Thursday, May 31, 2007

It's also how he explains it to the President

Aware that September, which has suddenly emerged as a consensus date among politicians & pundits by which something good must happen in Iraq, is appraoching rapidly, the Pentagon is trying to ease away from it as a firm deadline. Hence the remarks of the commander of ground forces in Iraq, Lt. General Ray Odierno, today, claiming that September could be too soon to see any surge, and:

Everything in Iraq is subject to quick changes, Odierno said. He said the situation is like a teeter-totter.

“You work your way up the teeter-totter, and when you go past the tipping point, it happens very quickly, and we've seen that out in Anbar,” he said. “We're still going up that teeter-totter, and I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to get to that tipping point or if I believe or assess that we can't get to that tipping point. And that's why I got to just look at it.”


For those used to English from the other side of the Atlantic, he's referring to a see-saw.

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