‘Plan B was to make Plan A work’

March 5, 2007

Over the weekend, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) relayed a recent conversation he had with Gen. David Petraeus, the new top military commander in Iraq, about the president’s latest escalation policy. Petraeus reportedly told Smith that the new “surge” has only a one in four chance of succeeding.

With those odds, and with the general in charge of Iraq 75% confident the plan will fail, it stands to reason that the administration would want to come up with a variety of contingency plans. Or not.

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.”

Part of the problem seems to be an inability for administration officials to decide whether or not they should even bother with a Plan B at all. Two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told senators that it would irresponsible to even consider the possibility of the escalation strategy failing. One month ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the opposite, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I would be irresponsible if I weren’t thinking about what the alternatives might be.” Now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is back to where Rice was in January. If these guys could pick a talking point and go with it, I’m sure everyone would appreciate it.

More importantly, though, Pace’s claims about avoiding a Plan B just aren’t believable.

It seems awkward, to put it mildly, to have higher expectations of the Bush administration than officials’ rhetoric would suggest, but it’s simply inconceivable that, after four years of tragic misjudgments and horrific errors, the entire Bush gang would rally behind a policy that few military leaders and policy experts believe in and refuse to consider future alternatives. I’m not an expert in military planning, but my sense is that Pentagon officials are constantly drawing up contingency plans for just about every imaginable scenario. They have war gamers crafting just-in-case scenarios all the time, have done so for decades.

But in this case, they would have us believe that none of this is happening anymore. Coach Bush called a Hail Mary, and the team threw out the playbook.

Please. What’s the point of this charade? Conservative Ed Morrissey wrote:

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.

I think that’s only partially right. If the administration at least acknowledged that fallback plans exist, it doesn’t matter if political opponents insist. Bush has ignored these demands before, he ignores them now, and will continue to ignore them as long as he’s in office. What does the White House care whether war critics “insist” on transitioning to Plan B? The answer can stay the same: “No.”

Instead, I suspect the answer probably is some misguided sense of public relations. It’s likely that the White House somehow got the notion that drawing up a Plan B, and acknowledging it, would a) make them appear “weak”; and b) send a “dangerous message to our enemies.” They’re wrong, of course, but they seem convinced that the latest escalation strategy is more likely to work if they maintain the fiction that it has to work.

So, am I suggesting that they’re appearing obstinate and incompetent on purpose? Pretty much.

Plan B is a type of emergency contraception and is therefore repugnant to any right-thinking American.

  • Normally, I’d tend to agree with CB’s suggestion that “they’re appearing obstinate and incompetent on purpose” and that alternative plans exist. This administration’s past record of refusing to engage in contingent planning, however, makes a reasonable case to assume otherwise.

  • This is what happens when one starts actually believing the “leadership” positive attitude that has infected bidnez thinking for the last 40 years.

    “Failure is not an option” is a statement that sounds great and has dramatic gravitas, but no one is so omnipotent to “will” away failure. It happens whether one likes it or not. If you bury your head in the sand, hoping it will go away, it just leaves you in the perfect position for the universe/critics/reality to hoof you hard in the ass.

    I remember a line from the movie Patton which suits. Rommell chastizes a suborinate for mocking the enemy “You can afford to be an optimist. I can’t. “

  • They don’t need a plan B when they’re “blowing 7 different kinds of smoke” on us, not the designated enemy. I think CB is right that they don’t want to divulge their contingency plans, but I doubt that any of those contingency plans are any good.

    Normally people don’t brag that their only tool is a hammer.

  • The plan is always going to be Plan A (even if it is a contantly changing Plan A) hence no need for Plan B. Circular I know but this is the Bush administration.

  • It’s no surprise that Bush has a plan B and won’t share it.
    Sharing his plans to use dire circumstances to replace our democracy with a dictatorship would be counter-productive.

  • Meanwhile in that ‘other’ war in Afghanistan….

    * On Sunday, US troops kill 10 civilians in shootout. Karzai condems incident.
    * US troops seize footage of incident from AP and erase it. AP to lodge complaint.
    * On Monday, US troops drop two 2000-pound bombs in Kapisa – 9 civilians are killed including 5 women and 3 children.

    news.bbc.co.uk

  • “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”

    Gee whilikers. Is he suggesting the Marines go it alone? Or that the rest of the forces stuck in the on-going “victory” are a bunch of pants wetters who do talk about failure? Or perhaps he’s just a chest thumping, sound-bite spewing dickhead who makes Marines who are doing the actual fighting grind their teeth.

    But of course the ReThugs want to make this a discussion about failure/victory. That way people who ask questions about Plan B (or maybe we’re on to Plan F by now) are quitters, cowards, “cut n’ runners (TM)”, rather than just…normal. To take a local example, the DC metro system now encourages riders to come up with a Plan B for getting to work if something goes wrong (something goes kaboom). According to BushLogik(TM) the WMATA planning to take a hit by terrorists and is too weak willed and sissified to stop it. They’ve surrendered to the terrorists! I guess the same goes for various drills that cover everything from fire to dirty bomb attack.

    It makes me think of some whackjob relatives who were Evangelists (the two may or may not be related). According to their flavour of religion if you “confessed” a bad thing might happen, it would happen and it would be YOUR FAULT. Therefore statements like “I think I’m getting a cold,” had to be avoided unless you really wanted to get a cold. Perhaps that explains BushCo’s modus “operandi.” To talk about alternate plans will wake Satan!
    And Cheney gets cranky if you interupt his nap.

  • No Plan B for Iraq. No plan B for women.

    Ever notice that the car bombs always kill more people than the reported number of insurgents killed in a raid? Interesting.

  • “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”

    Maybe this is the reason that, until now, no Marine has ever been the top military adviser to the president.

    And maybe this is the reason that George W. Bush decided he needed a Marine to be his top military adviser.

  • Awww…c’mon, people—this is the military we’re talking about here. The only way you get a “Plan B” is to incorporate a whole new model—and we’re still stick with the BushCheney model. So all you’re going to see out of these clowns is the typical “mil.spec” trick (for “military specification). That leaves:

    Plan A, revision none;

    Plan A, revision a;

    Plan A, revision b;

    …and so on, and so forth, etc., etc., etc.,….

    You want a Plan B, then you have to (1) acknowledge that Plan A is obsolete, decide the core requirements of a Plan B, send out a bid-call for Plan B, select a winning bid, and then let the winning bidder implement the research, development, prototype testing, and production start-up for Plan B.

    And your comprehensive test on this will be in triplicate—to comply with the military specifications for submission of request forms….

  • Since the administration has staked everything on Plan A, Plan B is firing and blackballing them all.

    Seriously. This bunch cannot be rehabilitated, and they are no more likely to come up with and execute a good Plan B than they are a Plan A.

  • Actually “Plan B” is being tried right now, it’s called “Get the Saudis to bail us out for another chunk of our souls”.

    Not surprisingly, that’s the same “Plan B” that Bush has used before.

    It won’t work this time, but you can see why a perpetual screwup like Bush would keep going back to the same plan that worked before.

  • It has to embolden “the enemy” to know that no matter how bad things get for US troops in Iraq, the US will not change its stategies because it would bruise egos in Washington and tarnish reputations of “strength.” Those wishing to kill American troops have us right where they want us: too stupid and prideful to make effective changes in our strategy. We are not fighting to win, or to achieve a lasting peace, we’re fighting for the vanity of our leaders.

  • Amen, petorado. And put that way, Obama, McCain, and every other thinking person should be willing to call the loss of young lives a “waste.”

    BushCo seems to want to paint the terra-ists as dumb; if the left never tells al Queda that Emperor Bush has no clothes, AQ will never notice. If they were that stupid, however, how has Bush, as Commander in Chief, not been able to stablize Iraq after 4 years? It is always dangerous to count on your enemy being stupid. In this case, I really don’t think it matters what the left does or doesn’t say, the rest of the world can clearly see for themselves the miniscule manhood of the naked Emperor and his court.

  • Ponder this. There is no need for a ‘plan B’ if the actual plan is to keep US in a state of war indefinately; where ‘success’ is the continued assault on civil liberties and the continued plundering of the treasury resulting in the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. Can you spell class warfare? The more I think about it the more I believe this war is all about the transfer of wealth.The creation of a police state helps to accomplish that goal. If taken in any other context it makes no sense. If the goal was to merely plunder more of the world’s resources we could have paid Saddam to do it for us.

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