Why isn’t Lawrence Korb on CNN non-stop?

I wrote recently about Joe Biden’s more or less hallucinatory plan to salvage Iraq by federalizing it and bringing in a UN peacekeeping force that would necessarily be an order of magnitude larger than any previously assembled. Some people are latching on to Biden’s plan, which would simultaneously fail and extend the U.S. occupation of Iraq by at least two years beyond the end of the Bush administration. Although Biden has not received nearly as much attention as Brookings Institution hacks Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack earned with their Surge-related soft shoe, he’s getting more notice from occupation foes than former Reagan assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb and his Center for American Progress colleagues are getting for their plan, which has the virtue of being more or less sane if overly optimistic and frankly ruthless.

Korb has co-authored two thematically linked papers, one that outlines new approaches to U.S. Middle East diplomacy, focusing on actual diplomacy, and one that describes in detail a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq except those directly involved in protecting diplomatic personnel (both links are to the report summaries, from which you can download the full Acrobat documents).

Unlike the report (Acrobat document) issued by O’Hanlon and Pollock following their Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq, the CAP papers are detailed and rely on verifiable information rather than super-secret Pentagon assessments that require the authors to say, “Trust us as we trust them.” (That’s presuming O’Hanlon and Pollack bothered to disclose their circumstances to consumers, which they didn’t). But for some reason, Korb is not being rewarded with hours of cable news face time, space on the Park Place op-ed pages of the Washington Post and New York Times, or breathless coverage in the news pages.

Media bias is probably the answer — not toward the administration, necessarily, but toward counter-intuitive and sensational narratives. The heavily footnoted CAP reports are not exciting reads, relying as they do on boring facts and historical predicates while skewing away from dramatic pronunciations. Korb and colleagues propose not an immediate, dramatic withdrawal but one conducted over a period of a year and in tandem with important but not Brobdingnagian diplomatic efforts. Some of what they propose in terms of stemming the disastrous internal tides in Iraq probably wouldn’t work, but, unlike the high-stakes uncertainty offered by O’Hanlon and Pollack, and Biden, at the end of Korb’s year the U.S. would without a doubt no longer be mired in the sand.

I think the CAP plan is too conventional and real politik-y on the diplomatic front, and too cautious on the withdrawal one, but it has the virtue of being workable — it would get us out, it doesn’t demand the for various reasons impossible from local and global actors, and Korb and his co-authors make a reasonable argument that the lengthy timetable would offer Iraqis opportunities to prepare for the U.S. absence in ways that would not be any more disastrous than their adaptations to the U.S. presence have been.

Like the Biden plan, the CAP one would have to cool its heels until the end of the Bush administration, by which time whatever is happening in Iraq will be worse than what’s happening now. Unlike the Biden plan, CAP is offering a definite end to the adventure, or at least to our massive military role in it. That really should be worth some coverage.