In an analysis, filled with truthiness from "senior administration officials", the Washington Post explains how The Surge happened:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national security adviser proposed that U.S. troops withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.
But Bush did not listen to Maliki, his own Generals or the Baker-Hamilton commission:
Bush relied on his own judgment that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. When his generals resisted sending more troops, he seemed irritated. When they finally agreed to go along with the plan, he doubled the number of troops they requested.
In reality, half of that "doubled number" will happen February to April, the other half form May to July.
But there was a Plan B that was consider and rejected:
A version of Maliki’s surprise proposal during the Amman meeting turned out to be the major alternative considered by Bush, White House officials said. The plan called for ringing Baghdad with U.S. troops while Iraqi security forces fought the sectarian violence in the city. Other U.S. troops in the country would shift to the borders to keep Iranian and Syrian infiltrators out, leaving U.S. forces with one main combat mission — attacking al-Qaeda elements in Anbar province in western Iraq.
The attribution of this plan as "a version of Maliki’s" plan is spin. Maliki did ask for less troops and more responsibility – not for ringing Baghdad.
But the Plan B offered in the above piece is now advertised by no less a war criminal than Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger agrees with Bush’s general War On Islam. In the International Herald Tribune he opines:
The war in Iraq is part of another war that cuts across the Shia-Sunni issue: the assault on the international order conducted by radical groups in both Islamic sects. Such organizations as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi army in Iraq and the Qaeda groups all over the Middle East seek to reassert an Islamic identity submerged, in their view, by Western secular institutions and values.
The most important target is the United States, as the most powerful country of the West and the indispensable component of any attempt to build a new world order.
For the new world order in Iraq Kissinger prescribes:
Of the current security threats in Iraq — the intervention of outside countries, the presence of Qaeda fighters, an extraordinarily large criminal element, the sectarian conflict — the United States has a national interest in defeating the first two; it must not involve itself in the sectarian conflict for any extended period, much less let itself be used by one side for its own sectarian goals.
Certainly there is no reason for the indispensables to care about crime and sectarian conflict in the new world order. So what would Kissinger do:
As the comprehensive strategy evolves, a repositioning of American forces from the cities into enclaves should be undertaken so that they can separate themselves from the civil war and concentrate on the threats described above.
The principal mission would be to protect the borders against infiltration, to prevent the establishment of terrorist training areas or Taliban-type control over significant regions.
Additionally Kissinger sees some need for diplomacy to share the burdon and/or for Iran to pay "a serious, not a rhetorical, price for choosing the militant option."
So the Plan B the Washington Post reports on is obviously Kissinger’s Plan B, not Maliki’s.
As Plan A, the fake surge, will have no significant results in solving the problems, expect this plan B to become operational pretty soon, even though there certainly is an argument against it. WaPo:
The plan had the appeal of not pulling U.S. troops out of the country while still allowing Iraqis to settle their own differences. But Bush worried that such a move might mean losing the war.
"He became convinced that that was not sustainable," Hadley said in an interview. "Let’s assume that the sectarian violence does escalate. Are the American military really going to stand outside the city while sectarian violence rages in Baghdad? I don’t think so."
While Kissinger, not suprisingly, would be unmoved by possible ethnic clensing happening throughout Baghdad, Hadley expects that the U.S. public and the military will not agree to stand by and watch.
But there is no other alternative for Bush/Cheney.
A real surge, requiring some 50,000-80,000 troops will not happen. A U.S. retreat from Iraq will not happen either as "the new world order" and the "New Middle East" would thereby be stillborn. The only middle way for Bush may therefore be Kissinger’s Plan B – and/or escalation into Iran.
This until the U.S. public really finds its voice and unequivocal demands the unavoidable defeat to be recognized and its troops to come home.