Remember plan B?

[ProSense]

For Iraq, the El Salvador option -- again

When Condoleezza Rice took to Capitol Hill in January to sell the president's plan to send more troops to Iraq, she resisted all efforts to discuss what the administration might have in mind if the "surge" didn't work. When John Kerry asked her about a fallback plan, she said: "I don't think you go to Plan B. You work with Plan A. You give it the best possibility of success." At another point in her marketing efforts, Rice declared: "It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work."

We can certainly understand her point: We've deferred all of our thinking about saving for retirement until we see if we can make this whole winning-the-lottery plan work. And that's the thing about Plan B's: They're seldom as attractive as Plan A's.

Which brings us to Plan B for Iraq. As the Los Angeles Times reports today, military planners have indeed begun working on a "fallback strategy for Iraq," and it looks a lot like ... El Salvador.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, "El Salvador isn't exactly the sort of model I'd like to be following." And you'd be right about that. As the Times puts it ever so gently, "Some academics have argued" that U.S. military advisors in El Salvador "turned a blind eye to government-backed death squads, or even aided them." But at least some military planners say that an El Salvador-style approach -- which is to say, relying on thousands of U.S. military advisors rather than 150,000 or so U.S. troops -- is the only way to make the Iraq war work now.

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