Richard Haas on Petraeus

Richard Haas the Prez of CFR and the author of the worthwhile, if somewhat simplistic, The Opportunity likes what he saw from Petraeus and Croker:

My overriding impression is that the administration has, to some extent—maybe a large extent—regained control of the Iraq debate and that two arguments seem to be gaining traction. One is that anything that smacked of what the Iraq Study Group termed a “precipitous withdrawal” would be a strategic error. Secondly, there has been sufficient progress, at least on the military side in certain areas, to justify some continuation of the policy. On top of that, Petraeus added the dimension of some withdrawals and as I understand it we are essentially looking at a return to pre-surge levels by next spring/ summer.

So in some ways, as a result, he has co-opted the reductions argument. Let me complicate things with one more point. Even a lot of the Democrats who opposed the policy aren’t calling for total withdrawal. If you deconstruct their position, a lot of them are talking about residual forces in certain places for certain missions. So essentially now we are talking about the pace of drawdown and the size and the role of the residual force. That to me is an “inside-the-Beltway” debate. So what this suggests to me is that sixteen months from now, when a new president takes over, you are likely to see a U.S. presence of plus-or-minus 100,000 troops in Iraq, doing a lot of training, but still doing some combat missions in the central part of the country. Again, I think the bottom line is that the administration has probably bought itself sixteen more months of something that looks a lot like the status quo.