Yes, I have thought it through completely.
First, domestically, America does not lose a war. This is crucial, because the war is not over and can't be over. We have to have this victory to find the tensile strength in the people to carry on. That is failing fast. We need the win.
Second, over there, Iraq will not be united when this is over. The factions will hate each other. Every Sunni won't really be killed. At a certain point they will submit. Maybe they will ALL flee, into Syria, which will massively destabilize that regime through a massive human crisis. Destabilizing Syria is a good thing, because a stable Syria uses that tax base to pump out trouble for US. Having them scrambling to prevent food riots in their own land will throw them on the ropes and start them plummeting into poverty and instability. Wrecking the internal peace of enemy regimes makes them far less dangerous to us, because they have to turn inward and battle their own people. Take the war to them.
Third, within Iraq, the Arabist Iraqi nationalist Shi'a and pro-Iranian Shi'a won't get along. They will be tense. The pro-Iranian Shi'a will keep getting support, and that will make the Iraqi Arabist Shi'a dependent on us for survival. That dependency will keep them more docile.
Also, the Kurds in the North will have their own autonomous state, with quite a bit of oil. Kurdistan will be quite stable (already is) and will be a rock under the collar of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Turks, for their part, knifed us in the back in our war deployment, and are going ever more Islamist, so alarming them with a Kurdish entity is not a bad thing. Give them something regional and domestic to worry about, and in the process sharply divide Sunni Muslim (Turk) from Sunni Muslim (Kurd). The Sunni Kurds and the Shi'ite Iraqis are territorially distinct, but will be wary and distrustful of each other. This makes the Kurds dependent on us (which, again, renders them more malleable), and it keeps Muslim divided against Muslim.
The more nationalism and ethnic rivalry stirs up Muslim-on-Muslim rivalry and hatred, the easier it is to put in firewalls against the Pan-Islamist spread.
Meanwhile, please remember that my plan does not have us leaving Iran alone or respecting their territorial sovereignty. No indeed! We bomb camps and convoys that are near the Iraqi border. They're aiding our enemies, so we attack them. We don't declare war (they haven't) we just blow things up in Iran in violation of their borders exactly as they are doing in Iraq. Tit for tat, but we use a lot more power. This makes them crazy, but what the hell are they going to do? They are already maxed out on nasty. A headlong ATTACK would allow us to level them. They can't do more than they already are to destabilize our position, and if we start bombing their terror support infrastructure in Iran, and unleashing swarms of Special Forces to disrupt Iranian economic centers, etc., their life becomes far more difficult, particular since their proxies in Iraq will either be cooperating with their Shi'ite Arabist brethren running the South of the country, or because they will have lost their heads and initiated a Shi'ite on Shi'ite civil war in Iraq which will be bloody as hell and drain more of the swamp. If Muslim radicals want to kill each other, the hatreds among Muslims grow and nationalisms grow, and the inability for them to coordinate an outward strike grows. This is precisely the method of divide and agitate by which the British captured all of India with a few handfuls of troops.
WE do not need to do the fighting.
What's the alternative?
What we are doing now has a shelf life of 2 years. Then the exhausted American people pull the plug, because there will be no victory in a six-sided civil war in which we will take no side.
Pull out and let the Islamists consolidate WITHOUT all that messy Muslim-on-Muslim violence that will stir up the hatreds sufficiently to cause Muslim to hate Muslim so much they'll kill each other and face off against each other, like Reformation Christians, instead of being able to focus outwards on the West (and Israel). Nobody in Iraq is thinking about Israel right now: they have too many IRAQIS to hate and kill to worry about faraway Jews.
Once we decided to cut loose with an undeclared war and 150,000 troops, we bought ourselves this situation and this civil war. My strategy is one that will WIN IT for the US. It's imperial, and vicious, but it kills a lot of enemy manpower, keeps the Muslims divided and at war with each other, and leaves us in possession of key sattelite dependencies in the region.
We bought Iraq, and now we're stuck in it.
What I have said offers victory. It's winning ugly, but it's winning. And relatively SWIFTLY too, which is itself a mercy.
I've thought it through just fine, and talked it over with some folks too. THEY reject it not because "it won't work", they know damned well that it will WORK. They reject it because they think it is EVIL, and that the United States "Shouldn't be doing things like that."
So instead of winning dirty, they're committed to losing clean.
That is why I call them pansies.
In war, real war, it ain't baseball. Winning is not the main thing. It's the ONLY thing.
Yes, I have thought it thoroughly through.
And talked it over with folks.
It's not as though this advice isn't going up the chain.
It's not as though the President hasn't been presented with variants of this option. He has publicly rejected them thrice, always on MORAL grounds.
Note, please, that a divide Iran with a Kurdish Sunni north and a (diminished and divided) Shi'a south is not an Iran that can adopt ONE Shia Islam as its law. It will face a Kurdish secession, which we would need to support under such circumstances. Keeping Shi'a and Sunni unhappily within Iraq keeps them from being able to move in a unified direction. BUT keeping the Sunni ARABS intact: THESE are the Nazis. THEY are the ones killing Americans. THEY need to be made an example of. And in their flight, they will end up helping us utterly wreck stability and economic life in Syria. Entire a million refugees into Syria, exit Syrian stability and the Syrian future. Causing Syria to teeter on the edge of collapse and starvation and wild internal riots hurts the very people who have been hurting us for a long time real, real bad. That's a good thing.
The President hates this plan, because it views the Islamists as what they are, barbarians who hate us, and pits one against the other in an orgy of blood designed to completely destroy the idea of united Arab civilization in religious civil war just as surely as the Reformation destroyed Christian moral authority and ended up handing Europe over to secular humanism.
That's the point.
Unleash Islamic civil war and let all of that bile and hatred go into killing EACH OTHER, thinning THEIR ranks, and letting their bile and hatred tear each other to pieces. Worked to end Christendom. Would end Islam too.
And we would not have to be defeated.
Currently, Bush would rather be defeated than unleash forces that will kill millions.
Bad attitude.
It is more important that America WIN and be safe than that those people over there be safe and comfy. We can't MAKE them safe and company. Demons are abroad in their land. We CAN channel their aggression at each other, choose sides, and control the winners.
This is not "stuck on steroids". It's clear thinking, methodical, ruthless, evil, and effective. I am willing to be very evil in order to pull out the win.
Bush would rather lose.
That's idiocy.
On a practical level, what make you think the Sunni Arab states will tolerate all of this, and not act? How do we protect the Kurds in their land locked state from the Turks or whomever? By C-130's or something? It is grand that you are so sure the Islamic Arab Shia state in Iraq will not become in Iranian vassel state. I wonder about that. I suspect it will, with the Sunni states funneling arms, a lot of them, and lots of money, and maybe more, to the Sunnis that America has decided simply don't fit in.
If that is the end game of American policy, I would be tempted to become an isolationist. America just can't handle the moral burden, and should stay the hell out of foreign adventures that are other than directly related to ending states that attack us, de jure or de facto, ala Afghanistan.
By the way, putting aside all the histrionics, it may well be necessary to effect a partition (which is sort of what you are saying, albeit with the Sunni's have relatively few zip codes left, and very many to most of them causing trouble elsewhere, angry and hateful of the US, and ready for more, via Syria or whatever), if things go wrong with the current policy, which they may well, but it should be done while minimizing the sanguinary, not maximizing it. That would be moral.
Reward your friends and punish your enemies - that's fundamental. We should have declared Kurdistan the minute the 4th ID was off the docks in Turkey.
Many, many modernist liberals like the President would literally rather die than live in the world as it is.
It's not properly called "idiocy" - that's a function of IQ.
It's failure to break the indoctrination of liberalism, and in a statesman it's maladministration at best.