Why haven't the Republicans united around a plan for Iraq?

Why can't they come up with a coordinated message?

How can we even have a debate if Republicans refuse to put a strategy on the table?

Republicans are in a political pickle.

They know the public has turned against the war, and they can't be seen as blindly supporting it.

But, for the most part, they're ideologically committed to maintaining a permanent military presence in the region.

They can't make a clean break, and offer a lucid change in course.

Instead, they grope to find cosmetic ways to put some distance between themselves and Bush.

And so, Republicans across the Sunday shows yesterday ended up being simply incoherent.

Leading the incoherence parade is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

On CBS' Face the Nation, he announced opposition to any Senate resolution that criticizes Bush's plan to increase troop levels.

Why? Because such a resolution "says to the troops who are going there this is a mission that doesn't have a chance of succeeding."

Then in the same breath, he indicates he doesn't think the chances of success are all that good:

I think I can pretty well speak for virtually all Republican senators when I say this is the last chance for the Iraqis to step up and do their part.

On NBC's Meet The Press, presidential hopeful former Gov. Mike Huckabee also opposes any Senate resolution that criticizes Bush's plan:

I think that's a dangerous position to take, to oppose a sitting commander in chief while we've got people being shot at on the ground.

And then, he criticizes Bush's handling of the troops:

I think we need to be very careful about the overuse of the Guard and the Reserve in our military.

As a governor for 10 1/2 years and commander in chief of our Guard, I've seen 80 percent of our Guard forces deployed to Iraq. Now we're talking about sending them back yet again and again.

These are citizen soldiers. They didn't sign up to be gone all the time.

Later on Meet The Press, Sen. David Vitter creatively said: "I'm supporting the president's plan, and I'm strongly encouraging some add-ons."

On ABC's This Week, Sen. Dick Lugar said he would support any critical resolution:

I don't believe that it's helpful right now to show this disarray around the world, as well as in our body politic.

Yet he also contributed to the disarray:

The President can be faulted for a good number of things.

...

I have doubts about the surge situation, both in terms of the numbers of people and so forth.

Over on Fox News Sunday, another '08 candidate, Sen. Sam Brownback came out for one of the proposed Senate resolutions criticizing Bush's plan:

[GOP Senator John Warner's] resolution … contains a lot of the Baker-Hamilton [Iraq Study Group] type of thought and language about how we move to a political solution regionally, inside Iraq, and in the countries in the area, and also a political solution here.

But after echoing Democratic messages about a "political solution," he also tipped his hat to his conservative base, saying Democrats and Republicans need to "pull together" so we can "maintain a fight over there".

There were a couple of Republicans -- namely '08er Rep. Duncan Hunter on ABC's This Week and Sen. Jon Kyl on CNN's Late Edition -- who blindly backed Bush's escalation with no qualification.

But the party as a whole, recognizing that Iraq is a massive political albatross, yet unwilling to fully renounce Bush's foreign policy objectives, is unable to coalesce around a plan and a message.