As The Meme Turns
Remember last week, when the Pentagon's failure to publicly discuss its Plan B to the surge indicated a lack of due diligence by military planners? At the time, we said that if the DoD was foolish enough to discuss other contingency plans openly, the media would cast that as a lack of confidence in the surge plan.
The Pentagon is actively considering a series of fallback positions for Iraq in the event that President George Bush's plan of expanding the US military presence fails. Among the options are adoption of the El Salvador model, which would see Washington withdraw most of its 150,000-plus troops and replace them with a few hundred, or few thousand, military advisers.A more drastic option also being looked at is to retreat inside Baghdad's Green Zone and the heavily fortified airport on the outskirts of the city. ...
An adviser familiar with discussions inside the Pentagon said there was great pessimism about whether Mr Bush's troop "surge" would work, and military planners were studying a range of alternatives.
Let's see if we get this straight. When Bush chose the surge strategy, critics accused him of being inflexible. When the Washington Post wrote that no one at the Pentagon seemed willing to discuss Plan B, they accused the administration of a lack of preparation. Now that people have started to discuss contingency plans, they're suddenly pessimists.
Predictable. Sad, but predictable.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on March 13, 2007 4:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
