You know the line, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”? We thought about using it a couple of months ago when we heard Dick Cheney seek some distance from Iraq by saying that “the president” is the one who “makes the decisions” and “bears the greatest burden” for what happens there.

We resisted. Now we can’t.

The news of the day: The U.S. Marine Corps would like to pull out of Iraq and take over operations in Afghanistan instead. As the New York Times puts it, “The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan.”

The semi-official explanation: Putting each service in charge of its own war “could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.”

Of course, there’s another way to operate more efficiently and reduce the strain, too: Just bring everybody home from Iraq now.