If there's no timetable, there's no plan.

In the Seattle Times, I find a linkable version of the generals' testimony today before the Senate. It's pretty much summed up by the headline: "U.S. generals: Now is not the time for a timetable"

The problem is, without a timetable, you don't have a plan. You don't have a strategy. All you have is wishful thinking.

And we've seen what three years of wishful thinking has gotten us when it comes to Iraq: bupkis.

NPR had an interview this morning with a new soldier in Iraq who said (roughly): "If we leave here now, there'll be chaos."

Here's the problem with that:

Yes, if we leave now, there will be chaos.

If we leave next year, there will be chaos.

If we leave five years from now, there will be chaos.

If we leave twenty years from now, there will be chaos.

If the limiting factor to our leaving Iraq is whether there will be chaos or not, we might as well make them the 51st State -- because that's a recipe for a permanent occupation. How long we stay will have no impact on the final result -- whenever we leave, things will go nuts.

So the question becomes, chaos now, or chaos later? Saving our soldiers now, or letting the casualties mount in the thousands, only to still get chaos?

And that's even before we get to George's syllogism: "We won't leave Iraq while I'm President." "We won't leave Iraq until victory is achieved." Therefore, though he's never said this: Our soldiers won't be allowed to achieve victory as long as he's President.

(Let's leave aside the fact they've already achieved victory three different ways : We said we'd topple Saddam Hussein, and they did that for us. We said we'd remove the weapons of mass destruction, and they did that for us {it helped that there never were any, but hey}. We said they'd stay there until a newly constituted government for Iraq could be formed, and they did that for us.)

There is no question that leaving tomorrow -- and I mean that literally, tomorrow -- would be a diplomatic disaster for us. Trouble is, every day that goes by makes it a bigger disaster, with not one shred of difference in the end result.

Right now, people aren't even dying for a mistake. If we take Mr. Bush's goals at face value, he's achieved all three of them.

No, they're dying because he's too stubborn to admit he's won. They're dying because he wants to play with his toys, his way.

No greater testimony exists to the premise the US is not {yet} a banana republic than the fact the troops have not mutinied, and strung Bush up.

Libertarians and Latin

I was reading Matthew Yglesias on Greg Makiw and why a head tax is considered "efficient". Lots of great comments in the comment thread, but this one by BobN went and pointed to this post over at Crooked Timber about how Economics courses appear to influence people's ideologies. The real capper here is Comment #10, which I'm going to shamelessly repost in full:

I never was taught basic economics (Latin and Greek were thought to be much more useful), but the logic of a rightward shift seems pretty straightforward to me.

First, you are taught how to conjugate a verb. That would be Latin 101.

Metella est mater. Quintis est filius et ambulat in hortum. Hic, haec, hoc. (This is all I can remember)

Then you spend the next 5 years learning all the 20,000 exceptions to the rule. That would be real Latin.

Similarly, Econ 101 is for libertarians, while economy is for, huh, real economists. The libertarians never get past the Esperanto-like first grade version of Latin.

They only learn the first bit: how markets work. They never get round to the second, far more frustrating bit: markets don’t work all the time, and can indeed fail disastrously. The invisible hand often needs guidance.

That was posted by Jasper Emmering, whose own blog seems to have all kinds of interesting stuff.