Editorial: A tragic lack of planning

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006 | 7:14 a.m.

While the White House is waiting for the Iraq Study Group to recommend how to proceed with the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials have been conducting their own review of how to improve strategy.

And, according to a Washington Post story published Monday, the Pentagon has come up with three scenarios:

Send in more troops, decrease the number of troops and stay longer, or pull out. The military group is expected to recommend a combination of the three. It will likely call for a short-term increase in the number of U.S. troops and a renewed commitment to training Iraqi forces so that U.S. troops can at some point be withdrawn, senior defense officials told the Post.

The Pentagon's group, which is conducting its meetings in secret, was commissioned by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace. The group's findings will be submitted to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, a congressionally chartered committee that is examining the war's strategy and will make recommendations to the White House.

Simply increasing the number of American troops is not an option, Pentagon officials said, because it would require several hundred thousand military personnel - more than the United States has available.

An immediate pull-out, Pentagon officials have said, likely would launch Iraq into a full-blown civil war.

But the hybrid solution toward which this group is leaning doesn't sound much different from current U.S. strategy. And the current war plan is an astonishing failure.

More than 2,850 American troops have died. Tens of thousands of others have been wounded, and sectarian and insurgent violence is bringing tragedy to Iraqi families each day. President Bush keeps talking about all of the training the United States is providing Iraqi forces, yet no organized troops or police force has coalesced.

The president is still saying that the Iraqis are eventually going to embrace the democracy that he has been trying to force them to accept. In reality, democratizing Iraq was a hurried afterthought when Bush's other stated reasons for invading the country did not pan out. Bush didn't have any idea how this war was going to proceed, and now he has no idea how he is going to get the United States out.

With the United States losing control of the war, a series of talks among Syria, Iran and Iraq are in the works. This development hardly bodes well for democracy.

We will be interested to hear what the Iraq Study Group has to say when it releases its findings. We hope that Congress' study group offers something better than the rehashed package of failed strategies that is being considered by the Pentagon's review.

Bush, who didn't listen to anyone who really understood Iraq before declaring this war, today says he's all ears. Now that we're so deeply in the war, however, there isn't much good advice to be offered. The time to make good decisions was before the troops were deployed, and that opportunity, tragically, has long passed.