Leadership Quote by Peter DeFazio

A timeline is the polite fig leaf here; the real push is to redefine what "being in Iraq" means without having to say "withdrawal" and eat the political shrapnel. DeFazio’s sentence is engineered to sound procedural, even managerial: remove troops from "front line combat positions", shift "daily security patrols" and "interactions with citizens" to Iraqis, and reserve American force for something implied but carefully unnamed. It’s a de-escalation plan dressed up as a handoff.

The phrase "in addition to a timeline" signals he knows the audience is split between people who want a date-certain exit and people who fear a vacuum. So he offers both: the symbolic reassurance of a schedule and the operational mechanism that makes the schedule plausible. Listing the tasks - patrols, citizen contact, offensive actions - isn’t redundancy; it’s a checklist meant to demonstrate seriousness and to box out the usual critique that critics of the war only deal in slogans.

The subtext is about legitimacy and optics as much as strategy. "Interactions with citizens" is a quiet admission that an occupying army, even a well-intentioned one, distorts daily life and can generate resistance simply by being present. Turning those interactions over to Iraqis is presented as empowerment, but it also functions as blame-shifting: if security deteriorates, responsibility has been "transferred."

Contextually, this sits in the era when "Iraqis must stand up so we can stand down" became bipartisan shorthand. DeFazio’s twist is to make that slogan concrete and immediate: not someday, not after victory, but now, in the streets where the war is most intimate and most politically toxic.