Two Years

Via Mudville Gazette:

Iraq's president says he believes the terrorism in Iraq can be defeated within two years, after which he says the foreign troops will leave. Speaking to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, Jalal Talabani said "Iraq needs only two years to put an end to chaos and terrorism" and establish a new Iraq. He also reiterated that "the US forces have expressed readiness to leave Iraq as soon as the Iraqi security and military forces have completed their training."

Earlier in November the Iraqi president declared, during an interview with the British TV channel ITV1, that the British soldiers deployed in southern Iraq should be able to leave Iraq by the end of 2006, when the Iraqi troops are expected to be ready to replace them.

Over the weekend Talabani also invited the insurgents to talk to him, while attending a reconciliation meeting of Iraqi politicians in Cairo organised by the Arab League ahead of a bigger conference due to be held in Baghdad after the December elections.

Two years to defeat the terrorists in Iraq? Interesting. I'm agnostic over whether that is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the situation. On the one hand, if the US went after the Syrians and Iranians directly, the conflict could end that much sooner since the terrorists in Iraq would lose their safe haven. On the other, the US couldn't undertake such an operation in the current political climate domestically given the ankle biting of the Democrats and even some Republicans.

What the ankle biters don't quite seem to understand is that the Iraq campaign was the first step in clearing the fever swamps in the Middle East of despotic regimes that harbor terrorism and threaten US national security. It wasn't the final step. Maybe that's what Democrats are fearful of - that this is going to reshape the Middle East in ways that they can't be happy about. That's why the French and Russians opposed the US efforts; they couldn't be happy to see their lucrative deals with Iraq go up in smoke (or the Oil for Food program scandal discovered).

UPDATE:
Don Surber thinks that now may be the time to start bringing the troops home. He wants to eliminate the possibility of an Iraqi 'entitlement state' that is dependent upon the US for everything. He's got a point, but it is limited. Do I expect or envision a garrison of 125,000 US troops stationed in Iraq indefinitely? Nope. I see that figure dropping to a Division's worth within a few years. We need to understand that the Iraq campaign set up a strategic and tactical situation that enables US forces to protect our national security needs well into the future. All the Iranians and Syrians need to realize is that there's a full compliment of Marines and other US forces forward stationed that can be called upon on short notice. That's a constraining factor on what the Iranians or Syrians can do in an overt manner. It wont completely limit those rogue states from acting to undermine US national security or those of our allies and friends in the region, but it is a clear deterrent.

Even the Iraqis know that the US presence will drop over time. We need to make sure that the Iraqis are on the right path. Think of it as a Big-Brothers/Big-Sisters collaborative effort. Only on a nation/state scale. Success in Iraq will pay dividends down the road.

UPDATE:
Opinionated Bastard has figured out the war plan where McCain, Kerry and the media hasn't:

The war plan, for good or ill has never been to occupy the country. It's always been the plan for the Iraqis to provide security in their own country. In other words, do the exact opposite of what we did in Vietnam:

~Instead of installing a puppet government, we've spent 2.5 years building up an Iraqi one.
~Instead of having 500,000 troops and 60,000 casualties from trying to take over Vietnam, we've 170,000 troops but only 2,000 casualties because we weren't trying to take over.

In other words, instead of going into Iraq and trying to run the country like we did in Vietnam (Step 1 install a Christian leader in a Buddhist country? What idiot thought up that one?), we've done the minimal amount of work to keep Iraq in a holding pattern until the Iraqis could run it.

It's pretty simple really, and it's actually not a bad plan. I think the US has learned the lessons of Vietnam and Somalia; let people run their own countries. The main mistake we made in this whole war was thinking that it wouldn't take most of 2004 to train the Iraqi Police and Army. It just takes time to do that kind of thing.