The mixed messages in Bush's new plan.

The mixed messages in Bush's new plan.

Military analysis.
Nov. 30 2005 6:17 PM

The Good News—Bush Finally Has a Plan

The bad news—it's an ill-defined muddle.

The most remarkable thing about the document President George W. Bush released today, titled National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, is that it was released today (and written not much earlier—it's authored by the National Security Council and dated November 2005).




Now, what about this path—the strategy for victory—and the speech that President Bush gave at the U.S. Naval Academy this morning to promote it?

The document and the speech are better than previous efforts. They're more detailed. They identify not just some ultimate ideal (defeat the terrorists or spread freedom throughout the world), but specific, achievable stages of success along the way. The speech even acknowledges that mistakes have been made—only tactical errors, involving the poorly wrought initial approaches to training Iraqi security forces, but still, publicly admitting any error is a first for this president. The NSC document goes still further and frankly specifies many of the "challenges"—political, military, and economic—yet to be overcome.

Had the president made this speech and issued this report a year or two ago, they would have been seen as hallmark statements; they might even have shaped the ensuing debate.

But the debate has now shifted—a result of the rising casualties in Iraq, the diminishing support for the war at home, and the growing demand for troop withdrawals from even once-hawkish quarters. Bush, in fact, gave the speech and ordered the report precisely to deal with this shift—and both must be deemed failures, because they don't really deal with it at all.

First, though the document is called a "strategy for victory," Bush doesn't clearly define either term. And even where he defines the terms nebulously or inconsistently, he doesn't tie them to the more pressing questions now consuming public discussion of the war: What do we do now? When can we start to pull out—under what circumstances, with what sorts of troops remaining, to what end, for how long?

In the speech, Bush says (as he has said many times before), "We will stay as long as necessary to complete the mission." But what is the mission? At one point he says, "When our mission of training the Iraqi security forces is complete, our troops will return home to a proud nation." However, a bit later, he says the mission will be complete "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy," and he adds, "I will settle for nothing less than complete victory."


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