In the days before Christmas and soon after the Iraq Study Group had delivered a report that was essentially a repudiation of US President George W. Bush's strategy on Iraq, the White House invited a retired army vice-chief of staff, General Jack Keane, together with four other outside advisers to give a briefing on the current situation in Iraq.
The meeting was hailed in the pages of the Weekly Standard -- the house organ of US conservatives -- for presenting the president with "an actual plan for victory in Iraq, one that is likely to be implemented."
It received very little attention anywhere else, however.
ORDINARY IRAQIS
That plan was the one that Bush unveiled on Wednesday night to send 21,500 extra US forces to Iraq and to adjust the focus of their mission, making the security of ordinary Iraqis the main priority of the forces.
It was produced by General Keane and a neoconservative scholar, Fredrick Kagan, who has been calling for an increase in US troops in Iraq for months.
In the world of Washington think tanks, that gives Kagan and Gen Keane the status of celebrities and when the duo presented their ideas in a paper called Choosing Victory at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Jan. 5, the event was packed.
NATIONAL PRIORITY
The paper begins by chiding US citizens for not seeing victory in Iraq as more of a national priority.
It also says that the US military made a fatal mistake early on in its strategy for Iraq by failing to allocated enough resources specifically to protecting ordinary Iraqi citizens.
But, it says: "Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort."
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