EDITORIAL – Rice should cook up plan for exiting Iraq

The mission has not yet been accomplished. Despite the president’s now-infamous May 2003… The mission has not yet been accomplished. Despite the president’s now-infamous May 2003 photo-op under the “Mission Accomplished” banner, the Iraqi occupation is far from over.

Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice, who’s undergoing confirmation hearings before the Senate, said that she could not give the Senate a time frame for withdrawal from Iraq. Considering how embroiled we are in the current conflict, having some sort of exit strategy would be, well, useful for the administration’s top foreign policy official to have.

Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that, “The goal is to get the mission accomplished,” just the type of decisive insight we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration.

Such a statement — admitting that we don’t know how to exit the quagmire of our own making — would be a black eye for the administration, except that President George W. Bush and company seem immune from that sort of embarrassment.

They’ve already admitted that our reasons for going into Iraq were dubious, our intelligence gathering faulty, our estimation of Iraq’s threat too great and our early declarations of victory mistaken. Admitting that we don’t know how or when to get us out will be one more in a list of mea culpas.

But apologies don’t mean anything if they don’t come with a resignation or a solution. Right now, the administration needs fewer of the former and more of the latter. Rice, who will probably be confirmed despite grumbling from Senate Democrats, should be able to offer solutions beyond immediate concerns about the Iraqi election.

Of course, it’s easy to point fingers and ask for a big strategy. Military and foreign policy experts are a bit like weathermen: Their jobs appear easy, but we only see the quick results — dumbed down so that the public can comprehend them — of huge amounts of research. And like meteorologists, when such experts are wrong, they’re really wrong, and publicly so.

During the hearings, Rice commented that, “The world is coming together behind the idea that we have to succeed in Iraq,” which is a nice way of saying that we’re not succeeding now and everybody knew it but us.

We went into Iraq with faulty evidence and the slimmest of reasons. Our occupation has met unforeseen, but predictable opposition. It’s time to have a plan — a real, solid, point-by-point strategy — to end this impulsive war.