Stay to until we win (Stay the Course)

The New York Times has one of the better takes on Bush's pep talk yesterday, Plan: We Win.

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

More and more comparisons to Lyndon Johnson are being made. A president who is losing a war both on the front and at home, largely because there was never a realistic plan to win, addressing selected audiences guaranteed to be receptive to the same old rhetoric. And there was nothing new in the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,". The same unrealistic plan based on over optimistic fantasy.

If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.

And what about that Iraqi Army?

On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

So we heard nothing new.

War supporters are correct when they say we can't afford to lose. That makes the deceptions and lies that got us into the war even more criminal because it's a war we can't win. The US went from liberators to occupiers in a few short weeks or months and now 80% of the population wants us out and a staggering 45% think it's OK to kill Americans. We are fortunate in sense, the military is simply incapable of "staying the course" much longer. For that reason alone we will eventually leave Iraq with a four figure casualty rate rather than the mid five figure rate in Vietnam.