I wrote the other day about suggestions that George W Bush approaches the presidency like he’s CEO of the most humungous business in the world. Trouble is, he’s using the static rationalist techniques that were taught at Harvard Business School 30 years ago, which depend on a model of the world that bears little resemblance to the one in which real businesses (and nation states) have to function.

Now it’s apparent that it’s not just GWB who operates like this, it’s the whole neo-conservative mob that was responsible for the Iraq shambles. Prime example: The American Enterprise Institute. This is the bunch of geniuses who claimed that freeing the Iraqi people would see a thousand democratic flowers bloom across the middle east. You’d think that after having been proven wrong about virtually everything over the last five years, they would have had the grace to retire from public life, or at least enrol in some contemporary MBA programs where they could learn about more recent change management research. But no, with unblinking lack of shame they’ve just released a new plan for Iraq.

It’s called … wait for it … Choosing Victory.

This is the bit I really liked:

McCain and Lieberman emphasized that they are not advocating a plan to blindly throw more troops into the Baghdad meat grinder. Kagan’s report appears to be meticulously thought out, detailing the specific forces that will be required to clear and hold Baghdad. The operation would start with securing the Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods closest to the Green Zone and between there and Baghdad International Airport. “Choosing Victory” comes complete with color-coded maps to help envision the neighborhood-by-neighborhood process of successfully pacifying the capital once and for all.

Don’t these clowns ever reflect on the past at all? Do they ever once pause from their doctrinaire planning to contemplate what happened to the last plan, and the one before that, and all the countless ones before that? Like “Hmm let’s see, Gallipoli, that was a great plan. Oh except they didn’t know the Turks would anticipate the invasion and already have lots of soldiers waiting … now Arnhem, that was a beautiful plan. Feel the quality of those maps. Pity the commander was a fool and half the troops got dropped in the wrong place.”

The answer to my rhetorical question is obviously “No”. They never reflect on the past. They remind me of managers I have known, who would spend exhausting hours devising complicated plans to resolve an industrial or contractual dispute. The plan would get blown out of the water in the first two minutes of implementation when the other side did something that wasn’t in the plan but that never stopped them making the same mistake the next time.

You see the failure was never due to the plan. It was always down to the execution. This is the exact same excuse that the AEI is clinging to: Iraq would have been a staggering success if only they’d followed the original plan properly. They’re already preparing the excuses for when this plan fails:

At AEI on Friday, there was some palpable concern that even with the color-coded road map to victory the White House might still screw things up. Half measures would lead to failure, according to supporters of this escalation.

So as soon as some poor bloody platoon commander comes back and says “Oh sorry, I thought that bit of the map was purple, not maroon” … that will be it. Mission screwed again, all because the plan wasn’t implemented properly. It is so hard to get good help these days.

One final comment on the AEI’s latest foray into its alternative universe … not only do they have a touching faith in the efficacy of planning, but they also play fast and loose with history:

Lieberman made sweeping historical comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Spanish Civil War, the failure to grasp the growing threat of fascism in Europe in the late 1930s and the start of World War II for America. “Pearl Harbor has already happened on 9-11-01,” Lieberman said darkly.

He left out other equally relevant comparisons such as the botched execution of King Charles I. And the Battle of Cannae, dammit! Lost because the fuckin Carthaginian government refused to Choose Victory and provide Hannibal with enough elephants to finish the job. That’s what they need in Iraq dammit. A surge of elephants.