Senator Reed's "four-point plan" for resolving the Iraq conflict is reasonable even if short on practical methodology but he undermines his entire strategy with his statement of principle:
Now the president needs to take the next step and make it clear to the Iraqis that our military presence is not open-ended and we will begin redeploying our forces from Iraq as quickly as possible. ...If President Bush cannot secure these basic commitments from the Iraqis, then the logic of keeping over 144,000 American troops in Iraq is suspect.
This approach is doomed to failure for two reasons:
I wouldn't presume to offer military strategies, but as a matter of basic approach, it seems to me that the message we want to send to Iraq's insurgents and government alike is that we are not going anywhere and may very well rewrite the rules to suite our own needs. The result of our losing patience has to be a stronger hand, not a weaker backbone.