I HEARD TODAY from a friend who spends much time on Capitol Hill...we'll just call her Congressional Girl. She sent me the following rather-unvarnished peek into Congress' view on the Iraq occupation. Its a bit lengthy but read the entire thing...because the better news is sort of buried toward the end.

CQ TODAY
May 27, 2003 – 6:14 p.m.
House Members Predict Long Stay — for Lots of Troops — in Iraq
By Pat Towell, CQ Staff
Two weeks before Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K.Shinseki retires, his Feb. 25 prediction that it would take "several hundred thousand" U.S. troops to occupy Iraq was endorsed Tuesday by the House Armed Services Committee's senior Republican manpower specialist, just back from a visit to Baghdad.

And those troops are likely to be in Iraq for a long time, several members of the delegation said.

Shinseki's prediction, made during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, was repudiated immediately by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who insisted that the requirement would be much less than 200,000.

But after hearing a day of briefings on Monday by top U.S. civilian and military officials in Iraq, Armed Services Total Force Subcommittee Chairman John M. McHugh, R-N.Y., said the departing Army chief was vindicated: 'If anything, Gen. Shinseki was conservative," McHugh said to reporters at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

According to Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, the senior Democrat on McHugh's subcommittee, there are more than 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. "I can't see . . . that we can reduce that number very much," he said. Because troops in the country would have to be replaced periodically, the total number of U.S. troops involved would be very large, he said.

"The occupation is going to be very difficult, very costly and very long," Abercrombie said.

The eight-member House delegation spent about 14 hours on Monday in Baghdad and Kirkuk, visiting U.S. troops and interviewing top U.S. leaders.

"The impression we got is that this is going to be a long-term commitment," McHugh said. "What concerns me is that, for some artificial, emotional deadline, we leave before the job is done. . . . It's not going to happen in a handful of months. It may happen in a year or five years," he said.

Making Headway Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who led the bipartisan delegation, insisted members had seen real progress in restoring public services, with about 50 percent of the country's electrical grid back in service and about 40 percent of its drinking water supply restored. Hunter cited the group's drive through downtown Baghdad as further evidence that life in the city was becoming more normal: "It was rush hour; there were traffic jams. . . . There were people in the streets. There were food vendors out. Markets were open."

Hunter also insisted U.S. officials were making headway toward creation of representative political institutions that Iraq did not see during more than three decades of Baath Party rule. In 17 of Iraq's 26 cities with a population of more than 100,000, he said, interim governments had been set up under appointed representatives of different ethnic,
religious and political groups. "People who are talking to each other, not shooting each other," Hunter said.

Hunter and Ed Royce, R-Calif., emphasized that Iraq's oil exports would cover some of the costs of reconstruction. But Hunter, too, said the United States had to be ready to see through the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. "As rapid as this military victory was," he said, "the watchword for reconstruction is patience."