TWENTY YEARS

Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have already posted about this but the timeframe is so much longer than anything else I've come across, I think it deserves repeating.

Fred Kapln of Slate interviewed Stephen Biddle, a counter-terrorism expert on the Council of Foreign Relations and a consultant to Gen. Petraeus. Biddle gave his personal thought on how long we would need to be in Iraq:

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years—and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

We know that Pres. Fredo doesn't mind long-term, long-shot gambles because, as he once put it, we'll all be dead but what about Petraeus and Crocker?