David at Oxblog is skeptical about WaPo’s prediction of a massive draw-down in Iraq next year:

There are some huge ‘if’s. I am fairly confident that the political process will head in the right direction, but the Iraqi security forces have a very long way to go. The question then is why the WaPo bothered to make such a fuss over Casey’s statement. This sentence from the Post provides the answer:

Rumsfeld and other officials have rejected making a deadline [for withdrawal] public, but a secret British defense memo leaked this month in London said U.S. officials favored “a relatively bold reduction in force numbers.”

In other words, this is supposed to be a story about hypocrisy in the White House, courtesy of yet another British memo. I have to admit, I was a little nervous when I saw that the supposed pullout had briefly become the top story on the WaPo homepage. But now it seems pretty clear that the headline writers were jumping the gun.

I could see us having somewhere just north of 100K troops in Iraq by the end of next year. But I would think that if any “secret” plans were afoot for a large-scale draw-down in force level, somebody in the milblogosphere would know about it.

This is via Glenn Reynolds, who wonders where our troops will go from here. It looks to me as though the political ground is being softened for a possible move against Syria.