Back of the Envelope

They're trying to wiggle out of ending the surge.

“Somebody made a back-of-the-envelope calculation and put a number, 30,000, out there,” a senior administration official told reporters hours before the speech. “As you know, we have tried to make clear to people in this room and outside this room that no one in the administration has ever used that number. And we cautioned against using that number.”

White House officials said the administration does not want to make predictions “beyond what you can do with reliability.” That means that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will come back in March “and give a fresh assessment on how we’re doing on the ground, what they can foresee, because we’re six months further down the road at that point, and what the situation will bear.

30,000 will be shaved to 20,000, and before the end of it there'll be only 8 or 10,000 less troops there than before, and the White Hosue will claim that it's just because rotations are overlapping, and the media will turn away and forget, and we'll have an even bigger presence than before if we're not careful.