20070719 The Pentagon Issues a warning to Senator Clinton

The Pentagon Issues Warning to Clinton

By Kate Phillips, July 19, 2007, 10:10 pm

Issuing a stunning rocket, one of the Pentagon’s top officials sent a letter to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier this week that essentially told her that any outline of plans for withdrawing American troops from Iraq is tantamount to reinforcing “enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”

The letter from Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman was in response to Senator Clinton’s request in May for the Defense Department to draw up proposals to get the troops out of the battlefields. It was first obtained by the Associated Press, which termed Mr. Edelman’s missive “a stinging rebuke.” (Both Senator Clinton’s initial request and Mr. Edelman’s response are now on the senator’s Web site.)

Here is Mr. Edelman’s language:

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Mr. Edelman wrote.

He added that “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

The backstory, according to the A.P. and elsewhere, is that Senator Clinton, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, has been asking the Defense Department to develop a detailed proposal for withdrawing troops, which could be complicated, she said in May, …

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