It's Gonna Be a Long, Hard Slog

When you peel away at the bogus facade of the Bush administration's "Progress = Troop withdrawal" rhetoric, what you really find is this:

Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations [and one of General Petraeus' key advisors], says the American public will support overseas deployments of troops — even for many years — as long as not many get killed. For instance, 64,000 U.S. troops are still in Germany, 60 years after the end of World War II and 16 years after the end of the Cold War. American soldiers have been keeping the peace in Bosnia now for more than a decade since the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic. In both operations, virtually no American soldiers have died as a result of hostile fire.




Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years — and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a "long shot gamble?"