“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it [a return to the draft]. And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.” — Bush War Czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute

Read more about the Pentagon’s future draft plans here.

Cost of war: $500,000,000,000

U.S. reconstruction funds disbursed: $17 billion

Completed Iraq reconstruction projects that are again in need of reconstruction, according to a recent audit: 7 of 8

Average hours that electricity is available in Baghdad: 5.8

Percentage of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors who’ve been murdered or have fled the country: 41

Fraction of 20,000 people killed in global terrorism last year represented by Iraqi deaths: 2/3

Number of Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes: 2.6 million

Number of refugees who have fled the country: 1.8 million

Number of U.S. visas issued to Iraqis: 466

Number of daily insurgent and militia attacks: 185

Reason Condi Rice says we can’t impose benchmarks of accountability on the Iraqis or any other “so-called consequences”: it “doesn’t allow us the flexibility and creativity that we need to move this forward.”

U.S. soldiers killed in April: 104

Killed by IED: 59

Number of U.S. troops killed in war: 3,352

Number younger than 22: 974

Number wounded: 25,000

Number committed to surge: 29,000

Months since John McCain said, “We’re either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months”: 5.5

(hat tip: Iraq Index)

Mr. Maverick, where have you gone?

I take the unmaking of John McCain personally. Another lifetime ago, when he was running against Gov. G.W. Bush, I registered Republican to vote for McCain in the California presidential primary. He struck me as a principled problem solver. A man who might bring about a post-partisan revolution in good government and accountability.

So it’s truly disheartening to watch McCain jettison the principled independence that used to make him a transcendent figure. Jerry Fallwell, formerly an “agent of intolerance” in McCain’s estimation is now a chum, who no doubt smiled when McCain decided to deliver the keynote address at a creationist convention.

Abortion used to be a woman’s choice. Now it’s time to overturn Roe v. Wade, says McCain. McCain says he doesn’t believe in building a border fence, but then, suddenly, in the same sentence, he offers to build the “damn fence” if the GOP base demands it. Same goes for gay marriage, which he recently said “should be allowed”, until an adviser whispered in his ear, prompting him to clarify, “I do not think that gay marriages should be legal.”

The one arena in which McCain’s independence had remained resolute is his support for this disastrous war. Right or wrong you knew where he stood. And he’s rightly been paying the price for that. The “surge” has become in popular parlance “The McCain Doctrine.” More recently, McCain was rechristened by Chris Matthews as “John McBush.”

So what’s a maverick to do? Stick to his guns? Weather the storm?

No. Now it’s time to speak out against…Donald Rumsfeld. (more…)

I’m a little shocked at Defense Secretary Gates’ candid admissions to congress that he’s “no expert on Iraq” and “no expert on military matters.”

Begging the obvious question… what is Mr. Gates an expert on?

The answer, for the old CIA hand, is intelligence.

It’s no secret that Rummy wanted the Pentagon to own intelligence gathering. Gates’ rise to the top ranks of the military seems to cement that peculiar transformation. And his history is that of a man who serves up intelligence to order.

Now comes news that John Negroponte, the nation’s intelligence czar, has shifted over to become the number two behind the charismatic but feckless Condi Rice at State.

Does this many spooks spoil the intelligence soup?

Or is this part a larger effort to cook the soup to administration specifications?

Thoughts?

Christmas brought us the news that the number of American casualties in the Iraq War has surpassed that of 9/11.

Am I the only one who finds these comparisons almost offensive?

They support the unfounded connections between this war and the Al Qaeda attacks on America five years ago, of course. But that’s only half the offense.

There’s also this perverse assumption that war can or should be justified on the basis of this kind of equivalence.

I’m often struck that had this war been fought the right way from the beginning — according to the dictates of the Powell Docrine of overwhelming force rather than the Rumsfeldian dictates of fast, cheap, and out of control — the nation might easily have suffered this level of casualties, or even greaters numbers, in the first weeks of war. And the nation would have accepted them as the price of ousting the Saddam regime and bringing stability to the heart of a region vital to American strategic interests.

But these same casualties — coming as they have in a tragic three-year trickle — are now unbearable because they are the continuing cost of an anarchic Iraq that now seems destined to subvert stability in the region for a generation.

That each of those deaths has come in the service of a policy that has made America far less safe is the real tragedy. Not that the number of those fallen heroes has matched the toll of our darkest civilian hour.

Outgoing SecDef Donald Rumsfeld sat down for the journalistic equivalent of a backrub from TownHall’s Cal Thomas.

Classic Rumsfeld. Not only answering the questions he wished he’d been asked, but actually asking himself those questions too.

On troop levels: “Is it the right number? I don’t know. Do I have a heckuva lot of confidencein those two folks [Generals Casey and Abizaid, who set them]? Yes. Do I think it’s probably right? You bet, or I would have overruled it, or made a different recommendation to the president. But they have to walk that line; they have to find that balance…. Do I know that the right number is there? No. Do I think it is? Yes. Is there anyone who is smart enough to prove it is or isn’t? No.”

Make it stop!

There are a couple of newsworthy tidbits in the transcript, including Rummy saying,

“I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror.”

And of course this amplification of his Homeric simile about how Iraq is like a tike on a bike:

You don’t want to create dependency. So at some point, you’ve got to take your hand off the bicycle seat. You’ve got the bicycle going down the street. You’re pushing and holding it up, and you go from four fingers, to three fingers, to two and you know if you let go they might fall. You also know if you don’t let go, you’ll end up with a 40-year-old who can’t ride a bike. Now that’s not a happy prospect.

It’s the saddest reflection of the Bush administration’s official state of denial that this simple admission by the man tapped to replace Donald Rumsfeld counts as huge news:
Sen. Carl Levin: “Mr. Gates, do you believe that we’re currently winning in Iraq?

Robert Gates: “No, sir.”

The leaking of Donald Rumsfeld’s “New Courses of Action” memo has the lefty chattering classes abuzz with cries of “Even Rumsfeld Knows We Have to Change the Course.”

It’s indeed comforting that Rumsfeld now lists “continue on the current path” as a “below the line” option.

But getting less serious attention are his “above the line” suggestions — a number of which are worthy of honest debate and a lot more intriguing than anything we’ve yet heard from the Baker Commision.

¶Initiate a massive program for unemployed youth. It would have to be run by U.S. forces, since no other organization could do it.

Newt Gingrich was on CSPAN the other night suggesting something similar, in Newt’s case a full-on New Deal style, U.S.-funded Works Progress Administration for young disaffected Iraqis.

Despite its proponents, this is a damn good idea. Make the continued American presence synonymous with jobs and oportunities instead of just tanks and checkpoints. We’re already squandering billions in Iraq, why not spend some of it buying good will and giving young Iraqis something worth living for?

¶Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period.

Again, expensive, but anything that helps ward off catastrophic failure will look cheap 20 years from now. I don’t think we can seriously hope to just buy our way out of this disaster, but giving the warring factions a financial stake in pursuing a political solution just might make it more attractive than the nihilism of civil war and ethnic cleansing. Or am I dreaming?

¶Position substantial U.S. forces near the Iranian and Syrian borders to reduce infiltration and, importantly, reduce Iranian influence on the Iraqi Government.

It’s criminal that this hasn’t been done already. I doubt this will do much to reduce the sway of Demascus and Tehran, but at the very least such a strategy should help keep the chaos of an imploding Iraq cabined inside its national borders.

¶Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start “taking our hand off the bicycle seat”), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.

¶Conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases. We have already reduced from 110 to 55 bases. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007.

Signaling a light at the end of the tunnel to Operation Enduring Occupation would play well in Iraq and at home.

Rummy suggests a number of other sound sounding ideas — increasing the number of U.S. embeds with Iraqi Security Forces, and vice versa — as well as some questionable ones — cutting off reconstruction funds to violent provinces. But at least these are honest ideas.

I hate that the national debate about Iraq has been reduced to two simple and terrible solutions: “Stay the course” and “Redeploy, and let Allah sort it out.”

I think Biden’s partition plan deserves serious debate. And I’d like to know why Rummy places both that and “a Dayton-like process” (referring to the accords that helped end the war in the Balkans) as “below-the-line” options.

John McCain is right about one thing: the consequences of a failed state in Iraq would be catastrophic almost beyond imagining, both for U.S. interests and the Iraqis. But Bush’s current plan fits Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Bring on the ideas. We’re in desperate need of a few great ones.