A Turning Point on Iraq

" 'The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,' Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. 'This was when the bombing would begin.'

"The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons."

Under the circumstances, critics will ask: Why bother?

Time sees a Democratic year in '06:

"If the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who masterminded the 1994 elections that brought Republicans to power on promises of revolutionizing the way Washington is run, told TIME that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: 'Had enough?' "

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the elections aren't until November, and Bush can't get any more unpopular. Can he?

National Review's Jonah Goldberg ruminates about Bush meeting the press:

"The best moment of political theater at the president's news conference this week came when that thespian carbuncle of bile, Helen Thomas, hung a question mark at the end of a diatribe. The 'dean' of the White House press corps all but called President Bush a lying warmonger who invaded Iraq for no legitimate reason.

"Thomas lost the exchange, but the sad truth is that her side has won the larger argument. Ever since the controversy over the '16 words' in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- in which the president alleged that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa -- the administration has been gun-shy about defending its original decision to invade. That's understandable, given the consequences of that episode: Not only did it make the White House seem inept, it made former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson and his very important hair a permanent fixture of the media firmament.

"It is now simply taken as a given inside this White House that having an argument about why we invaded Iraq is a political loser. So the president prefers to talk democracy, not WMDs."

That's the problem with defending the original decision -- all the endless speeches about the nonexistent weapons.

And we're learning still more about what went on, says Josh Marshall: "So we have one more Bushie giving up the (loyalism) ghost and spilling the beans: the CPA was run by a bunch of inexperienced partisan operatives, chosen for their party-linism rather than any experience with what they'd be doing in Iraq. And they -- through incompetence or their lust for a piece of the pie -- let the reconstruction of Iraq get overrun by all manner of corruption large and small.