okay, i'm still fixated on this issue. but this time i have a question:
why is the bush administration suddenly giving in on the timetable issue? for months they have been increasingly desperate to get a deal, any deal, with the iraqis to commit to u.s. forces remaining in iraq after bush leaves office. i had thought that the push was to try to lock in bush's "never leave" policy on his successor. eventually, it became clear that the only way that bush would get a deal is if he agreed to some kind of withdrawal. but that seems to undermine the entire reason that bush was pushing for a deal in the first place.
so what happened? did the bush administration lose the storyline and forget why the SOFA was so important in the first place? was i wrong about the reason the administration was pushing for the deal? (but if i was wrong, what was the real reason they were pushing?) or maybe the "timetables" reported today aren't real and so the bush administration is just pretending to concede the point when really the text of the agreement will be quite different? or is the administration in such disarray, there's no sense in trying to find a logical reason behind anything they do? or it is something else i haven't thought of yet?
