''Inslee hopes troops begin return next year''

"Having just completed a three-day trip in Iraq, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., said Wednesday that he hoped U.S. troops would start coming home early next year and that the number of forces on the ground there is "substantially reduced" by the end of 2006.

Inslee returned to Sea-Tac Airport Wednesday afternoon after he and a bipartisan delegation of five other members of Congress visited with top U.S. generals and Iraqi political leaders to assess matters there. It was Inslee's first trip to Iraq.

Inslee, who said he has been a dedicated opponent of the war from the beginning, urged the Bush administration to focus on extricating American troops and ensuring an orderly transition to a stable Iraqi political and military leadership.

First, the only way to placate the vast center of the country -- which is non-radicalized, he said, but increasingly resentful of a seemingly indefinite U.S. presence -- is to set and stick by a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops. Just as important, Inslee said, U.S. forces needed to do a better job helping "stand up" a viable Iraqi military. That includes doing a better job supplying them with communications and transportation equipment and basic infrastructure.

"The key to the exit door of Iraq is having a working Iraqi army and police force," he said.

Toward that end, Inslee said, Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi security forces, told him that a fully functioning army should be up and running by the end of 2006. A stable police force should be in place by early to mid- 2007. The congressional delegation went to Baghdad and Tikrit and to a U.S. Army base. They also visited injured American troops at a military hospital at Ramstein Air Base in Germany before returning.
Inslee said he believed that morale was surprisingly high, given the casualties and the uncertainty as to when the troops might come home. He couldn't say the same about his congressional colleagues, whose partisan squabbling over the course of the war and the Bush administration's rationale for starting it has turned ugly in recent weeks.

Inslee decried the remarks of Rep. Jean Schmidt, a freshman Republican from Ohio, who Friday slammed Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., saying on the House floor that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do. There was a lot of tension that night," said Inslee, who termed Schmidt's remarks as "very loathsome. We can't have a debate where there are 'warmongers' on one side and 'cowards' on the other," he said."-from the P-I today.
Either there was nobody available at the Seattle Times to cover this, or the paper is just so chock full of ads today there isn't any room for another word. Or they decided it wasn't newsworthy.