The headline says Kerry suggests Bush may have set Iraq deadline for political reasons.
Where did the “may” come from? I mean, it’s pretty damn obvious from Bush’s obscene haste to get the goverment turned over exactly on time, even when it looks like the situation is getting worse and worse, that it’s all politically motivated.
I’m sure that Bush, or rather the Bush advisors who can count to 11 without taking off their socks, sat down last year and did a complex calculus of how much time they could possible make political hay out of the new Iraqi government, based on how long it would be before the inevitable civil war breaks out or at least until it becomes patently obvious the new goverment isn’t working, and worked backwards from election day to figure out when to set the deadline.
A real leader, somebody who actually cared about making things better for Iraq and the rest of the world, would have said “We’ll restore the infastructure first, THEN we’ll get a provisional goverment set up, THEN get the oil flowing again”. Instead, they did the oil first, the government second, and they still haven’t gotten the infastructure going, and Iraq is looking more and more like Somalia but with US private security companies playing the role of some of the warlords.