Yes it's Still "Stay the Course"

The very people who have been wrong about everything are still calling the shots in Iraq. Yesterday I directed you over to Justin Logan's critique of Fred Kagan's "plan for victory" in Iraq. Today at the American Prospect Spencer Ackerman takes on Kagan's Final Fantasy .

Kagan, in his writings for The Weekly Standard, has been a vociferous critic of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military leadership, whom he believes have jeopardized America's fortunes in Iraq through their insistence on both a relatively light military footprint and a rapid handover of security responsibilities to Iraqis. That makes it all the more painfully ironic that his plan is so Rumsfeldian: it seeks to essentially re-fight the invasion of Iraq; it substitutes wishful thinking for sound military strategy; it presumes that American military resources are both omnipotent and inexhaustible; and it's agnostic to the point of indifferent about what political settlement is to follow military operations.

Go read Ackerman's complete analysis but he points out that what Kagan is saying is that we should use imaginary troops to obtain an undefined security at which point the Iraqis will all become one happy family.