They don't need no stinkin' back up plan

I'll say one thing about the White House. They may be unrealisitc but they're relentlessly optimistic.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

.. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

... "Plan B was to make Plan A work."

However, as the WaPo surprisingly remembers to point out:

Over the years of U.S. involvement in Iraq, new plans have been launched with assurances of success -- the return of sovereignty to a handpicked Iraqi administration in the summer of 2004; a democratically elected government in January 2005; "Plan Baghdad," designed to retake the capital from insurgents and militias, in the summer of 2006. The current Plan A is arguably already Plan D or beyond.

Meanwhile,

Pressed to specify U.S. limits, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there would be ample opportunity "to see whether or not in fact the Iraqis are living up to the assurances they gave us."

"And what if they don't?" Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) asked.

"I don't think you go to Plan B," Rice replied. "You work with Plan A."

Is it me or is this new surge strategy beginning to sound a whole lot like that old time White House favorite, stay the course? One wonders if the real Plan B is simply to wait it out until Bush's term ends and he can leave the whole godawful mess to the next guy to solve.