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Explainer: What’s This About U.S. Troops In Iraq?

June 30, 2009

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Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon helped Fox News viewers just now get their heads around what’s going on with U.S. troops in Iraq today (withdrawl? pullback? handover?):

[I]t’s the equivalent of having bases in Staten Island but not Manhattan…

So after today, U.S. troops are totally B&T.

O’Hanlon, whom Fox’s Shep Smith identified as from “a conservative-leaning think tank,” also criticized “a lot of the reporting” on this for leaving an “impression that American forces are somehow pulling out of the cities, having been there until yesterday and no longer being there tomorrow,” when it’s “actually a much more gradual process and it is not absolute process.”

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Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.