Not Going Anywhere

Refusing to bow to growing public pressure to produce an exit strategy in Iraq, President Bush today pugnaciously declared that his focus is on winning, not leaving.

"We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory," he said in this morning's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Or, as he put it even more succinctly yesterday in El Paso : "We want to win."

Bush's speech -- combined with a new, rosy, slogan-filled White House document entitled " Victory in Iraq " -- kicks off a bold public-relations campaign to recast the debate about the war.

But there are several reasons to suspect that it might not work:

* It doesn't answer the most compelling question in contemporary American politics: When are the troops coming home?

* It doesn't even include any objective ways of measuring progress towards an eventual U.S. pullout.

* It is at heart a restatement, rather than a reappraisal, of a strategy that according to the polls the American public has overwhelmingly rejected.

* The White House did not address, not to mention refute, the argument that the continued presence of American troops is making things worse, rather than better.

* And nothing Bush said is likely to change the fact that he has a big credibility problem with most Americans.

Bush's speech, delivered to an enthusiastic, captive audience of Navy midshipmen, was the first in a series that Bush will be making between now and the December 15th elections in Iraq.

This is what Bush had to say about when troops come home: "As the Iraqi forces gain experience and the political progress advances, we will be able to decrease our troop levels in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists.