The White House on Monday said plans to withdraw significant numbers of U.S. troops from Iraq during the next 18 months are “under consideration,” yet not “engraved in stone.”
The plans were one of several scenarios presented to President Bush on Friday by Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. News of the meeting prompted Democrats, whose calls for troop withdrawal were defeated in the Senate on Thursday, to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy.
Sen. John Kerry, D–Mass.,whosponsored one of the withdrawal proposals, said Casey’s scenario looks “an awful lot like what the Republicans spent the last week attacking. Will the partisan attack dogs now turn their venom and disinformation campaign on Gen. Casey?”
But Snow said Kerry’s withdrawal proposal and a failed redeployment proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., were significantly different from Casey’s hypothetical.
“There’s still a pretty significant difference between what Sen. Kerry or even Sen. Levin had proposed, and what Gen. Casey is talking about, simply because one is driven by a calendar and the other is driven by events on the ground,” he said.
“Gen. Casey is assigned the business of making a lot of plans, and this is one of the plans that’s under consideration,” Snow added. “For anybody who thinks that this is engraved in stone, it is not.”
President Bush was equally noncommittal. “In terms of our troop presence there, that decision will be made by Gen. Casey, as well as the sovereign government of Iraq, based upon conditions on the ground,” he said to reporters.
