The Jordanian Charade

There are no signs that the rhetoric is changing. Bush today said in a speech it Latvia: "There's one thing I'm not going to do, I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete. . . . We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren."

So what will Bush announce in the coming weeks? Who knows? But whatever the decision is, it's critical that the president look decider-y.

About That Civil War

Yesterday's column was about the long-overdue decision by some news organizations to call the conflict in Iraq what it is: civil war.

Bush himself ducked a question on the topic yesterday in a brief press availability with President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia.

" Q: Mr. President, thank you, sir. What is the difference between what we're seeing now in Iraq and civil war? And do you worry that calling it a civil war would make it difficult to argue that we're fighting the central front of the war on terror there?

" PRESIDENT BUSH: You know, the plans of Mr. Zarqawi was to foment sectarian violence. That's what he said he wanted to do. The Samarra bombing that took place last winter was intended to create sectarian violence, and it has."

Or, as Deb Riechmann writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush said Tuesday that an al-Qaeda plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in Iraq is to blame for escalating bloodshed, refusing to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war."

Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks write in The Washington Post: "The White House again resisted assertions that Iraq is now in a civil war, but that stance is increasingly hard to defend, according to analysts, diplomats and even some U.S. officials in private. . . .

"'It's worse than a civil war. In a civil war, you at least know which factions are fighting each other,' lamented a senior member of Iraq's government in an interview. . . . 'We don't even know that anymore. It's so bloody confused.'

"Saudi Arabia is so concerned about the damage that the conflict in Iraq is doing across the region that it basically summoned Vice President Cheney for talks over the weekend, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. The visit was originally portrayed as U.S. outreach to its oil-rich Arab ally."

Wright and Ricks quote a senior U.S. intelligence official as saying that the militia of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr is more effective than the Iraqi government's army. "Iraq's prime minister 'doesn't have any coercive powers of his own,' he said, calling Maliki 'beholden to Sadr.'"

The Media Turnaround

NBC's decision to go with "civil war" yesterday sparked a lot of coverage today.