Two top U.S. defense officials signaled Congress on Wednesday that U.S. forces might remain in Iraq for as long as a decade and that permanent facilities need to be built to house them there.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no explicit estimates for the time U.S. forces would stay in Iraq, but they did not dispute members of Congress who said the deployment could last a decade or more. The comments were among the most explicit acknowledgements yet from the Bush administration that the U.S. presence in Iraq will be long, arduous, costly and a strain on the military....

--USA Today

From The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, August 1, 2000:

SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, (R) Texas: ...What many of us have disagreed with the Clinton/Gore administration about is that there is no progress. There is no strategy. And I don't think Governor Bush as President would put our troops in harm's way ad infinitum and certainly with no exit strategy.

No -- of course he wouldn't.

(Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the USA Today link.)