Does he have a plan?

In spite of what Seymour Hersh told us yesterday it appears that a cut and run from Iraq is inevitable. The religion of politics will take precedence over the religion of holy democratic crusades and apparently even Dick Cheneys's religion of power through oil. At least that's what Fred Kaplan is saying today over at Slate.

Brace yourself for a mind-bog of sheer cynicism. The discombobulation begins Wednesday, when President George W. Bush is expected to proclaim, in a major speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, that the Iraqi security forces—which only a few months ago were said to have just one battalion capable of fighting on its own—have suddenly made uncanny progress in combat readiness. Expect soon after (if not during the speech itself) the thing that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have, just this month, denounced as near-treason—a timetable for withdrawal of American troops.

And so it appears (assuming the forecasts about the speech are true) that the White House is as cynical about this war as its cynical critics have charged it with being. For several months now, many of these critics have predicted that, once the Iraqis passed their constitution and elected a new government, President Bush would declare his mission complete and begin to pull out—this, despite his public pledge to "stay the course" until the insurgents were defeated.

Kaplan suggests that this new Iraq "plan" is the reason the Bush administration was so insistent that the Iraqis approve their flawed constitution on the administrations schedule. Kaplan further thinks it could be a winner for Bush and the Republicans.

The political beauty of this scenario is that, even if Iraq remains mired in chaos or seems to be hurtling toward civil war, nobody in Congress is going to call for a halt, much less a reversal, of the withdrawal. The Republicans will fall in line; many of them have been nervous that the war's perpetuation, with its rising toll and dim horizons, might cost them their seats. And who among the Democrats will choose to outflank Bush on his right wing and advocate—as some were doing not so long ago—keeping the troops in Iraq for another five or 10 years or even boosting their numbers. (The question is so rhetorical, it doesn't warrant a question mark.)

In short, Bush could pull a win-win-win out of this shift. He could pre-empt the Democrats' main line of attack against his administration, stave off the prospect of (from the GOP's perspective) disastrous elections in 2006 and '08, and, as a result, bolster his presidency's otherwise dwindling authority within his own party and among the general population.

I'm not so sure. When Iraq descends into civil war and chaos, quite possible taking much of the middle east with it, the question will be asked, what did over 2000 Americans die for? This will be bad for Bush but not so bad for the Republicans as the Democrats have been willing to go along with the Iraq debacle until very recently. Kaplan concludes with a question, I assume a rhetorical one, does the Bush administration have a plan for the withdrawal?

More to the point, does the president have a plan for all this? (The point is far from facetious; it's tragically clear, after all, that he didn't have a plan for how to fight the war if it extended beyond the collapse of Saddam.) Has he entertained these questions, much less devised some shrewd answers? If he's serious about a withdrawal or redeployment that's strategically sensible, as opposed to politically opportune, we should hear about them in his speech Wednesday night.

He correctly points out that the administration hasn't had a plan for anything else. Stay the course was not a plan and neither is cut and run even if you declare mission accomplished first.