plan B

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of hopes pinned on plan A—and I do mean all over the place.

John McCain:

Senator John McCain said that the buildup of American forces in Iraq represented the only viable option to avoid failure in Iraq and that he had yet to identify an effective fallback if the current strategy failed.

”I have no Plan B,” Mr. McCain said in an interview. ”If I saw that doomsday scenario evolving, then I would try to come up with one. But I cannot give you a good alternative because if I had a good alternative, maybe we could consider it now.”

George W. Bush:

The president would not discuss what he would do if [Petraeus told him in September that the surge wasn't working].

“The Plan B is to make Plan A work,” [Bush told Charlie Rose].  “You know, the problem is you start talking about Plan B, that’s where everybody defaults.”

And here Martin Kramer, in a fascinating piece on the “Geopolitics of the Jews” asks some pointed questions about what Israel plans to do when (not if but when) the tide of history changes, as it inevitably must, because that is what history does:

Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it. The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. …

Yet as we all should know, history stops for no man, and for no people. … What is, will not be. Balances of power will change. Identities will be recast. Eventually, too, the map of the Middle East will be redrawn.

When we worry, we tend to focus on apocalyptic scenarios. But I invite you to think for a moment about five long-term trends that could erode the status quo, but that fall short of a mushroom cloud. I will proceed from the far to the near, and I will focus on the Israeli side of the equation.

Read the whole thing. And bookmark and check out Kramer’s excellent and frequently updated site.

This reliance on plan A is a guy thing, I’m afraid. Women always have a Plan B.