War Quote by Stuart Rothenberg

A troop drawdown becomes, in Stuart Rothenberg's framing, less a military fact than a political raw material. The phrase "drawing down some troops" is deliberately modest: not victory, not withdrawal, not even a strategy shift. "Some" keeps the commitment vague and the risk manageable, the way a cautious pundit leaves room for the headline to change overnight.

Then comes the real move: permission. "If the president wants to try to turn that into the beginning of a success" treats success as something you narrate into existence, not something you secure on the ground. The verb "turn" is the tell. This is about conversion: taking a partial, possibly tactical adjustment and translating it into a storyline the public can recognize as progress. The drawdown is positioned as a symbolic inflection point - the kind that can be sold as momentum even if the underlying situation remains murky.

The subtext is a mixture of skepticism and pragmatic advice. Rothenberg implies the administration has not yet earned the word "success", but could manufacture the early scaffolding of it. "Opportunity" is the softest of political words: it signals that outcomes are contingent, that messaging matters, and that the president's agency lies as much in framing as in policy.

Contextually, this sits in the well-worn American cycle of war management: leaders need off-ramps that look like achievements, commentators police the boundary between spin and substance, and small operational changes get drafted into larger narratives because the electorate demands a plot. Rothenberg isn't celebrating the drawdown; he's noting the opening for a story - and the danger that it might become the story.