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Whatever Bush's Plan is, if it is like the others, it will be slipshod and probably intentionally so. It will not establish milestones. It will not establish critical success factors. It will not include any contingency planning for what to do if the main plan fails. If the Dems don't hold Bush's feet to the fire for a plan that includes at least these key elements (some of which would necessarily only be disclosed to cleared committees), then Bush will have evaded oversight again, and the Dems will have failed to do what they said they were going to do.
The problem is that Bush has a habit of substituting tactics for strategy, of managing by crisis. Bush wants to "decide" things, not manage them. He wants to call the shots, not sweat the planning. Hard work is a buzz phrase for Bush. You can practically hear a whine in his voice every time he says it, and he says it a lot.
Because Bush is not a full service leader, his people don't have any incentive to think through "what ifs" as in "What if this goes wrong?" For one thing, they don't want documentary evidence that they lacked utter confidence in their tactic du jour. They also don't want to commit to contingency plans in the event of failure, because that might bind their hands later. They don't want to commit to milestones, because that would give others an agreed standard to use to judge the "plan's" success or failure. Finally, the repeated calls to re-plan in the midst of each new crisis serve to buy time for the Administration.
Suppose Bush presented a plan that involved a "surge" of troops and money, but specifically called out milestones and contingency plans. If the violence, say, did not decrease in six months, the plan would be judged a failure. A contingency plan of phased troop withdrawal would then be in effect.
Bush is unlikely to produce such a complete plan on his own initiative. At least he has not done so in the past. (Otherwise, we would not be working on a "new" plan now; we would already have one ready.) I predict Bush will do nothing more than state a "bold" goal of victory and lay out some tactics -- probably the ones we have already heard. Congressional oversight committees will not be promised any metrics by which to judge the plan, and there will be no mention of what will happen should the plan fail.
This "new plan," like all the others Bush has come up with will be "failsafe" only in the sense that it protects its creators from being judged failures in the event of failure. There will be no standards by which to judge the new plan. Any noticeable improvement, however un-envisioned in the plan, however remote geographically, however incidental will be hailed as a "sign of success." Any lack of improvement or worsening of the Iraq situation will be called "slow progress." And then the real contingency plan will kick in: the plan to come up with another plan.
Rinse. Repeat.
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