Military Plans and Political Will

The Washington Post today says there is no Plan B if the current "surge" in Iraq doesn't work.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration's position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. "Plan B was to make Plan A work."

Heritage Foundation blogger Captain Ed is getting all mussed up about this, saying the Wapo doesn't understand that the Pentagon has contingency plans for everything and is just trying to put the administration in an impossible position:

Anyone who understands military operations would know that a multiplicity of alternatives have already been discussed, formulated, and selected. This article is of a piece with the meme of the last couple of years: that Bush could not admit mistakes. It's a transparent catch-22. If the Bush administration refuses to discuss the alternatives, then the media can say they have no fallback plans. If they start discussing the alternatives, their political opponents can use them to insist on transitioning to the fallbacks immediately.

Ed then goes on to discuss the other alternatives which would keep US forces in Iraq and admit they don't look good. He ends by echoing Pace and Condi Rice: "Plan B should focus on making that Plan A successful."

Ed obviously didn't read page 2 of the WaPo's online article - if he had he would have seen their discussion of the very fact that the Pentagon plans for all kinds of happenstances but that which plans get taken down from their shelf and dusted off depend on political will.

Which is really the whole point - that there is no Plan B even if several "plan B's" sit on Pentagon shelves because there is no political will in the administration to change from Plan A. It has become, yet again, a case of staying the course.

There used to be political will within the Bush administration and its neocon think-tankers for all kinds of Plan B's - as revealed yesterday by two uner-reported but key interviews with ex-military bigwigs.

The first came from USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, late of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary for Policy Near East South Asia (NESA) Policy directorate. She talks mostly about the politicization of intelligence over Iraq and Iran - fixing the facts around the policy. That leads to Plans driven by political will rather than military good sense (H/t Kat):

SWANSON: What is the Iran Directorate?

KWIATKOWSKI: I have heard that it is much like what we knew as the expanded Iraq desk, the alternative nomenclature for the Office of Special Plans directed by Abe Shulsky in 2002 and 2003. Incidentally – the OSP, when formally separated from our spaces in late August 2002 was described to us by our boss Bill Luti (now at the National Security Council under Elliot Abrams) as the "expanded Iraq desk." However, within weeks, the two people working the Iran desk (Larry Franklin and Ladan Archin) were moved permanently into the OSP, indicating that in practical terms, Iraq and Iran policies were unified. I have heard Abe Shulsky runs the Iran office or Directorate today. Ladan Archin, a political appointee who worked with former Iran desk officer Larry Franklin, is reported to be working for Shulsky in the same capacity as she did in OSP in 2002. When observers note the similarities between the thoroughly discredited OSP and today's Iran Directorate under Shulsky, in terms of leadership, leakage of falsehoods and talking points designed to demonize Iran's government, and promote ideas of a Iranian threat to the United States, the "need" for the U.S. to foment "democracy" in Iran, and a warmongering agenda, they are on track. It's a real shame.

The second, and far more shocking account of political will driving which plans get dusted off comes from Gen Wesley Clark (H/t Earl):

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” -- meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”

Those grandiose neocon plans came to grief on their own inability to see beyond their own fairy-tale fantasies of "cakewalks" and "rosepetals", however. Still, the point is that Plans are driven by civilians, not men in uniform. The latter just come up with a variety of plans then enact the Plan their political superiors decide upon.

Thus it is with the "surge" - which isn't really a surge at all since a true surge would take far more troops than the military has spare. The political will simply does not exist in the White House to admit that, as Gen Petraeus told one Senator recently, the surge-that-isn't has at best a one in four chance of success. Nor does it exist to even talk about other options involving staying in Iraq - all of which are fraught with dangers, not least being the loss of supply lines. And there is definitely no political will within the Bush administration to talk about the only realistic option - withdrawal.

Which means that we will stay the course - same Plan A ship, different Plan B flag atop the mast - until the day comes when there is no choice but to withdraw. Delaying until then will not be pretty. Gen. Clark knows exactly how it will go.

The real danger is, and one of the reasons this is so complicated is because -- let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well, yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the road one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and load and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq. You'd have a few roadside bombs. But if you line everybody up there won't be any roadside bombs. Maybe some sniping. You can fly helicopters over, do your air cover. You’d probably get safely out of there. But when you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism.

And now we can understand why the neoconservatives are so keen to see absolutely no thawing in Sunni-Shia sectarian fighting. Sectarian infighting has become the sole practical reason to stay in Iraq, the neocons want to stay in Iraq because to leave would be a failure of their political will...and so they will work to make sure the US needs to stay in Iraq by sniping at every attempt to defuse the sectarian situation. It dovetails nicely, too, with their legend of a Clash of Civilizations between the West and Moslem nations - it's a deliberate policy to head off that supposed clash be engineering a clash of Sunni and Shia instead. If you think that's crazy, then you underestimate the neocon desire to be proven "right".