De Plan Boss, De Plan!

Ha. Who says four years of failure won't teach a body something about the need for flexibility? Well, unless you're Condoleeza Rice, or maybe General Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, neither of whom have left the island yet. But eventually, of course, someone has to explain the whole plan isn't working thing. What to do? What to do? Oh, we know. How about a plan B?

U.S. military planners have begun work on a fallback strategy in case the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq has the same level of success as the previous 437 plans for success in Iraq. Actually, there's only been one plan for success in Iraq. It's just that it's been tried 437 times. Each time with a different hat, though. Anyway, the strategy, based partly on the U.S. experience in El Salvador in the 1980s, is in the early planning stages according to U.S. military officials and Pentagon consultants who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Yeah, we decided to go the Death Squad route," explained one consultant.

The United States sent 55 Green Berets to El Salvador to help its military fight rebels from 1981 to 1992, in a drive to make the U.S. military presence less visible. "We figure pretty soon there will only be about 55 guys left in the military anyway, the way this war is going," said the consultant. " And that's if you count the wounded."

Shifting from a troop increase to more reliance on an advisory role would bring the administration more in line with the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that recommended a gradual reduction in U.S. combat forces in Iraq. "Well, that's just a coincidence," said White House Press Secretary Tony Snowjob. "The president never actually read the ISG Report. Not enough pictures."