The long haul

President Bush wants more time for his strategy in Iraq, but he offers no certainty that the conflict is even winnable

If Americans feel shell-shocked from the Iraq debate this week, they are to be excused. This anniversary week of 9/11 by coincidence was supposed to bring a reckoning of the war effort, and as the foggy reporting to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus was winding down, the nation was told that President Bush would make a prime time report of his own on Thursday night. After a flood of words and upbeat assessments, his speech no better informed Americans about what they might with any confidence expect as this nation's costly Iraq venture drags on.

What they did learn was sobering. The president made clear he thinks that a large contingent of U.S. troops should be in Iraq when his successor takes the oath of office in January 2009, and beyond. To the extent that the administration was able to spin any good news out of this week's reports from Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, it was doused by the reality that young Americans will long be tied down far from home.

Although the White House apparently didn't realize it at the time, that dismal fact was ordained the day the administration decided to invade Iraq. The doctrine of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell should have been heeded: You break it, you own it, he reportedly told the president. The U.S. invasion ended Saddam Hussein's bloody grip, but it's still unproven that the dictator posed any serious terrorist threat to these shores.

Bush's rhetoric doesn't mask the unpleasant truth that the so-called surge has yet to work. The president marketed the 30,000-troop increase as giving the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki room to heal the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divide that fuels much of the violence across the nation. Not surprisingly, thousands more well-trained U.S. troops have reduced incidents of suicide bombings, kidnappings and the like.

But Baghdad is little closer to forging a cooperative government necessary to prevent a bloodbath if American troops depart. Less than 12 hours after Bush's address, in fact, the White House released a benchmark report to Congress stating that Iraqi leaders have made little progress in meeting key military and political goals.

Bush is correct that leaving Iraq precipitously will endanger Iraqi lives and harm America's reputation internationally. But it's just as obvious that America's standing has been diminished by this misadventure and by the untenable position in which it has placed our government. The president announced that the surge troops will be home by next summer and additional units will be pulled out by December 2008. That signals an intent to leave tens of thousands of troops tied down in Iraq when the next president takes office, in the world where 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden still roams.

And for all the emphasis on maintaining a troop presence to try to promote stability in Iraq, where was Bush's call for the kind of diplomatic surge that obviously would enhance the chances for political reconciliation and a unified regional effort to curb radical Islamic terrorists?

White House spinmeisters called the president's plan "a way forward." It actually amounts to a dangerous marching in place.