Decision ‘08

Krauthammer: Plan B

Despite Condi Rice’s insistance that to discuss a “Plan B” is a sign of lack of commitment, we do have to acknowledge the following realities: (a) I don’t care what the Democrats say, the surge is a reality and they won’t stop it (or even try hard to do so), and (b) the surge may fail. The most probable reasons for failure would be (a) still not enough troops, and (b) loss of nerve on the part of Maliki.

Charles Krauthammer essentially takes as a given all of the above, but argues that we should articulate our Plan B in such a way to increase pressure on Maliki to make Plan A work. Sounds pretty sound to me…so what does Krauthammer have in mind?

The Pentagon should be working on a sustainable Plan B whose major element would be not so much a drawdown of troops as a drawdown of risk to our troops. If we had zero American casualties a day, there would be as little need to withdraw from Iraq as there is to withdraw from the Balkans.

We need to find a redeployment strategy that maintains as much latent American strength as possible, but with minimal exposure. We say to Maliki: you let us down and we dismantle the Green Zone, leave Baghdad and let you fend for yourself; we keep the airport and certain strategic bases in the area; we redeploy most of our forces to Kurdistan; we maintain a significant presence in Anbar province where we are having success in our one-front war against al-Qaeda and the Baathists. Then we watch. You can have your Baghdad civil war without us. We will be around to pick up the pieces as best we can.

This is not a great option, but fallbacks never are. It does have the virtue of being better than all the others, if the surge fails. It has the additional virtue of increasing the chances that the surge will succeed.

This is not an original idea; I’ve heard variations floated many times, and many months ago, and I’m not sure I endorse it, regarding the details. I very much agree with Krauthammer that we need to articulate an alternative to put a little wind in Maliki’s sails.

I don’t necessarily think the alternative needs to be floated in public at this point, however, as long as Maliki gets the message - and that leaves open the possibility that such a communication has already taken place…in other words, I think it’s a little presumptuous to assume that we know everything that is taking place below the public radar. Good food for thought, though…