A Man With A Plan

Watching the folks at the Corner get all excited about the prospect of a troop "surge" in Iraq reminded me of something I wanted to say several weeks ago but forgot about. I think a lot of people who realize we ought to be pulling out of Iraq as soon as possible made a mistake in complaining that Bush was advocating sending in more troops without having a specific plan for what to do with them. Now the guy's going to come up with a plan and, by that very fact, he'll take the wind out of the anti-surge/withdrawal argument.

But the problem was never that Bush didn't have a plan, it was that no plan whatever would stand any real chance of success. Obviously Bush was going to slap together a plan for the surge at some point, so it was kind of silly to lower the bar for him by making the absence of a plan the main obstacle for him to overcome. The appropriate strategy was to prep everybody for the fact that Bush was going to come up, inevitably, with a strategy that was doomed to failure. Now we're going to have to hear grudging concessions about Bush's wisdom just because he decided to figure out what to do with the troops before actually deploying them.