Maybe It's the "No Math"

I'm beginning to wonder if there's any kind of uniformity coming out of the White House. Somewhere or another (and I'm too tired to google around to see if I can pinpoint where--if such a discovery is even possible) we started using the 30,000 as the number of troops who would be coming home in the Unsurge. That's not a huge number in relation to the total number of troops stationed there, but it's large enough to get our attention. Of course, once they had our attention, first Petraeus, and then the White House as a whole started backing off of it. Sure, it sounded like they were talking about 30,000, but those numbers could easily be manipulated so that the actual count of troops going home from Iraq could be far smaller. Or it could be much larger. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates today held a press conference and stated that as many as 100,000 troops could be withdrawn by the end of next year. It didn't take much time before a Gates spokesperson "clarified" that Gates's estimate was purely a personal opinion--because one always calls a press conference to shoot the breeze with reporters and offer some personal opinions that have nothing whatsoever to do with true administration policy. It's been speculated for quite some time, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of unifying policy in the administration.

Yeah, yeah, you're thinking. So what else is new?