Rich: Just to declare we’re staying in Iraq for 10 years sounds like a cute idea, but it wouldn’t work. Foreigners follow US politics too closely. (Why do you think the Tet offensive was launched in the spring of an election year?)
Who is going to make this declaration? The President? He’s gone three years from now, as our enemies perfectly well know. A joint session of Congress? Uh-huh.
Basically, nobody would believe it. Whether they would be RIGHT not to believe it is neither here nor there; they just wouldn’t, under any conceivable circumstances–no, not if you wrote it into a Constitutional Amendment–and that alone makes the exercise pointless.