Dr. Trifkovic’s latest confirms what I thought to be the case about the “surge” back in January.  He begins:

During a recent White House meeting, the Washington Post reported on March 5, 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 if the current “surge” fails. The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B; or, as Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee put it, “Plan B was to make Plan A work.”

As I wrote on 30 January:

If we’re playing a “field position” game, as Sen. Lugar absurdly describes it, that means we had better have an awfully good “punt kicker.”  In the real world that means we would have to be something like a back-up plan when the surge (sorry, “draw play”) fails.  (For those paying attention, we don’t have any such back-up plan.) 

Dr. Trifkovic was very clear-eyed about the “surge” two months ago:

What was really new in the President’s address? It was his statement that he would establish certain benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, and that if they fail to do so there would be certain consequences, presumably unpleasant consequences for Mr. al-Maliki and his team. What is also new is not a “strategy” but a tactical military matter. Instead of simply going into neighborhoods, cleaning them up and then going out and thus enabling the insurgents to come back again, the President now says that U.S. troops will have sufficient numbers to retain a presence in the neighborhoods from which the insurgents had been expelled. Presumably those neighborhoods would then be transferred to the Iraqis’ control once a modicum of stability has been achieved. Let me emphasize, this is a purely tactical issue, nothing to do with “strategy.”

In strategic terms, the only novelty is the stress on the behavior of the Iraqi government, and in particular its commitment to end the sectarian strife. But this is an element that does not depend on the will and the resources of the United States. In other words, the President is basing his “new strategy” – such as it is – on a “known unknown,” to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. He is basing it on the assumption that the Shia-dominated government of al-Maliki (who is a protégé of Muqtada al-Sadr) will work for the establishment of a truly unified Iraqi security force that will eliminate all militias regardless of their sectarian coloring and regardless of their core allegiance. In my opinion, that expectation is completely unrealistic.

Dr. Trifkovic argues in his new article for containment of the Iraqi civil war within Iraq and a sort of dual containment of the insurgency and the Shi’ite majority inside Iraq combined with containment of Iran.