So the Secret Plan To End The War is ... "stay the course"?

Reading the post-election commentary and reporting on potential changes in the administration's approach to the Iraq War, it's looking more and more like the groundwork is being laid for a short-term escalation with a (tentative) promise of major drawdowns in American force levels a year from now. The same tentative promise we've been hearing at the end of every year since 2003, the first year of the war.

Tom Ricks' report in the Washington Post, Pentagon May Suggest Short-Term Buildup Leading to Iraq Exit 11/20/06, reads to me like part of the rollout of an approach that's been decided upon, with only the details of the marketing still open to tweaking. Apparently the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) team studying options is the one that Seymour Hersh reports that Rummy sat up back in August to head off unwelcome recommendations from the "realists" of James Baker's Iraq Study Group (ISG). Ricks also reports that the ISG report is likely to be very similar in its recommendations.

The likely "new" strategy is to escalate the American involvement in the coming weeks by adding 20,000-30,000 more troops to the 140,000 or so currently there. (There was a report a couple of weeks ago that an increase of 10,000 had already been decided.) Then the drive to subdue the militias in Baghdad, Operation Forward Together, which has been going on since June, would be successful. By the end of 2007 only about 60,000 US troops would remain in Iraq, but they would be expected to stay indefinitely, in effect.

It sounds pretty much like what the Cheney-Bush course has been all along: Install a US-friendly government in Iraq, then keep behind permanent US military bases with several tens of thousands of combat-ready forces.

Is having James Baker sprinkle it with holy water supposed to make it work now when so far it has failed?

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