Woke Up This Morning, Fell Out of Bed...
...Dragged a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq across my head

Got in late from Honolulu (warning to potential Hawaiian Airlines passengers who are vegetarians--they've stopped providing special vegetarian meals, so stock up on a panini or salad before you board), and am just trolling the major news of the day: President Bush's unveiling of the long-awaited plan for moving toward victory in Iraq. (One wonders why we didn't have this previously.) As you might expect, Democratic leaders aren't being too kind to its arrival. Here's Russ Feingold (via Raw Story):

While today’s speech by the President was billed as yet another attempt to lay out a plan for finishing the military mission in Iraq, the only new thing the administration gave the American people was a glossy 35-page pamphlet filled with the same rhetoric we’ve all heard before.

Think Progress also has a good deconstruction of the pamphlet; here's a tidbit, but I recommend a full read:

NO STANDARDS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY: Two weeks ago, the Senate overwhelmingly endorsed an amendment calling on the Bush administration to provide a “schedule” for meeting U.S. objectives in Iraq, “information regarding variables that could alter that schedule, and the reasons for any subsequent changes to that schedule.” The NSVI completely rejects this call. “We will not put a date certain on when each stage of success will be reached,” the document states in bold and italicized print, “because the timing of success depends upon meeting certain conditions, not arbitrary timetables.” The only time frames proposed for achieving U.S. objectives are virtually meaningless phrases: “short term,” “medium term,” and “longer term.” The goals for these time frames are equally ambiguous; the so-called “short term” goals, for instance, are listed as “making steady progress in fighting terrorists, meeting political milestones, building democratic institutions, and standing up security forces.”

And Salon's War Room adds this:

Osama bin Laden gets a few mentions, and there's talk of al-Qaida there, too. The attacks of 9/11 get their due. There's not much talk about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and what there is comes close to an admission of their nonexistence. The war in Iraq is making America safer, the document says, because it has allowed the United States to remove a "ruthless dictator who had a history of pursuing and even using weapons of mass destruction."

Of course, that's not how the White House sold Americans on the war in the first place. If the Bush administration had spent much of 2002 and 2003 warning about the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam used to have, it's hard to see how anyone would have supported a war of choice to depose him. Instead, the president and his people insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction on hand and ready to go, and that he was fixin' to use them against us.

Need an example? How about the speech the White House quotes in the preamble to the "National Strategy for Victory"? It's the president speaking to an American Enterprise Institute gathering in February 2003, and, for the "National Strategy," the White House excerpts a quote about the future of Iraq and the nature of the U.S. commitment there. Here's a part that didn't make the cut: "In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world -- and we will not allow it. This same tyrant has close ties to terrorist organizations, and could supply them with the terrible means to strike this country -- and America will not permit it. The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away. The danger must be confronted. We hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm, fully and peacefully. If it does not, we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed."

The president's bold talk drew waves of applause. Nearly three years, 2,110 dead soldiers and not a single stockpile of WMD later, is anyone still clapping?

[UPDATE - 9:50am] Here's some more from the War Room:

What did we hear that was new? Not much. The president said more than he usually does about the nature of the "enemy" in Iraq, explaining that the United States actually faces a three-part mixture of "rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists." And the president offered more details than he usually does about the training of Iraqi security forces, although the "metrics" the Pentagon has offered up on that front have varied so much over time that there's little reason to trust the numbers that the president ticked off during his speech today.

What else? There wasn't a timetable for getting out of Iraq, and there wasn't an admission that mistakes have been made along the way. But there was a nifty new backdrop that said "Strategy for Victory" a whole bunch of times, and maybe just saying it enough times will finally make it so. The president has three more speeches planned between now and Dec. 15.