The Bush Administration has apparently decided that the best way to make sure that the so-called surge option succeeds is to refuse to discuss the possibility that it could fail:

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn’t work? The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.” Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration’s position, Gov. Philip N. Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. “Plan B was to make Plan A work.” In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq — including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government — senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into the situation we are in today. From the start of the war, there was an almost criminal lack of planning for the countless things that could go wrong during the course of a major military operation. When things did go wrong, such as when the Iraqis failed to great us as the liberators that Paul Wolfowitz and others assured Americans would happen, there was no plan in place to deal with them and military officials were forced to make things up as they went along, hoping they would work.

And now, it seems, we’re making the same mistakes all over again.