Four Years, Same Message

With an avalanche of media coverage guaranteed for yesterday's fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it was smart politics for President Bush to take to the airwaves for what amounted to a pep talk to the American people.

The problem is, we've all heard the pep talk again and again since 2003.

The president's rhetoric was restrained as he talked about "hopeful signs" and "good days" and "bad days." Gone was the swagger of the Mission Accomplished period, or even, more recently, when Dick Cheney dismissed the insurgency as being in its "last throes."

Bush was, at bottom, pleading for patience. And the polls suggest that quality is in increasingly short supply when it comes to public attitudes toward Iraq.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, there was something of an ongoing battle between the press (journalists in Baghdad telling us, and showing us, that the war was going quite badly) and the administration (insisting that media types were too negative, too drawn to the spectacular suicide bombing and -- though this was sometimes merely implied -- undermining the morale of our troops).

I believe that battle ended the day after the election. It was then that Bush sent Don Rumsfeld packing, began contemplating a change in strategy (remember the Iraq Study Group?) that led to the surge, and began acknowledging what was obvious to anyone with a television set: that the war wasn't going well at all.

If the recent escalation is helping to make Baghdad more secure -- a subject I think needs more press attention -- perhaps the president can make some headway with public opinion. Otherwise, a war in which we were supposed to be "greeted as liberators," now entering its fifth year, remains a tough sell indeed.

"As the war in Iraq enters its fifth year Tuesday," says the L.A. Times, "President Bush called anew for patience while beefed-up U.S. forces try to secure Baghdad, but the president faced increasing difficulty on Capitol Hill, where prospects improved for a proposal to set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces . . .

"In the past, Bush has left little doubt that he believed the United States would prevail. Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said the president's more uncertain language today reflected questions about whether Congress would 'provide the flexibility and funding necessary to succeed.'"

Ah, so it's (potentially) the Democrats' fault.

"Mr. Bush's commemoration of the anniversary, delivered beneath a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider, was notable for the sharp change in tone from his speeches in the heady, early days of the war -- when it still appeared possible that a quick victory in Baghdad could be followed by a relatively swift withdrawal," says the New York Times. "In those first few months, Mr. Bush argued that he was on the way to spreading democracy throughout the Middle East through the euphoria that would surely follow the unseating of Saddam Hussein.

"But on Monday Mr. Bush made no reference to democracy."