The No Plan-B Zone

Welcome to the no-plan-B zone. Six bombs killed at least 45 people in Baghdad today. John McCain has no plan-B for those people. Heavily criticized for his armored Baghdad sojourn, John McCain recently said he would be willing to walk the same market with less security this time. I think he should be given that option.

The war in Iraq, the occupation, the fiasco, is there even a word for what has gone on over there? Imagine the schools we could have built with that money. Imagine what Afghanistan would look like now if we hadn't diverted our resources to the the failure in Iraq. Meanwhile bombs are going off in the parliament building, deep in the heart of the fortified no-plan-B zone, killing lawmakers. Our presence is not making Baghdad safer. It's probably making things worse. We need to take the best people we have, people like General Petraeus, and task them with getting us out of Iraq. Put the smartest people on the most pressing problem, how do we withdraw with the least bad scenario. It's too late to put anybody in charge of winning this thing. Not with the Prime Minister in hock to Muqtada al-Sadr. There's not going to be a victory, just various levels of defeat. Last week the president accused the Democrats of trying to cut funding just when we're starting to make progress in Iraq. Starting to make progress? Isn't this the same guy that said we won this war back in 2003?

Stephen Elliott"