The Plan I: Inauspicious Beginnings

As I hope you noticed, I'm quite delayed with my much-anticipated Plan For Democrats. This is because I had intended to start out with a real barn-burner, a page-scroller, a manifesto of great promise: I was going to solve Iraq. I had a plan, stolen from people who've actually been there and who know stuff. I was ready to articulate this plagiarized plan for you, my readers, who have better things to do than peruse the latest books on the Iraq nightmare. So, what went wrong? Iraq went wrong. All week. In the most extraordinary ways. And so I have been bereft of a post with which to launch my agenda.

Let's start with the plan that I was going to offer, which is the plan outlined, in different forms, by Peter Galbraith and also by Joe Biden. This is the plan whereby we partition Iraq into three pieces, leaving the Kurds the north, the Shiites the south, and the Sunnis the middle. In the interests of providing originality, my plan has US troops patrolling the borders of the different sectors and keeping everyone in their own area, but no more than that. And then we do some diplomacy or something to get some help with all the patrolling. I haven't quite worked that part out, since I don't think we actually have enough troops to patrol such lengthy borders. Not that it matters, because this week has rendered my lovely plan obsolete.

It is now evident that the Shiites are killing each other and killing Sunnis. Amara, in the south, was, as I'm sure you've heard, briefly taken over by one of the competing Shiite militias dominating the area -- an area theoretically so thoroughly pacified that it was transferred from British control to the Iraqis. So it is fairly obvious that even locked up in their own sections of the country, these people are determined to kill each other, and no amount of sending them to their separate corners is going to stop them.

So I don't know what to do. But let us remember: Democrats are probably going to win this election in a landslide, and they are going to do so in large part because Americans are sick of the war. I personally think the Foley thing is overrated; I actually contend it just reminded people of how much they hate the war. At any rate, if/when we win this election, we inherit Iraq. By controlling the budget, we will have the ability to pull all of the troops home simply by starving the war over Bush's objections.

Beware, beware. I have never bought the concept of the "War on Terror", first because I think all ideological wars are total bullshit, and second because I have no idea what "Terror" is. It's obviously nonsense that "the terrorists" are going to follow us home. What is going to happen, though, is that Iran will take up the task of stabilizing Iraq -- for a price. This is apparently part of the anticipated Baker/Hamilton plan, if you can believe it; no wonder they're holding it until after the election. That's going to go over huge. So that's bad; but the worst of it is that, until and unless the Iranians clean up our mess, we are going to have to stomach hundreds of thousands of deaths, over a period of years, while the Iraqis fight it out -- and if you think those deaths will be credited to the Republicans, you have to lay off the crack. I don't know if I can stomach watching that mayhem unfold, and getting blamed for it. And I really can't stomach the idea that Democrats are once again going to get tarred with the pussy label. So I'm just going to advise that we not pull out of Iraq precipitously. It would probably be better to start talking to the Syrians and Iranians first, since they're going to own it once we leave, and it would be nice if we had a little leverage.

I know; it's not much. But has anyone got anything better???? Apparently even Bush is now reduced to contemplating possibly surrendering to the Sunni insurgency (the linked blog is an absolute must-read, by the way). And for what it's worth, while I can't solve the war in Iraq, in my next post I will explain how Democrats can win the War on Terror. Whatever the hell that is.


One more thing: whatever vocabulary wizard recently taught Bush the word "caliphate" must be found and shot.