Iraq'd

It pretty obvious whats happening here: the American military leadership is looking for ways to reduce the troop presence in Iraq in the near future, but the civilian leadership and the White House are striving to keep up the appearance of continued full commitment to the Iraq war.

For an administration that boasts about strong support among the military, it's got to be more than a little annoying when Barry McCaffrey comes back and says this:

It's a race against time because by the end of this coming summer we can no longer sustain the presence we have now," said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who visited Iraq most recently in May and briefed Cheney, Rice and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This thing, the wheels are coming off it."

Now the administration is telling the military, essentially, to shut their mouth. Why? Because the Weekly Standard was getting uncomfortable with all this talk of withdrawal.

Administration officials cited an editorial in The Weekly Standard that chastised the administration for appearing to give up on Iraq, based on the Pentagon's earlier discussions of scaling back next year, that had caused military officials to shift their message away from target dates for troop withdrawal.

And by midweek, a senior American military official in Baghdad, speaking to The Washington Post under a condition of anonymity, said that Iraq's political and military leaders would not be able to lead the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq until next summer at the earliest.

According to The Post, the military official, referring to the Iraq vote in December, said it was "important to calibrate expectations post-elections." Military officials in Washington said on Thursday that the senior military official quoted was General Casey.

"We need to stick to one message," said one military officer in Washington. "This vacillation creates confusion for the American public."

At least we now know who is in control of Iraq policy.