nothing short of an absolute stalemate. The Conservative response to Iraq is typical of conservatives response in general: They do not need to win, they just need to not lose. If they can keep stringing together "a few months" they can keep us there indefinatey; if they can find "a few skeptics" they can undermine climate change efforts, if they can sow enough doubt about public healthcare, they can keep progressives from fixing healthcare.
As Ackerman notes...
Perversely, Bush, in his final months in office, operates according to the political logic of an Iraqi insurgent: He wins by not obviously losing. It's unclear whether the Democrats have an effective response.
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