Remember early in the week, when the Chimp was scampering and prancing and smirking

his simian strut around the Middle East, and he told a command-performance audience of troops in Kuwait he was going to bring 20,000 troops home by the middle of the year?

Well, fugGEDdaboddit! Nagahapun.

Via The Raw Story, today:

Bush says troop cutbacks might stop

Bush Says No Decision Yet on Deepening Drawdown of U.S. Troops in Iraq

TERENCE HUN, AP News , Jan 12, 2008 22:47 EST

President Bush said Saturday he is open to the possibility of slowing or stopping plans to bring home more U.S. troops from Iraq, defying domestic demands to speed the withdrawals. Updated on war developments, Bush said the U.S. presence in Iraq will outlast his presidency.

Bush said any decision about troop levels "needs to be based upon success," but that there was no discussion about specific numbers when he was briefed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad.

The president was cheered by news that Iraq's parliament had approved legislation reinstating thousands of former supporters of Saddam Hussein's dissolved Baath party to government jobs. Bush had prodded Iraqi leaders for more than a year to enact the law.

The US presence in Iraq will outlast his residency and probably the next several presidencies. Romney and Ghouliani want to EXPAND the military presence in the region; McStain says he's okay if troops are stationed there for a thousand years--but the oil will run out LONG before that... Both Hillary and Obama say that they'll be fulfilling their campaign promises if troops are out by 2013, and neither claims that they will bring ALL the troops home. And there will be NO change at all in the status quo until the Iraqi Parliament ratifies the USer Oil Exploitation Plan, otherwise known as the Iraqi Oil Law, about which I have written previously.

But of course, NONE of the candidates can bring all the troops home, or even the majority of them. If they did, who would fly the aircraft that they are stationing in those huge ("temporary") bases from which they intend to ("extend influence") intimidate possible antagonists in the region? Who will protect those bases, those aircraft, those flyers?

You see the dilemma?