John Kerry finally has told us what his plan is for Iraq:

“Significant” troop reductions by next August.

Now let’s try and understand the logic here, such as it is. Sen. Kerry says he supports the war and occupation in Iraq, the goal of which, according to the White House, is to establish democracy in that tormented land.

But so far, despite nearly 1000 U.S. fatalities, thousands of U.S. casualties, and well over 10,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and counting, all America’s invasion of Iraq seems to have produced is a budding new dictator, famously corrupt, whose forces have already begun torturing his people, who is relying on 160,000 foreign troops to prop up his regime, and who has signaled his disdain for democracy by closing the only independent Arab news organization in the country, Al Jazera, and establishing a new martial law statute, complete with a restoration of the death penalty.

Given all this, on what basis does Sen. Kerry come up with a date of August 2005 for “significantly” reducing American levels in Iraq?

Does he anticipate the country being much more peaceful and orderly and democratic a year hence? If so, on what grounds? Nobody else seems to see that happening, least of all the officers on the ground.

If, as is surely the reality, he doesn’t have a clue, and in fact there is little likelihood at all that Iraq will have joined the quiescent democratic fold by then, Kerry’s pledge to “significantly” reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq is really a pledge to give it up and go home, because if the U.S. military can’t pacify the country with 138,000 troops, along with some 40,000 other foreign soldiers and high-priced mercenaries, it certainly won’t be able to do the job with fewer troops later on.

So now the question for Kerry is one he once, as a soldier himself, asked the members of Congress: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

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