Not Going Anywhere

Flashback

Peter Baker and Dan Balz wrote in The Washington Post last June: "When President Bush confidently predicts victory in Iraq and admits no mistakes, admirers see steely resolve and critics see exasperating stubbornness. But the president's full-speed-ahead message articulated in this week's prime-time address also reflects a purposeful strategy based on extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly and problem-plagued military mission.

"The White House recently brought onto its staff one of the nation's top academic experts on public opinion during wartime, whose studies are now helping Bush craft his message two years into a war with no easy end in sight. Behind the president's speech is a conviction among White House officials that the battle for public opinion on Iraq hinges on their success in convincing Americans that, whatever their views of going to war in the first place, the conflict there must and can be won."

The Analytic View

Charles J. Hanley writes for the Associated Press: "Two senior Army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the turmoil that would be unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq offer a bleak assessment in a new study of what now lies ahead in that bloodied land. . . .

"In a February 2003 report , a month before the U.S. invasion, Crane and Terrill had warned that the United States might 'win the war but lose the peace' if it attacked Iraq. They suggested armed resistance to an occupation would grow, a harsh American response would further alienate Iraqis, and establishing political stability would prove difficult _ all predictions that were borne out."

In their new 60-page report , veteran Middle East scholar Andrew Terrill and Conrad Crane, director of the Army Military History Institute, say:

* "It appears increasingly unlikely that U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces will crush the insurgency prior to the beginning of a phased U.S. and coalition withdrawal."

* "It is no longer clear that the United States will be able to create (Iraqi) military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long U.S. forces remain."

* "The United States may also have to scale back its expectations for Iraq's political future," by accepting a relatively stable but undemocratic state as preferable to a civil war among Iraq's ethnic and religious factions.

They also offered this pithy insight: "The long-term dilemma of the U.S. position in Iraq can perhaps best be summarized as, 'We can't stay, we can't leave, and we can't fail.'"

McCain Watch

John Dickerson explains in Slate why Sen. John McCain, who has been spending a lot of time in public with Bush lately, is "immune to the presidential taint":

"McCain can embrace Bush without being hurt by the affiliation because voters think he's winking as he does it. McCain's fans see his stumping for Bush and his policies as completely pro forma and insincere. 'I genuinely like him,' McCain insists to friends, referring to Bush. Remembering how roughly Bush treated him in the 2000 primaries, the friends don't believe the senator, either. . . .

"Bailing out the president in his moment of need endears him to the party powers -- or at least helps sap the force of their potential resistance to the possibility of his being nominated in 2008.