Groundhog Day

Whenever I go to a Nexis search to see what various pundits were writing about Iraq at the time I always mess it up the first time. When I put in a search range for the dates, I always put in the Fall of 2003 as the starting point, instead of the Fall of 2002, as it's still hard to comprehend that we've been in Iraq for over 2 years.

This is from a George Will column in August of 2003:

Abizaid briskly defines the modest, nuts-and-bolts but potentially momentous development that must happen soon: "We've got to do a lot more to bring an Iraqi face" -- beyond the nearly 60,000 Iraqis already under arms in reconstituted security forces -- "to the security establishments throughout Iraq very quickly." As Wolfowitz says, the basic U.S. strategy is to "get us into the background before we become the issue."

So, almost 2 years ago, we had Wolfowitz hitting exactly the same themes that they're hitting now - we've trained a bunch of Iraqis and all we need to do is train a few more.