Bush's Iraq speech was a class-B re-run--no new ideas, no compelling story line and a dwindling audience

The Two Wars of the Worlds - New York Times: "Mr. Bush could have addressed that question honestly on Tuesday night. Instead of once more cooking the books - exaggerating the number of coalition partners, the number of battle-ready Iraqi troops, the amount of non-American dollars in the Iraq kitty - he could have laid out the long haul in hard facts, explaining the future costs in manpower, money and time, and what sacrifices he proposes for meeting them. He could have been, as he is fond of calling himself, a leader.
It was a blown opportunity, and it's hard to see that there will be another chance. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the current war's unpopularity now matches the Gallup findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968. As the prospect of midterm elections pumps more and more genuine fear into the hearts of Republicans up for re-election, it's the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will be in its last throes. Is the commander in chief so isolated in his bubble that he does not realize this? G.W.B., phone home."

Kenneth Pollack's OP-ED purports to offer a better analysis of Iraq and more effective prescriptions, but it does neither. He claims that we lost in Vietnam because we lacked a better counter-insurgency strategy, and that we have a parallel problem in Iraq. This really trivializes the problem. The U.S. lost in Vietnam for a much more fundamental reason: Vietnam was seen as a key battlefield of the Cold war, whereas the U.S. campaign there was seen as yet another colonial venture by the Vietnamese. Similarly, the U.S. is not winning in Iraq for lack of a strategy but because many Iraqis are deeply suspicious of U.S. motives. It is possible that by dint of massive efforts and expenditures the U.S. will eventually quell the Sunni insurgency, but there is a good chance that the U.S. will alienate more Iraqis, perhaps most Iraqis, in the process.

Pollack offers several suggestions, including the that the U.S. constitute "safe zones" in Iraq, and that it buy-off tribal sheikhs, but the key suggestion is that the U.S. needs more troops. This is the major structural constraint on U.S. action, and it will not be fixed short of a massive increase in recruitment or a draft, and reconstituting retired units will take several years. His idea that the National Guard might be mobilized is risible. The National Guard is already broken. In short, his OPED takes us no further than Bush's emptty speech.