Who said that the guys in the Bush Administration are not creative? President Bush and Senator McCain have stressed their opposition to plans supported by the “appeasers” to set-up a timline or a time table for withdrawal from Iraq. But now as the New York Times headline puts it, Bush, in Shift, Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline and is negotiating now such a timeline — which the administration calls a time horizon — with the Iraqi government. But then some officials and pundits are saying that “time horizon” doesn’t really amount to time table/timeline.

Officials and experts suggested that including language in the security agreement, which the administration hopes to complete soon, would have little impact on Iraq policy: US troop levels are still expected to be about 140,000 by the time Mr Bush leaves office in January.“He has found a soft enough way to do it that will not really constrain American policy,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defence expert at the Brookings Institution. “Any kind of a time horizon is not going to be permanent … My guess is it will be harmless and yet it will partially respond to the Iraqi domestic political need to show that this is not going to last forever.”The administration is implacably opposed to a fixed timetable of the kind proposed by Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate. By agreeing to a vague “time horizon”, the White House argues the deal is consistent with its strategy of gradually handing control to the Iraqis as security conditions improve.

And indeed, according to Wikipedia

One hundred years, sometimes considered equal to seven generations, is a time horizon often cited by the ancient Iroquois and modern Greens. The Forestry Commission in the UK plans over a century into the future. There are Japanese corporations rumoured to have five-hundred year plans, which amount to a sort of official science fiction story or myth to which the company commits itself – these are highly secret and have not been confirmed to exist.

So I suppose that you could include McCain’s plan for a 100 hundred years in Iraq as another example of this concept of “time horizon.”

BTW, I heard a talking head on television saying that that “time horizon” reminded him of a name of movie. He was probably thinking of Frank Capra’s 1937 Lost Horizon or the 1997 Event Horizon. Both films are fantasies dealing with the search for utopia and lost worlds, which kind of fits very much with the Iraq War and the entire Bush Administration’s agenda. They are certainly not realistic films.