The Good News—Bush Finally Has a Plan

The bad news—it's an ill-defined muddle.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 6:17 PM ET

Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day.

The most remarkable thing about the document President George W. Bush released today, titled National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, is that it was released today (and written not much earlier—it's authored by the National Security Council and dated November 2005).

It is symptomatic of everything that's gone wrong with this war that, after two and a half years of fighting it (and four years after starting to plan it), the White House is just now getting around to articulating a strategy for winning it.