Wishful Thinking

It's a good idea...a very good idea. But I must assume, sadly, that it won't go down that way. Nowhere near that way:

My suggestion:

No Oval Office, no big desk. Have the president stand in the Map Room, the room on the ground floor of White House in which Franklin Roosevelt reviewed strategy with his generals.
(Over the mantel hangs the last map FDR ever saw. It is a monument to faulty intelligence: a map drawn in March 1945 of the final German positions of the war. It shows a "redoubt" of German divisions hunkered in south Germany. To defend against these divisions, the US Army paused in its drive eastward toward Berlin, allowing the Soviets to reach the city first. The "redoubt" later proved to be a total fiction, one the army accepted in part because it offered an excellent excuse to avoid the lethal street fighting that claimed the lives of perhaps as many as 25,000 Soviet troops.)

Hang a map of Baghdad on one wall. A map of Iraq on another. Have the president stand between them with a laser pointer. Let him show where the sectarian fighting in the city is occurring, let him detail where US troops are currently deployed. Then he can explain the new plan: Where the extra troops would go, what they would do, where the new checkpoints would be placed, how the city would be cleared, how it would be held.

No flowery language, no hazy generalities. Detail, detail, detail - to assure the American people that their commander-in-chief has thought this plan through and has reason to believe that it can and will work.

This President can't, it seems, get that far outside the box.