Withdrawl
NYTimes Editorial Super Post with Hidden Columnists Brooks and Herbert

The NYTimes editorial for Tuesday is quite frank in its assessment of President Bush's speech and delivery of the Path to Victory booklet yesterday:

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately.
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The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.

On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
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Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory," which his strategy document defines as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency," is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure" and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."

That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for that region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969 Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it) and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.

A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

Bob Herbert in his column "Bush Hits Rewind" piles on thusly (here's the link to the full column for Times Select subscribers):

It's weird. It's like watching a computerized model of a president. Somebody programs George W. Bush, carefully embedding the information to be dispensed over the next several hours, and then he goes out and addresses the nation - as a computerized bundle of administration talking points.

"We will never back down," said Mr. Bush in his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy yesterday. "We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory."

I don't think there were many people who believed him. Members of Mr. Bush's own party are nervously eyeing next year's Congressional elections. They would abandon Iraq in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between getting re-elected or having to hunt for a real job.
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Here's today's reality: the $6-billion-a-month U.S. military mission in Iraq is unsustainable, as is the political support for the war. There is now a virtual consensus that a significant American troop withdrawal will get under way in 2006.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are ill equipped, understaffed and widely infiltrated by private militia members and insurgents. In many ways, it's an amateurish operation.

As Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who served in the 82nd Airborne, told reporters this week:

"Without an effective ministry that can keep track of soldiers and police, pay those soldiers and police, apply those soldiers and police and essentially provide the foundation, then you're going to have some tactically trained units, but they're not going to be a coherent or effective force."

Despite the rosy scenarios offered by President Bush, American-style democracy is nowhere in sight in Iraq. Among other things, the evidence of horrific human rights abuses by Iraqi forces allied with us - including kidnappings, torture and murders - is increasing.

In short, the picture in Iraq is not a pretty one, and there is no indication that substantial improvements are coming soon.

If the president gets any of this, you couldn't tell it by his appearance yesterday. He stuck to his talking points. "To all who wear the uniform," he said, "I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief."

We may not cut and run in Iraq, but with the G.O.P. sweating out next year's elections, the plans are already under way for American forces by the tens of thousands to cut and speed-walk toward the exits. Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be.

Speaking of cynicism, that's the subject of David Brooks' column, "The Age of Skepticism," which makes some points that I agree with for once (here's the link to the full Times Select column). After noting various and sundry examples of our autumn and winter of discontent (equally low polling numbers for confidence in either Republicans or Democrats, high polling numbers for the question whether America is going in the wrong direction), Brooks gets to the crux of the matter:

In this atmosphere of general weariness, the political pendulum is no longer swinging on a left-to-right axis. As Christopher Caldwell noted recently in The Financial Times, the same phenomenon is striking country after country: the governing party is sinking, but the opposition party is not rising. Problems on the right do not lead to a resurgence on the left, or vice versa. In other words, the Democrats may win elections in 2006 or 2008, but that doesn't mean they will have the public's confidence or a mandate for change.

In this atmosphere of exhaustion, the political pendulum swings from engagement to cynicism. When polarized voters lose faith in their own side, they don't switch to the other. They just withdraw.

The chief cultural effect of the Iraq war is that we are now entering a period of skepticism. Many Americans are going to be skeptical that their government can know enough to accomplish large tasks or competent enough to execute ambitious policies. More people are going to be skeptical of plans to mold reality according to our designs or to solve the deep problems that are rooted in history and culture. They are going to be skeptical of our ability to engage with or understand faraway societies in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere.

In theory, skepticism leads to prudence, not a bad trait. But when it is tinged with cynicism, as it is now, skepticism turns into passivity. In skeptical ages, people are quick to decide that longstanding problems, like poverty and despotism, are intractable and not really worth taking on. They find it easy to delay taking any action on the distant but overwhelming problems, like the deficits, that do not impose immediate pain. They find it easy to dawdle on foreign problems, like Iran's nuclear ambitions, rather than confronting them.

As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman has observed, Americans begin social reforms when they are feeling confident, not when they are weary and insecure.

Already the resolve to rebuild New Orleans and seize the post-Katrina moment has dissipated. The bipartisan desire to do something ambitious about energy policy is going nowhere. Even the problem of Darfur evokes little more than sad sighs and shrugs.

What's at stake in Iraq is not only the future of that country, but the future of American self-confidence. We may have to endure a cycle of skepticism before we can enjoy another cycle of hope.

Speaking of confidence, be sure to check out this Colbert Report Word segment on that very matter at Crooks and Liars.