Recent weeks have brought us so much blather about the war in Iraq that it is difficult to hold on to realities. But let’s try. The President gave us his latest speech on Iraq in September. I often wonder who listens to him any more, who believes him any more. Yet I can’t help finding a certain fascination with his oratory. I am always astonished at what he will come up with next. He has a new though clunky slogan: Return on Success. Since the success is imperceptible, his pullback of troops is insignificant. But he does not say that, of course. Instead he insists that “the troop surge is working” and that this “measure of success” allows him to reduce his force enough for him and his critics “for the first time in years....to come together.” In short, he is telling us, the Great Decider has become the Great Compromiser. That is hard to swallow...

The enthusiasts who stormed into Iraq are incapable of letting go. It is not so much that President Bush and Vice President Cheney cannot face defeat. Far more important, they cannot face the enormity of the mindlessness that powered them to war. So they are hanging on with a stubborn show of honor and even political courage, persuaded that, despite their mistakes and misadventures, history will absolve them. To keep on in the face of congressional harassment and public discontent, they are spewing a lot of cant about terrorism, micromanagement, chaos and patriotism. It is not easy to see the awful situation clearly. There is no doubt that deadlines set by Congress smack of micromanagement. Ideally, Congress should leave war to the commander in chief and his generals. Try to imagine Congress passing a bill during World War II with a deadline for getting out. The thought is monstrous...

So much wonderful critique of the Bushites, the foolish war, the botched occupation and the torture scandal has come forth recently (especially the articles by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, the daily news coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the extraordinary book of James Mann on Bush’s Vulcans) that there is no need to add comment. But I would like to summarize a little: 1. We all knew the cliché that war has unforeseen consequences. But I do not believe those of us opposed ever expected that things would go as badly as they have. More than 800 dead. More than 4,000 wounded. Torturers posing over wog victims. Conquerors riven with colonial arrogance. Democracy a fool’s goal. The country slithering toward theocratic rule or a breakup. It’s hard not to gloat if you opposed the war. But gloating gets us nowhere, 2...

As the United States and Britain relentlessly carried out a third wave of airstrikes early today, the Iraqi regime fought back on the stage of world opinion, with President Saddam Hussein telling Arab television viewers that he will kneel only “before the face of God” and never to his enemies. And in a witting echo of Republicans during impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz branded President Clinton a liar to his people in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair and declared that the U.S. president has also been lying to Americans about Iraq. In Washington, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told reporters that U.S. ships and warplanes had already launched more cruise missiles against Iraq than the total number fired at the country during the entire five weeks of bombing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War...

The American impasse on Iraq derives from two American faults: sound-bite thinking and too much empty bombast. For almost a decade, American policy towards Saddam Hussein has been based on the assumption that he can't last very long. This has produced a lot of threats and blather without too much thought about what would happen if someone didn't rescue us from our threats. The confusion has led us to the present snarl where options are limited and we do not know what to do. None of this would be with us, of course, if President George Bush had finished the job and ordered the troops into Baghdad to bring down Saddam. But we can't blame Bush much for this. That was not a war aim at the time. Policymakers, in fact, did not want Iraq so weak that it could not balance the power of our then bête noire, Iran. Moreover, the Bush people had every right to expect the Iraqi military to get rid of its disgraced leader. It's hard to recall any leader in the last century or so who survived a defeat as total as Saddam's. Napoleon III, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Mussolini all died or were dumped into oblivion...