NYT spills the Beans Again

The perfidious jerks down at the Net York Times are publishing a classified report of troop withdrawal plans submitted by Gen. George W. Casey Jr.. The plan does not have any hard dates but is what looks to me to be an outline that the Iraqi government and the US can begin to work from.

American officials emphasized that any withdrawals would depend on continued progress, including the development of competent Iraqi security forces, a reduction in Sunni Arab hostility toward the new Iraqi government and the assumption that the insurgency will not expand beyond Iraq's six central provinces. Even so, the projected troop withdrawals in 2007 are more significant than many experts had expected.

General Casey's briefing has remained a closely held secret, and it was described by American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity. Word of the plan comes after a week in which the American troop presence in Iraq was stridently debated in Congress, with Democratic initiatives to force troop withdrawals defeated in the Senate.

The US has lost the ability to keep a secret. After eight years of the Clinton Administration one can hardly be surprised. They placed people with no security clearance into sensitive positions as a matter of routine. That administration was so focused on politics, particularly those that effected the Clintons, that one should suspect that all levels of appointments and hires were done to fill some future political need. The intelligence problem seems to bare that out. And the NYT is there to happily accommodate them.

war security politics