Bush's Triumphalist Amnesia

In fact, the significance is highly debatable.

Bush repeated his frequent assertion that the war in Iraq is keeping Americans safer: "Over the past five years, we have seen moments of triumph and moments of tragedy. We have watched in admiration as 12 million Iraqis defied the terrorists, went to the polls, and chose their leaders in free elections. We watched in horror as al-Qaeda beheaded innocent captives, and sent suicide bombers to blow up mosques and markets. These actions show the brutal nature of the enemy in Iraq. And they serve as a grim reminder: The terrorists who murder the innocent in the streets of Baghdad want to murder the innocent in the streets of America. Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely we will face this enemy here at home."

But most of the attacks in Iraq either involve religious and political rivals trying to kill each other or local insurgents fighting back against what they see as an oppressive occupation. See my column on the fourth anniversary of the war, They Won't Follow Us Home.

Later, Bush added: "An emboldened al-Qaeda, with access to Iraq's oil resources, could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations. . . . Our enemies would see an America -- an American failure in Iraq as evidence of weakness and a lack of resolve.

"To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack like the one we experienced that day, a day in which 19 armed men with box cutters killed nearly 3,000 people in our -- on our soil -- a day after which in the following of that attack more than a million Americans lost work, lost their jobs."

Forget the First Four Years

Karen DeYoung, writing on The Washington Post's front page this morning, explains how the emerging White House public-relations strategy is essentially to pretend that the first four years of the occupation never happened.

"For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed," DeYoung writes.

"Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies -- in particular, sharply reduced violence -- are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife."

But critics think the surge needs to be put in its proper context.

"'Like a tourniquet,' the troop increase 'has stopped the bleeding,' Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed said, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become. And even U.S. officials acknowledge that the 'surge' has not led to the political reconciliation the administration had hoped for.

"Others see the past year's successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. 'I think they have it righter than they ever have before,' Daniel P. Serwer, an Iraq expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace, said of the administration. 'But the fact is that those four other years did exist, and they condition a lot of what can and cannot happen now. There's a history here, there's a lot of blood and guts on the floor -- literally.'

"The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. While it recognizes the inclination to 'relitigate the past' when a milestone such as the fifth anniversary is reached, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, 'our focus is on the way ahead and making sure that the current situation and the future situation gets better.'"