Timetable?

President Bush is scheduled to make a speech at the Naval Academy tomorrow evening and there's speculation that he will begin to prepare the American public for troop withdrawals from Iraq. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate today about such a withdrawal scenario , says:

The political beauty of this scenario is that, even if Iraq remains mired in chaos or seems to be hurtling toward civil war, nobody in Congress is going to call for a halt, much less a reversal, of the withdrawal. The Republicans will fall in line; many of them have been nervous that the war's perpetuation, with its rising toll and dim horizons, might cost them their seats. And who among the Democrats will choose to outflank Bush on his right wing and advocate—as some were doing not so long ago—keeping the troops in Iraq for another five or 10 years or even boosting their numbers. (The question is so rhetorical, it doesn't warrant a question mark.)

The general consensus among the pundits is that Dubya won't announce a "timetable" tomorrow night but will emphasize, instead, that the Iraqis are increasingly capable of providing for their own security. This is in keeping with his oft-repeated "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down" statement when questioned about US withdrawal from Iraq. On the one hand, we don't want to give the terrorists a concrete date they can plan their operations around (i.e., we're out by, say, June 2007). On the other hand, the Iraqis won't accept the burden of providing for their own security while we're still around in force. Why should they do the heavy lifting if we will?

There's much more on this in the WaPo, the NYT, and at Defense Tech. The extensive comments at Defense Tech are interesting.

I'll be watching the speech tomorrow evening. Much hangs in the balance here.