So now... when can we cut and run?

Officials in Washington appear to be discussing how we can establish when it's time to call it day and bail on the rebuilding of Iraq.

So far it is mostly talk, not planning. The only thing resembling a formal map to the exit door is a series of Pentagon contingency plans for events after the Jan. 30 elections. But a senior administration official warned over the weekend against reading too much into that, saying "the Pentagon has plans for everything," from the outbreak of war in Korea to relief missions in Africa.

The rumblings about disengagement have grown distinctly louder as members of Congress return from their districts after the winter recess, and as military officers try to game out how Sunni Arabs and Shiites might react to the election results. The annual drafting of the budget is a reminder that the American presence in Iraq is costing nearly $4.5 billion a month and putting huge strains on the military. And White House officials contemplate the political costs of a second term possibly dominated by a nightly accounting of continuing casualties.

By all accounts, President Bush has not joined the conversation about disengagement so far, though a few senior members of his national security team have.

It had to happen of course. The administration has been so relentlessly optimistic in public about how the occupation would go since the beginning of the war that there's never been any serious articulation of what conditions would have to be present for us to begin drawing down our forces in Iraq. If they had a plan, they certainly didn't share it with us, beyond the extremely vague goal of liberating the Iraqis and establishing a democracy.

So, what next? Some, mostly opponents of the war in the first place, are arguing that since we're losing we might as well cut our losses now and get out early, before more soldiers die and more money is lost. Then there are those who argue that our troops need to stay as long as it takes to secure and/or stabilize Iraq, whether that be 5 years, 10, 15 years or longer. I think those in the administration who were honest with themselves before the war started knew that our soldiers would be there that long, though they don't seem to have figured on them fighting an increasingly deadly insurgency the longer they stayed. Then there's the third position, the one that it appears from the article above is becoming increasingly popular in the cirlces of power. That position consists of narrowing the definition of "success" in Iraq such that we can declare victory and bring our troops home. This solution is a mix of the worst of both of the prior solutions; instead of leaving before we lose more troops, we'll stay just long enough to fail to achieve an actual stabilization, and we'll declare hollow victory that fails to disguise the actual defeat, while losing hundreds if not a thousand or more soldiers in the process. That would be the political "compromise" that we get for failing to have the balls to either get out early, or stick to it until we absolutely must admit defeat. Despite this administration's well-earned reputation for stubborness, the truth is politics comes before everything...and if it takes sacrificing Iraq to get Bush's domestic initiatives through, you can count on hearing more and more about "disengagement" in the coming weeks and months. However we leave, you can rest assured that our occupation will be deemed a "success" by the administration and it's supporters, even if success must be redefined as getting out with only 2,000 or so soldiers dead, $300-$400 billion spent, and a country worse off then before we got there.