Deadlines don't work, another busted Republican talking point demolished by Kerry

"If we expel this company immediately there will be a security vacuum that will demand pulling some troops off the battlefield," Tahseen Sheikhly, a civilian spokesman for the seven-month-old offensive against militants in Baghdad and surrounding areas. "This will create a security imbalance in securing Baghdad."

I think as long as you give the Iraqi politicians as long as they want, they will take as long as they want. As long as we say we are there for as long as it takes, they will take as long as they want. That is exactly what they are doing today.

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There is a complete contradiction, incidentally, in the arguments made by the other side. I remember visiting General Petraeus when he was training people. Two years ago, he said we will have 125,000, 200,000-something next year. How long does it take to train people? We have been training people for 4 1/2 years. We certainly have been training them for at least 2 years in a highly focused manner--2 1/2 or 3 years. How long does it take to take our recruits down to Parris Island or out to the Great Lakes, from total civilian status to graduation? Three or four months. Then they go to a specialty school and then, within a few months, they are ready to go and serve on the frontlines. They always do it with great distinction.

These folks have been training and training and training. The problem is, it is not a lack of training, it is a lack of motivation. It is a lack of commitment and will. It manifests itself in the following way. If you are a Shia, can you safely go into a Sunni neighborhood and police? Can a Shia go tell a Sunni what to do? Will the Sunni listen and feel safe? Ask anybody in the country about that equation. That is part of the problem, a lack of historical understanding, a lack of cultural understanding, a remarkable kind of arrogance that came out of corners in the Pentagon, led by Secretary Rumsfeld and Richard Perle and Doug Feith and these other folks, all of whom talked about parades and flowers and the easy welcome of our troops and welcomed as liberators and every decision was wrong, not to mention the arrogance of turning their backs on the plans that the State Department and Secretary Powell drew up for how you deal with postwar Iraq.

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Now, why a deadline? I guess it is kind of like anybody doing their homework--we operate under deadlines here. Does anybody here believe we get the budget done without a deadline that we usually have? We usually have drop-dead times. In fact, we even move the clocks. We have a continuing resolution that is short-lived, and then we come back and we live under a certain sense of, you know, a responsibility factor there and all kinds of deadlines.

The fact is, deadlines have worked in Iraq already. There was a deadline to have the transfer from the Provisional Authority from Paul Bremer. In fact, Iraqis and a lot of other people said: Do not do this to us; we are not ready. But the Government, our Government, to its credit, we insisted and said: No, this is what is going to happen. And it happened. Now, the decisions they made afterward were awful. But the transfer took place; likewise, the elections; likewise, the Constitution. Each of them was accomplished with a deadline.

In fact, the President himself has already set a deadline, in some ways, because he is saying: We are going to have X number of forces out by such and such a time--30,000. That is a deadline. He has told us when--by next spring. General Petraeus has set a deadline that he is going to come back by next March and he is going to say something to us. So this idea that deadlines don't work or it is a losing equation, I just do not agree with that. I think, like any human reaction, when a big country like the United States of America gets serious in putting some deadlines there, people can begin to respond and you change the dynamics that people are dealing with.