Indeed, the White House billed the address as the first of a series that, taken together, will provide a comprehensive restatement of America’s objectives in Iraq and the broader War on Terror. ~The New York Post

It is easy to lose track of how many times “America’s objectives” in Iraq have been restated, how many imaginary “corners” there have been turned and how many re-launches of the same failed initiative Mr. Bush has attempted in a sad imitation in foreign affairs of Tony Blair’s excuse for domestic governance. It became something of a running joke even before the 2002 election that all Mr. Blair knew how to do on domestic policy was to hold press conferences where he would launch or re-launch his policy initiatives with much fanfare and euphemistic drivel. New Labour effectively meant a new polish and a good spin on a lot of fatuous nonsense, backed up by a lot of serious-sounding figures and projections.

The San Jose Mercury News had this observation about the figures of Iraqi battalions ready for combat:

Bush has steadfastly said that as Iraqi troops stand up, American troops would stand down. And suddenly, the Iraqis are standing tall, in great numbers. Battalions of Iraqi soldiers who were ill-prepared six months ago, by our own generals’ admission, are fit, trim and hardened now. Cadres of police will take charge, enabling U.S. troops to retreat from cities and go chase down the main terrorists.

In the New Labour spirit Mr. Bush re-launched the Iraq war yesterday, or rather re-launched the initiative to make the Iraq war credible for what seems like the fifth or sixth time in the last two years. For someone who is “staying the course,” he certainly has a strange need to keep reiterating his intention to do more or less the same thing he told us he was going to do before. We got the message the first time–Mr. Bush has no idea what to do, and so he gives us more or less the same rehashed talking points. There was a greater quantity of detail about the training of Iraqi forces, but Mr. Bush remains firmly committed to staking something he regards as vital to the security of the United States on the competence of Iraqi security forces.

The Boston Globe rightly observed a curious divide in the speech:

President Bush gave two speeches in one yesterday. The first reported steady progress in training Iraqi security forces, offering hope that the bulk of US troops would be able to leave soon. The other spoke of victory in Iraq in such grandiose terms that it seemed US troops would remain far into the future.

Note that definition of victory:

Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq’s democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation.

Under the circumstances, that is as unsatisfying a definition of victory as there is. Iraq’s “democracy” will be imperiled by some sort of terrorist or other for decades, and if the enemy is automatically defined as Saddamist and terrorist (as Mr. Bush has done) there is theoretically no end to the time when “Saddamists and terrorists” threaten Iraq’s “democracy.” The third leg of the enemy tripod, the “rejectionists,” are supposed to be won over by persuasion and the benefits of working within the democratic system–can he be serious? All any rejectionist Sunni would have to do would be to run the numbers to see that he has a far better chance of extracting concessions by violence than through voting.

Note that the endgame has been for well over a year that the United States government premises its military objectives on the competence of a ramshackle foreign force. This is an admission that our military cannot achieve victory in Iraq. But Mr. Bush nonetheless continues to expose our soldiers to danger until such time as Iraqi forces manage to suppress an enemy that our armed forces could not.

All of this rests on the assumption that native Iraqi forces will be more effective in infiltrating and disrupting terrorist attacks. This is a tremendous assumption, and one I suspect that is made on the false assumption that there is sufficient homogeneity among Iraqis to make this sort of infiltration and intelligence-gathering possible. What sane Sunni would assist a presumably impermanent government (which probably appears illegitimate to him anyway, and not without reason) against his own kin, tribe and sect if he has relatives or friends among the insurgents? Our strategy is based on the gamble that normal Sunnis will prefer Allawi and a regime of crooks in Baghdad to their interests and their own people and cooperate with the Iraqi police and army in ways that they would not do with us–this is lunacy. As far as Iraq serving as a base of future terrorists, we were closer to victory on that score in 2002 than we will be for decades.