No need to wait until September

The administration seems to have leaked a copy of Petraeus' post-surge strategy to the New York Times. Or it very much appears that way. And now it seems quite clear: The administration has adopted something like a list of objectives and decided to call it a strategy. Judging from the article, this particular "strategy" is less blustery than the previous "strategy" but still leaves open the possibility of a troop presence in Iraq for years and years and years to come.

The plan envisions two phases. The “near-term” goal is to achieve “localized security” in Baghdad and other areas no later than June 2008. It envisions encouraging political accommodations at the local level, including with former insurgents, while pressing Iraq’s leaders to make headway on their program of national reconciliation.

The “intermediate” goal is to stitch together such local arrangements to establish a broader sense of security on a nationwide basis no later than June 2009.

“The coalition, in partnership with the government of Iraq, employs integrated political, security, economic and diplomatic means, to help the people of Iraq achieve sustainable security by the summer of 2009,” a summary of the campaign plan states.

Military officials here have been careful not to guarantee success, and recognized they may need to revise the plan if some assumptions were not met.

Really, at this point, somebody who's not a blogger needs to make the fairly obvious point that a promise by a military expert to achieve a goal using "political, security, economic and diplomatic means" is about as impressive as a promise by a doctor to one day cure AIDS with medicine. It's possible that the report goes into exciting detail and that the article about the report left all of the good stuff out. But I've seen a sufficient number of similar strategies at this point (all failed) to have very serious doubts about that.