Republicans trashed the Biden plan they now back

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U.S. President George W. Bush has apparently decided that the path to victory lies in a plan devised more than a year ago by … wait for it … Democratic Sen. Joe Biden.

That’s right, as the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, the “bottom-up” strategy Bush was touting in Anbar yesterday, “bears some striking similarities to the ‘soft partition’ strategy pushed by senior Democrats.” The Journal is referring, of course, to the “unity through autonomy” (Times Select) plan floated by Biden and former Council on Foreign Relations Chairman Leslie Gelb in May 2006.

Watching Republicans turn tail and support Biden’s plan is as comical as it is tragic. Let’s not forget just what conservatives said about Biden’s plan back when he devised it.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was certain that Biden’s plan would doom Iraq to failure, saying the president supported only a “federal, democratic, pluralist and unified” Iraq. He added:

A partition government with regional security forces and a weak central government … is something that no Iraqi leader has proposed and that the Iraqi people have not supported.”

The feelings of the conservative intelligentsia were summarized by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who told the Washington Times (no longer online) that Biden’s plan was “virtually certain to make things worse, not better.”

The GOP’s armchair pundits, meanwhile, attacked Biden viciously. “Liberal Democrats – who can figure them?” wrote 30-year Army veteran Michael John McCrae in The Conservative Voice. He added:

The terrorists see these proposals and they cheer their supporters in the American Congress.”

After almost four years of fighting in Iraq, at a cost of nearly 4,000 American lives, round and round we go.