Of course I looked it up and that’s not what she’s proposing.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a ”remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In short, the troops wouldn’t be doing much patrolling at all. I’d imagine that the only active combat troops would be strike forces to attack Al Qaeda with the remaining troops based in Kurdistan for deterence.

I don’t see how 75k soldiers can possibly hope to contain the violence. It might slow it down, but a genocide/civil war carried out over a decade is still genocide/civil war.

But no one ever said that just adding 75K soldiers would contain the violence. The strategy involved a lot of other policy changes and clearly it’s an attempt to slow down the violence enough to allow the political changes and reconstruction to take place. There are signs that the political part isn’t working which is no surprise because of the difficulty of the situation and the fact that this all comes too little too late, but that still doesn’t change the fact that no one has been foolish enough to think that this was just a matter of adding more troops doing the same thing as before and expecting a different outcome.

MvdG: What I don’t understand is, if you favor leaving half the troop force, what if the facts on the ground indicate that this would be more dangerous for the troops that are there and that it would actually be like subjecting them to a suicide mission? It seems to me that that taking half of the troops away would be highly dangerous for the ones who are still there and what made sense to me about the surge is that it was putting all the troops that we can in, partly because that’s preferable to being so highly undermanned that we’re completely unable to contain the sectarian fighting at all. Having that few troops IMO would either mean that they’d be completely ineffective if they have to simply hide out in the Green Zone, or that they’d be in grave danger of getting caught in the crossfire without having the manpower to do anything about it.

Thanks’ Petreaus, the Surge is Working…..

I think you may need to comment code the sarcasm because people are too obtuse and lack basic reading skills.

I have yet to hear any good strategy proposal.

Davebo: as those who actually read what I write know

Not only have I actually read what you write, I paraphrased it in my response.

I’m open to the possibility that you could have had second thoughts, but you certainly offer no evidence of that here.

So rather than whine that folks don’t actually read your writings, how about trying to stand behind them, perhaps even justify them for a change?

It must be nice to have such a casual relationship with the reality you cheered on.

If only those actually affected could joke about it in such detached joy.

Oh well, so long as Harry Reid is a traitor and Fred Thompson speaks to truth I guess everything is hunky dory.

Well, that and your Treasury is safe.