At Last, An Iraq Policy That Rhymes

Just when you thought it would take the Baker-Hamilton commission to rescue us from the unacceptable alternatives of "stay the course" and "cut and run," Defense Department officials have come up with genuinely euphonious options: "Go Big, Go Long, Go Home."

Not only does this formulation satisfy the media's need for snappy shorthand; it caters to our reptile brainstem's longing for rhythm and rhyme. Three iambs, those three go's, the subtle prosody of "long" and "home": finally, there's a worthy successor to "blame game."

I wonder whether this triumph of military scansion will be met by some alternative Democratic poetry. The haiku form strikes me as having particularly rich potential. For example:

Stuck in a quagmire,
Pentagon enumerates
synonyms for "draft."

Or how about:

Rummy is gone, but
Cheney's still ventriloquist:
"If we quit, we lose."

Then there's this found haiku, drawn from the Washington Post's account of a "hybrid option" being floated by senior Defense officials:

Go Big But Short While
Transitioning to Go Long:
moonwalk our way out.

Anyone else got sumthin?

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