a couple of weeks ago when the iraq study group report came out everyone seemed to assume that bush would cherry pick a handful of its recommendations, ignore the rest and pretend that he was taking their advice. at least that's what i thought he would do. but i guess i under-estimated bush's ability to stall and over-estimated the public's attention span.
one of those recommendations was a public declaration that the u.s. has no intention of maintaining a permanent military presence in iraq. of the recommendations it's probably the easiest one to do. a declaration costs nothing and would take less than a minute. it could diffuse some (though probably only a very little bit) of the hostility against u.s. forces and would not actually bind the hands of american forces at all. promising not to stay permanently is non-falsifiable. there's always tomorrow; you can claim that circumstances are making you stay right now, but you still plan to eventually leave. plus, making a declaration would simply be good PR for the administration. they could spin it into some kind of demonstration that he was taking the ISG's advice seriously.
but instead of doing enacting the easiest ISG recommendation there is, bush's new secretary of defense is saying stuff like this. not that a "no permanent base" declaration is any kind of miracle cure for the iraq problem. at best, it would be a tiny step. but it seems bush won't even do that.
