But Sorensen and Schlesinger are also right about this, in response to Bush's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy last week:
We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless -- because we do not count them -- Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.
And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home -- no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.
And:
The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war's opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq's borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.
Can there be any confidence that this president knows what he's doing, that he has a plan, that there's some viable strategy for winning the war in Iraq, a war that's been grossly mismanaged and that seems increasingly unwinnable?
It's not at all clear that Bush even understands what's really going on in Iraq and what's truly gone wrong in a war of his own making.
Don't expect that to change.
GWB is no JFK.
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