Will Baker Come Up With A Plan This Good?

The Baker Commission is probably still hunting for the "abracadabra" word that will give their efforts to chart a viable course for Iraq consensus, viability and a chance for success.

They might be well to cut and paste Josh Manchester's "Go Native" approach from today's TCS, slap a fancy cover on it, and call it a day. Manchester's six-point plan is straightforward and makes more sense than any of the approaches I've read to date:

1. Dramatically expand the training and advisory efforts. More people, more money.
2. Teach 20,000+ American troops Arabic so they can "lead an attack, plan a patrol, or otherwise advise an Iraqi force.
3. Give Maliki 60 days to strip the Shi'ite militias of power.
4. If he can't do it, "declare Iraq's security forces to be in receivership. This is a great point: "It means that the security forces of Iraq no longer answer to the Iraqi government, they answer to the US military. The government will still exist. It will still be a democracy. But it will temporarily lose control of its military. After doing this, purge the Iraqi forces of those loyal to Shi'ite militias."
   
5. Create combined US-Iraqi forces. That's why you need 20,000 Arabic-speaking troops, so they can "live, eat, sleep, fight and die with their Iraqi counterparts."
6. Move support and logistics to the front bases, freeing massive numbers of support troops to come home.

Points 3 and 4 are straightforward ways to deal with the mounting death toll and the existing Iraqi government's unwillingness to rip out the root of the problem. Rip it out and the bombings decrease, satisfaction with the situation at home and in Iraq grows, and the government there will have the opportunity to solidify.

The electorate's discontent with the current policy would be well answered by this approach, it would signal to the Islamofascists that they're taking on an agile and committed enemy, and it would tell the people of Iraq we're partners, not occupiers.

Read more of Manchester's work at his blog, The Adventures of Manchester.

Related Tags: War on Terror, Baker, Iraq, Manchester