The president stated back in early August (in an interview with some doltish fellow) that America's participation in "NATO's" war against Khadaffi (See? It wasn't the president, it was NATO setting that red line!) taught him that you need a plan for the day after the war is won.
I did wonder where that plan was. I assumed it was awesome.
Yet I also thought that was the lesson our Left learned from the Iraq War.
That was never an honest charge by our Left, reported by the New York Times, I'll add. Let me quote:
President Bush's national security team is assembling final plans for administering and democratizing Iraq after the expected ouster of Saddam Hussein. Those plans call for a heavy American military presence in the country for at least 18 months, military trials of only the most senior Iraqi leaders and quick takeover of the country's oil fields to pay for reconstruction.
The proposals, according to administration officials who have been developing them for several months, have been discussed informally with Mr. Bush in considerable detail. They would amount to the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II.
Plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. Not enough of our assumptions for Iraq held, it is true. But we had an ambitious plan--in considerable detail.
Note too that this rebukes the Left's charge that democracy promotion in Iraq was Plan B after not finding chemical weapons in firing condition after we won the war (since "Operation Iraqi Freedom" wasn't enough of a clue).
And given that President Obama boasted about ending the Iraq War in 2011, I wondered where the big-brained plan for post-war Iraq was?
So why no post-war plan for Iraq by now?
Hillary (whose State Department was supposed to lead the effort in the absence of the military)?
Obama (our president who is theoretically our leader)?
Biden (designated point man for post-war Iraq)?
Bueller??
