:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 10.24.2006 ::

:: "Bush drops 'stay the course' slogan as political mood sours" ::

Takeover could come in a year, but more troops may go to Bagdhad, says US general
Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
From Guardian Unlimited

The top US general in Iraq said yesterday he might send more troops into the battle for Baghdad, after an announcement that the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable for political and military measures aimed at curbing the violence.

General George Casey said the US-led coalition was three-quarters of the way through the process of training Iraqi forces, and predicted that those forces would be "completely capable of taking over responsibility for their own security" in 12 to 18 months.

The White House, meanwhile, announced that George Bush had stopped using the slogan, "Stay the course", while the president himself hammered a new buzzword: "Change". "We're constantly changing. The enemy changes, and we change. The enemy adapts to our strategies and tactics, and we adapt to theirs. We're constantly changing to defeat this enemy," he said, after visiting a Florida company making a device for sniffing out roadside bombs.

"I don't hear anything that would suggest change in policy, just a restatement of it," Rand Beers, a former strategist in the Bush administration's national security council, said, pointing out that there had been previous promises about Iraqi troop training and political reforms.

In an indication of the mounting pressure for a change of course, the New York Times yesterday devoted its entire leader column to calling for a new solution to the "disaster" of Iraq and the sacking of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:13:00 PM [+] ::
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