RICE: TIME HORIZON FOR IRAQ TROOP PULLOUT NOT A TIMETABLE
By R J Shulman
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the agreement that was reached between the US and Iraq regarding US troops leaving Iraq was not a timetable for troop withdrawal, but was a time horizon for troop withdrawal. “This is not a surrender, a cutting and running, an admission of defeat or us trying to be like the French,” she said, “because as everyone knows, a timetable is nothing even remotely related to a time horizon.”

“Even I know the difference,” said President Bush after he was briefed by Rice. “When I was in school I could never learn me those times tables, but I sure spent a lot of time staring out the school window at the horizon.”

“A timetable for withdrawal, is about the time set for your leaving,” Rice said, “whereas a time horizon is about the time set for your leaving, but with conditions. The conditions we tentatively agreed on are that the US troops will leave Iraq when pigs fly, hell freezes over or the Iraqis finally wake up and sign over all those oil rights to Exxon, Shell and British Petroleum, whichever of those events comes first.”

“Our troops could leave right away if the oil companies are allowed to drill for oil anywhere they wanted to instead of all the restrictions Obama and his posse the Democrat Party are imposing on progress,” said Karl Rove. “So we will start taking out ads on TV that show how it is Obama and his anti domestic drilling policies that are killing our brave soldiers and draining our treasury.”
“While Obama is keeping the war going for his own personal political ambitions,” said Rick Davis, McCain campaign director, “John McCain, being the maverick that he is, agrees with the Bush Administration that drilling will get the troops home sooner and that a time horizon is much preferable to a timetable. “I am John McCain, my friends,” McCain told this reporter, “and I believe in an orderly withdrawal of American troops, a time horizon withdrawal that should take about a hundred years.”