Iraq War: Secret plan, secret plan, who's got the secret plan?

"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

As the press and punditocracy eagerly awaits the fabled James Baker Secret Plan to End the Iraq War, a number of people are saying its time to face the reality of defeat.

Steve Gilliard, for instance, on Iraq 11/14/06 writes:

We have three choices

1) Draft 100,000 men to bolster the Army in Iraq, sending 20K there in the next nine months. Expanding the Army will not happen without conscription

2) Prepare for an immediate withdrawal

3) Plan to leave within a fixed time frame

Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations and an advocate for partitioning Iraq, was interviewed by Der Spiegel Online, "Iraq Is Not Winnable" 11/13/06:

SPIEGEL: Is Iraq still winnable for the United States?

Haass: We've reached a point in Iraq where we've got to get real. And this is not going to be a near-term success for American foreign policy. The Iraq situation is not winnable in any meaningful sense of the word "winnable." So what we need to do now is look for a way to limit the losses and costs, try to advance on other fronts in the region and try to limit the fallout of Iraq. That's what you have to do sometimes when you're a global power.

Other highlights of that interview include this on the "axis of evil":

SPIEGEL: Almost five years ago Bush grouped Iraq, North Korea and Iran together in the now-notorious "Axis of Evil." Now the US is faced with considerable crises in all three countries. What to do?

Haass: We have allowed ourselves to get into three very difficult situations. As the United States has learned to its great cost in Iraq, military force is no panacea. Any option that would be heavily reliant on the Army is not a realistic option, because the only Army we have is busy right now.

North Korean nukes:

SPIEGEL: Bush's comments on North Korea's nuclear tests seem to indicate that it is no longer the possession of nuclear weapons, but the passing along of nuclear technology to terrorists or hostile states that America is opposed to. Is this a new nuclear doctrine?

Haass: Here, at least, the administration has moved from what you might call non-proliferation to managing proliferation. But I would hope that doesn't become the new status quo. I'm not comfortable living in a world in which an aggressive, hostile, poor and potentially desperate North Korea is sitting on a mountain of nuclear material. That does not fill me with anything except extraordinary alarm.

On the eternal bogeyman of isolationism:

SPIEGEL: The disaster of the last years leads many Americans to doubt the military strength and moral superiority of the nation. Is this country on the verge of a new isolationist phase?

Haass: The danger is an Iraq syndrome. The war is one the American people weren't quite prepared for: They had not been told it was going to be that difficult and expensive. After the military battlefield phase, they thought it was going to be easy. So this has proven shocking. Nearly 3,000 Americans have lost their lives. Maybe 15,000 - 20,000 Americans have been wounded. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. It has been disruptive on many levels. The danger is that the United States now will be weary of intervening elsewhere, like the cat that once sat on a hot stove and will never sit on any stove again.

SPIEGEL: How long could such a period last?

Haass: It is quite possible that this generation of Americans will be as affected by Iraq as the previous generation was by Vietnam.

I'm with the war critics like Andrew Bacevich who think that an "Iraq syndrome" would be a desirable thing if that means less arrogance, more realism and greater caution in foreign policy than the Cheney-Bush administration showed in Iraq.

Actual "isolationism" is actually a small trend in the US, one with little direct influence on foreign policy. And that's essentially been true since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Isolationism in the 1930s sense has never been a viable option since then, although there are a hard core of "paleo-conservatives" who haven't given it up.

But advocates of the two dominant schools of foreign policy thought prior to the current administration, the "realists" and the "liberal internationalists", have both used "isolationism" as a straw-man to oppose. Until the neoconservatives became the grand strategists behind the Bush Doctrine, realism and liberal internationalism had been the major alternatives in US policy decisions and debates.

This is part of why it's so important for the Democrats as a group not to buy on to some Baker-Hamilton recommendations on the war that are some phony non-solution. If it doesn't involve a scheduled withdrawal of American troops from Iraq on a set timetable, it won't even be worth considering. Buying on to a doomed "new" strategy will just drag their reputations down with Bush's. (I take it for granted that Joe Lieberman will take whatever position on the war the administration ask him to.)

Coming to grips with the loss in Iraq in a sensible way would be good practice. We're going to have to do the same in Afghanistan. So will the Europeans fighting there. But they haven't spent the last 50+ years telling themselves that they are invincible and the greatest countries in thehistory of the world and so forth.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05