On to Victory...Somehow

President Bush has painted himself into quite a corner. His talking-point speeches on Iraq aren't boosting his popularity. Every poll shows a considerable majority of Americans remaining convinced that he has no clue what to do about Iraq. His much-vaunted "strategy for victory" released with a splash a couple of weeks ago has instead sunk like a stone. He has lost all credibility, and the percentage of Americans who consider him honest and trustworthy is rapidly sinking to below the freezing point.

And yet he can't stop spouting the same macho slogans, the same empty rhetoric, the same stock phrases. "We will not leave until victory has been achieved," he still thunders righteously, unable to define "victory" beyond the fuzziest of catchphrases. "We can debate these issues openly," he still says, all the while accusing anyone who actually questions him of "hurt[ing] the morale of our troops."

His latest PR campaign, consisting of a series of speeches before properly dutiful audiences, is basically more of the same. Watching Bush's Iraq speech (let's face it, it's really just the same speech delivered over and over as if sheer repetition can make us believe that black is white) is an exercise in sheer frustration, making one itch to reach through the TV screen and shake him until he faces reality.

There is no strategy, no policy. There is only wishful thinking that the current parliamentary elections, merely the latest in a long string of "milestones," will magically make everything better. Nobody in the White House wants to hear what the Iraq experts in the State Department and CIA are saying - that Iraq is coming apart along ethnic lines, and a bloody civil war is a matter of when, not if. And anyone who dares admit the truth is promptly set upon by GOP attack dogs.

As more and more Americans (and even some in Congress) are realizing, it's time to face facts: the Iraq War simply cannot be won militarily. What began as an ostensible war of liberation has morphed into an indefinite occupation, and the Iraqi people want us out. They'd rather handle their own affairs without American interference, regardless of the consequences.

It doesn't help that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq has also been a disaster, with billions of dollars simply stolen by contractors and billions more disappearing into a swamp of waste. It is telling that the Bush Administration, having made a big deal over the Oil For Food "scandal," doesn't have a single auditor in Iraq to watch the money. In many Iraqi cities, basic infrastructure is in worse shape than before the invasion almost three years ago.

The death toll has been horrendous. Briefly forced from his blissful bubble to acknowledge Iraqi deaths for the first time, Bush reluctantly said that approximately 30,000 Iraqis have been killed in his obsessive war, but his figure included military and insurgent deaths as will as civilian and is widely seen as far too low. Estimates of civilian deaths alone vary wildly from 31,000 to 100,000, and the actual figure will very likely never be known.

The fledgling Shiite-controlled Iraqi government seems determined to follow in Saddam Hussein's footsteps, from maintaining torture chambers in prisons to using death squads to knock off prominent Sunnis. Of course, Washington displays the appropriate horror at each new example of depravity, but never actually does anything about it. Because, after all, it's not Saddam doing these things, so they can't be that bad.

Meanwhile, one cannot blame the Iraqi people for suspecting that the whole point of the invasion and occupation was to seize control of Iraq's oil supplies. It's not for nothing that the original name for Operation Iraqi Freedom was "Operation Iraqi Liberation," which was rather hastily changed once someone realized what it spelled.

Bush is in deep denial. Having committed himself to invading Iraq since long before 9/11, he cannot bring himself to admit that he just might have made a mistake. It doesn't matter how many people are killed for the sake of his self-righteous ego, he can never, ever, admit error. And as much lip service as he pays to the notion of "supporting the troops," every American soldier who comes home in a flag-draped coffin, and every grieving family member who mourns him or her, is paying the price for his vendetta.