Zbigniew Brzezenski on NewsNight

No one in blogland seems to have picked up on this yet. Brzezenski was Carter's National Security Advisor and he articulated a plan to CNN's Aaron Brown for Iraq that seems almost obvious and strikingly close to what Kerry has suggested should be done.

But my view is, if our military wants more U.S. military in there, we should without hesitation provide them. We have to show that we have staying power and that we can handle the security problem. But, at the same time, we really ought to engage ourselves politically. This is not a problem to be solved militarily and just by U.S. occupation. We ought to move rapidly in transforming the authority in Iraq into a U.N.-sponsored authority, so that it isn't an American occupation.

We ought to hand over "sovereignty" -- in quotation marks -- on schedule. And we ought to become much more active in promoting the Israeli-Palestinian peace, because we can't disengage from Iraq if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still going on. So we need a political dimension that's much more active. And that will be more likely to gain us international support, both from the Europeans and maybe even from some moderate Muslim countries.

It seems obvious, but the administration is unwilling to lift a finger to make this a reality. Right wing critics and even some liberal bloggers continue to say Kerry should tell the American people what he would do differently. Well, here he is from yesterday's CNN's Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff:

The president needs to step up and acknowledge that there are difficulties and that the world needs to be involved and they need to reverse their policy that countries that were not involved in supporting us are not going to be part of the reconstruction.

I mean, that's a terrible message to send to countries. They need to go to the world and say we're not going to have an American authority that is -- creating this new government. We're going to have an international authority that will help develop the new government and absent a legitimate effort to globalize this presence, they're going to continue to have the very problems they have today.

This was predictable, and there are many of us who have said that this is exactly the kind of thing that will happen absent a legitimate kind of international presence.