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This amendment was entirely pointless for one simple reason: the Whitehouse doesn't know when we'll be able to withdraw from Iraq. Sure, it makes Congress feel important to receive periodic updates about the status of the reconstruction, but what good does it do?
We should not set a timetable for withdrawal because military campaigns should always be governed by military concerns, not political ones. It doesn't matter if it is politically convenient to, say, bring troops home right before an election: the troops should leave or stay based on the available military intelligence, not on some Berlin Conference-style plan drawn up in a bunker 5,000 miles away.
We also should not create a document outlining the conditions that need to be met before we can withdraw. This document would otherwise be known as "Al-Qaida's Guide on How to Indefinitely Postpone the Withdrawal of American Forces". The conditions must of strategic necessity be flexible. Generally speaking, American forces should be withdrawn in proportion to the availability of Iraqi police and military units that are able to take over security work.
I'm with McCain on this one.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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