Fred Thompson Drops Out of GOP Race: Ho Hum

Fred Thompson ended his half-campaign for the Republican nomination for President.

I don't think he ever started a real campaign. He slept through most of it, and seemed to expect victory to be handed to him. It didn't happen. It couldn't.

All of the other campaigns are campaigning full-time and are making major inroads with voters. Against that type of effort, a part-time campaign has virtually no chance of success.

I wanted to support him at first, but he became unsupportable due to his lack of a viable campaign. Five minute speeches won't cut it in a Presidential campaign. A Boy Scout doing a five minute speech to complete a merit badge would make the grade, but someone outlining his vision of the future as the next President of the United States definitely doesn't.

I also think people saw that Thompson the political candidate didn't live up to his various on-screen personas. People couldn't separate Thompson from his awesome presidential characters, which was something that Thompson really didn't try to combat. And to make matters worse, his relaxed approach to waging a campaign made people think he wasn't serious about running for President. The media pounced on that perception to great effect.

I wish that Thompson had waged an all-out aggressive campaign for core conservative values. If he had, he would have been a viable candidate who could have really gone after closet liberals McCain and Giuliani for their wrong stands. He also could have challenged Huckabee and Romney on their actual records and accomplishments while serving as governors of their respective states. At the moment, both are making claims that are overinflated and need to be poked full of holes to bring the Romney and Huckabee hype under control.

Thompson's withdrawal is more than a lost opportunity for him; it means that this dangerous cycle that has taken root in the remaining campaigns will continue to flourish unchallenged. I'm disappointed that he didn't take the other contenders to task more than he did.

If Someone Like Edwards is Elected President, Will U.S. Military Be Able to Pull Troops and Equipment Out in First Year of New Administration?

Democrat John Edwards has promised to pull the U.S. military completely out of Iraq in the first year of his Presidency as part of his campaign platform. A question: if an anti-war candidate like Edwards is elected in November, can the military fulfill that wish in one year, assuming that the current administration keeps troop levels around 130,000?

The answer is: probably not. It's simple physics and logistics. The military brass say that they can move one combat brigade out of Iraq per month. There are between nineteen and twenty combat and support brigades and their equipment currently deployed. That's a minimum of twenty months, if all the ships and transport aircraft stay available and don't have maintenance issues.

The military pace is more realistic than the political pace.

The only way that a promise like Edwards' can be fulfilled is if President Bush starts withdrawing troops on a large scale in 2008, which is doubtful.

Edwards and the others shouldn't make promises that they can't keep. A more realistic promise is to withdraw troops by the end of their first term. The politicians are really going to mess things up if they have their way.

Congress's Withdrawal Timetable is Unrealistic: The U.S. Military Can't Pack Up and Move Out of Iraq Like a Boy Scout Troop on a Camp-Out

As I had feared in my May 14th entry, the Pentagon and other military planners do not have a plan for a full withdrawal yet. In fact, the challenges ahead of them are huge. But they are working on the problem.

According to military logistics officials, it would take 10,000 flatbed trucks and one year to move out--and that's just to withdraw the twenty combat brigades currently deployed in Iraq. For a full pullout, it would take twenty months or more to get the troops and all equipment out of Iraq.

Congress's timetable is unrealistic. They are TOTALLY out of their minds!

This entire withdrawal debate needs to be re-cast with more realistic timetables. Vietnam withdrawal planning took two years to complete, and the draw down took place between 1969-1973.

If the Pentagon needs to take two years to plan it out, that puts the timetable to begin withdrawing somewhere around 2009 or 2010. And then a minimum of twenty months to get all troops and equipment out, which puts the complete withdrawal date anywhere from late 2012 to somewhere around 2015.

Congress must not screw this up! They're going to get a lot of people killed if they insist on this cockamamie plan to complete the withdrawal by April 2008. This is a force of 200,000 people with many thousands of tons of equipment, not a Boy Scout troop packing up to go home after a camp-out.

Congress needs to get it's head out of the sand and get with the program.

Democrats Tack on Withdrawal Date to Military Spending Bill Again: Bush May Not Be Given Time for Surge to Work

Senator Levin tacked on an amendment to a new military spending bill that features a withdrawal date for troops from Iraq.

Here we go again.

This time, however, the Democrats may have support from GOP Senators Lugar, Warner and Voinovich, as well as several other GOP senators. They have said that the Administration's plan isn't working and a change in direction was needed.

It appears that Congress isn't going to wait for General Petraeus's report in September to decide what's working and what isn't. The House has already voted to withdraw troops next year.

And President Bush isn't gaining any new allies in Congress; he's losing the allies he's already got. Looks like things are going to get really nasty.

Looking Forward: Pentagon Needs to Carefully Plan Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, or We'll Lose a Ton of People on the Last Day

The recent clashes between Congress and the White House over withdrawal dates for U.S. forces from Iraq have me worried that the government may err on how they go about actually doing it, when the time comes to leave Iraq.

One nightmare scenario that I can see happening is that the U.S. military will be on the move under cover of darkness to their pre-invasion positions in Kuwait, as well as heading for Saudi Arabia. No one will realize what exactly is going on, until one of the networks put two and two together and announce that the U.S. pull-out is underway.

When it goes on the air, you can bet that al-Qaeda and many insurgent groups will head to the American withdrawal routes and start staging ambushes.

The same kind of thing happened to the Soviets when they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989; they lost a lot of soldiers to snipers and ambushes; Soviet President Gorbachev bitterly complained that they were leaving and they shouldn't be shot at, but the mujahideen didn't care. Bullets and bombs continued to hit the Red Army as they headed back into Soviet territory.

Hopefully the Pentagon is looking at this carefully and determining how they will get our troops out. I think a gradual quiet withdrawal is the way to go, instead of having tens of thousands of vehicles and 140,000 troops on the move at the same time. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

We don't need tons of casualties on the last day simply because the withdrawal of troops from Iraq was planned in the same way as the occupation was. We don't need to go there.