In an earlier post titled "Not the Same" I spent 11 paragraphs trying to say what Noam Scheiber says more clearly in one:
Robin Wright's analysis of Kerry's Iraq plan in today's Washington Post has a weirdly disembodied feel to it. She writes as though Kerry and Bush were participating in an essay contest about the future of some hypothetical war zone called "Iraq," proclaiming Kerry's proposals marginally better but really no different than Bush's. (Kerry gets a B+, Bush a B-.) But the point isn't that Kerry's proposals only have a slightly better chance of success. It's that Bush's poor judgment and total incompetence have arranged it so that no proposal has a very good chance of success. Assessing the two candidate's positions outside that context is a totally useless exercise.
Yes, exactly.
And the first step in any plan for salvaging some kind of hopeful outcome from this mess is to, as Richard Clarke put it Monday on The Daily Show: "Stop doing stupid things, how's that for starters?"
Like Scheiber, I've been frustrated by the way the media has been complaining about John Kerry's lack of a simple 4-Point Plan for the quagmire without similarly pressing President Bush — the guy responsible for this mess — for a similar plan.
George Packer, in a New Yorker piece titled "The Political War," helps explain why that is:
The president's actions have led the country into a blind alley; there's no new strategy for Kerry to propose, and the press should stop insisting that he come up with one when the candidate who started the war feels no such obligation. …
The National Intelligence Council spelled it out clearly in their National Intelligence Estimate this summer. There are only three remaining scenarios that can unfold in Iraq: one is bad; one is very bad; one is very, very bad. None involves the march of freedom and democracy or the evolution of a beacon of liberty in the Middle East. The very, very bad scenario involves perpetual civil war and a festering failed state that serves as a breeding ground and sanctuary for the global export of terrorism.
Unlike the prewar NIE on Iraq — which was written without any firsthand intelligence from within the country and turned out to be spectacularly wrong — this assessment is based on firsthand knowledge and experience on the ground.
But it's too gloomy — too dour and pessimistic. Surely there must be some angle, some new trick, that the analysts have missed. Maybe Kerry knows the secret fix. Maybe he can magically turn this quagmire into a success story. You have a magic plan, don't you John? Don't you?
If John Kerry is elected, this is what he will be up against for the next four years. The country is facing some difficult, desperate challenges and he will have to disillusion the public and the press of the idea that these challenges have easy, simple solutions, all while trying to keep them from becoming wholly disillusioned.
Achieving the least bad outcome in Iraq will involve military and diplomatic miracles, but the end result will still be dissatisfying — not the sort of thing to be celebrated with ticker tape parades and aircraft carrier landings. Getting the country out of debt will involve paying the bills. (There's no magical, 4-Point Plan for balancing the budget in six months either.)
Kerry has refrained from offering shallow, impossible promises that these tasks will be easy — even when the press has begged him to make such promises and chided him for not doing so. That's part of why I'm proud to be voting for him.
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