Plan A

Kevin Drum, talking about Ricardo Sanchez, mentions the idea that "the Wolfowitz/Feith/Rumsfeld plan to immediately draw down to 30,000 troops and essentially abandon Iraq is pretty well known, though never officially acknowledged by the Bush administration to the best of my knowledge."

Clearly -- both in retrospect, at the time, and in advance to anyone with any sense -- this was a pretty stupid plan and couldn't possibly have worked. But given that the alternative hasn't worked either, wouldn't it possibly have been better if Bush had just listened to Rumsfeld? I've suspected for a while that a lot of pro-war Democrats basically expected that outcome -- "the war" would be a "success," and then there would be the giant postwar mess that average Americans didn't care much about because it didn't involve U.S. troops, and then guys like Ken Pollack would point out that they'd written articles saying that successful reconstruction "will likely require a presence of as many as 200,000 troops" for "one or two years" and claiming Bush ineptly screwed things up.