A year ago Bush began the year assuring Americans that he had a plan – a “strategy for victory in Iraq.” He lied. And then he lied again to cover his ass, and he just kept on lying until finally in November voters went to the polls and deemed that it was time to end the one party rule here in America. In the midst of voter’s deciding they had enough of the decider’s cabal in Congress, Poppy Bush called in his markers and deemed that his old friend Jim Baker should come up with a plan for Jr.. But Jr., didn’t like the Baker Group plan so off he went to Texas and “he ended the year closeted with his war cabinet on his ranch trying to devise a new strategy, because the existing one had collapsed.”

The N.Y. Times has more on the fables and follies of BushCo in Iraq and how “chaos overran” their Iraq plan in ’06.”

The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.

In interviews in Washington and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan.

This left the president and his advisers constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground.

“We could not clear and hold,” Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, acknowledged in a recent interview, in a frank admission of how American strategy had crumbled. “Iraqi forces were not able to hold neighborhoods, and the effort to build did not show up. The sectarian violence continued to mount, so we did not make the progress on security we had hoped. We did not bring the moderate Sunnis off the fence, as we had hoped. The Shia lost patience, and began to see the militias as their protectors.”

Over the past 12 months, as optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy with General Casey’s strategy. And now, as the image of Saddam Hussein at the gallows recedes, Mr. Bush seems all but certain not only to reverse the strategy that General Casey championed, but also to accelerate the general’s departure from Iraq, according to senior military officials.

General Casey repeatedly argued that his plan offered the best prospect for reducing the perception that the United States remained an occupier — and it was a path he thought matched Mr. Bush’s wishes. Earlier in the year, it had.

But as Baghdad spun further out of control, some of the president’s advisers now say, Mr. Bush grew concerned that General Casey, among others, had become more fixated on withdrawal than victory.

So, enquiring minds want to know what’s next? It appears it’s anyone’s guess at this point… still no plan from BushCo and the chaos reigns supreme.

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