Plan? What Plan?
Stumping for Republican candidates in the days leading up to the election, W. insists that the Democrats can't be trusted to control Congress because they have no cohesive plan for winning in Iraq. All you hear from Democrats is a mix of ideas and paraphrasing him that they'll cut and run before the job is over. An interesting position from a man who clearly has no plan himself. What exactly is his strategy for success in Iraq? If he has one, I'd like to hear it. Up until recently, it was stay the course, even though staying the course was getting us nowhere except deeper into the morass. Now he advocates flexibility and a series of benchmarks for gauging when it's safe to turn things over to the Iraqi government. Yet the Iraqi government publicly disagreed with W. this week over his policy and timetable for removing U.S. troops. They claim to be on the same page now, but that's just a public dog and pony show. I'm sure there are deep divisions, and how can W. have a plan if the Iraqi government doesn't support it? Even if he has a plan, it's been a miserable failure up until now. Can he truly be trusted as the person to lead us to victory? Wasn't he, after all, the one who claimed mission over when it was and is nowhere close to being over? Isn't he the one who's insisted on the same policy all these years even though it clearly was the wrong course?
I don't know what the right course of action is. Maybe the Democrats have competing visions for winning over there. Still, I'd like to see an alternate plan of action to the plan we've had up until now. Since the Republicans have flopped thus far, I'd like to see how a different party would handle the situation. The Democrats deserve the opportunity to come up with a cohesive strategy of their own, not that it would do much good anyway. Whatever approach they advocate won't have the support of the President, whatever legislation they pass will be vetoed with no possibility of override. We're stuck until a new President with a new vision comes into office. Will he or she have the answer? I don't know, but whatever happens, it would nice to see something new.