Is there a plan?

Here's Tucker Carlson yesterday on CNN:

John Kerry hasn't even decided whether we should transfer [sovereignty in Iraq] at all on June 30. In other words, you can't defeat a plan with no plan at all.

This seems to be the latest line of defense for the Bush administration's apparent lack of a plan or even a clue about what to do as the situation in Iraq unravels.

And, yes, it does seem to be unraveling, as Knight-Ridder's Warren Strobel reports:

President Bush invaded Iraq hoping to spread democracy across the Middle East, but after the worst week of violence since Saddam Hussein was overthrown, he's now struggling to avoid a costly, humiliating defeat.

"It was going to transform the Middle East, remember? Now all we want to do is save our butts," said former U.S. ambassador David Mack, vice president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan research center that concentrates on Arab states.

It's not clear, at this point, that our war-time president has any clear notion how to go about "saving our butts," let alone seriously "transforming the Middle East."

Perhaps tonight's press conference will be President Bush's opportunity to explain what our plan is for Iraq. I'm not optimistic that will be the case, however. I think we're more likely to hear only more of what we heard from the president yesterday:

We will transfer sovereignty. …

Secondly, the situation in Iraq has improved. But you're right, it was a tough week, because of — there was lawlessness and gangs that were trying to take the law in their own hands. These were people that were trying to make a statement prior to the transfer of sovereignty that they would get to decide the fate of Iraq, through violence. … And our job is to provide security for the Iraqi people, so that a transition can take place. And that's what you were seeing. …

I believe — strongly believe that by far, the vast majority of Iraqis want there to be a peaceful country and a free country. And so the Iraq people are on the side of the transition to a peaceful country. We just can't let a few people — and I say "a few" — listen, there was enough to cause harm, but a few, relative to the rest of the people — you just can't let a small percentage of the Iraqi people decide the fate of everybody, and that's what you're seeing.

Hope is not a plan. Feckless optimism is even less of a plan. So what is the plan? When the U.S. transfers sovereignty in Iraq on June 30, who will we be transferring sovereignty to? What assurance can we have that this transfer will not simply open the floodgates to even more violence, if not outright civil war? What steps are being taken to prevent the new Iraq from becoming an Iranian-style religious autocracy or, even worse, a failed state in which terrorists find a safe haven? (Or some combination of the two — such as Taliban-era Afghanistan?)

The repeated response to such questions in recent days has been to say, as Carlson did, that John Kerry doesn't have a detailed plan for June 30 either. I certainly hope that, if Kerry wins in November — five months after the June 30 deadline in Iraq — he will present and carry out a coherent and plausible plan for stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. That will be among the most challenging of the many messes he will inherit from his predecessor.

Yet it's certainly more urgent for the moment that President Bush have such a plan since, A) he's in office right now, and B) he got us into this mess in the first place with little or no planning beforehand.

Kevin Drum responds to the what-about-Kerry? dodge:

Shouldn't that question be turned around? We all know that George Bush talks a lot about doing whatever it takes to win in Iraq, but what's his plan? Compare his words to his deeds and you find that every single action he's taken belies any serious plan to rebuild a stable, democratic Iraq. Not only has he been consistently afraid to prepare the public for what it would take — at least 80,000 more troops and two to ten years — he publicly downplays it. Why the cowardice in asking support for something he claims to believe is our nation's #1 priority?

War supporters need to ask themselves why Bush's actions have invariably been those that are least likely to bring the results he claims to want. Is it because he's incompetent, or because he's been misleading us all along about his real goals? If the latter, what are his real goals?

I don't know. But rather than harping on Democrats for not having a silver bullet to fix George Bush's war, shouldn't they be asking George Bush what he's planning to do? I'm baffled that war supporters continue to think that Bush is serious about the same things they are just because he says he is.

That's the conclusion of a long post in which Kevin also retraces his own switch from supporting to opposing the invasion of Iraq. His rethinking was the result of realizing, in the words of retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, "These guys don't understand what they are getting into."

And now that they've gotten into it, it's not clear they know how to get out.