The Charlie Brown press and the football of troop withdrawal

The press is falling for it again, interpreting this,

After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they “tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Into a headlines like this, "Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible" or "Bush sees possible troop cuts in Iraq," or "Bush hints at US troop reduction in visit to Iraq."

Shouldn't the headline be, "Bush says he'll stick to current deployment schedules only if security improves"?

PS. Dear Press, you are being outsmarted by this man,

On Air Force One after leaving Iraq, Bush acknowledged that his comment about troop reductions had piqued interest. "Maybe I was intending to do that," the president said, sitting around a table with reporters in his plane's conference room as he flew to Australia to meet with Asia-Pacific leaders.

"If you look at my comments over the past eight months, it's gone from a security situation in the sense that we're either going to get out and there will be chaos, or more troops," the president said. "Now the situation has changed where I'm able to speculate on the hypothetical."

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