Bush was insistent in disdaining any "timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq. He made no reference to Rumsfeld's 12-year calculation. But Rumsfeld, who has demanded precise indexes for progress, is the only, and the highest, official in the administration who has offered any metric. How did he arrive at the 12-year number? What analyses have been done by the Department of Defense to inform his statement? And what is the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Has Rumsfeld presented his analysis before the principals of the National Security Council? Has he, or the national security advisor, or the director of national intelligence, briefed the president on it? If not, why not? Has he briefed the Armed Services committees of the House and Senate?

Given Rumsfeld's 12-year timetable, what plan has he formulated for troop rotation in Iraq? How many tours of duty will units serve? How will the Army be replenished over 12 years? What impact will 12 years have on the recruitment rate, down 40 percent this year despite $40,000 bonuses?

When will Rumsfeld propose his 12-year budget? At the current rate of $1 billion a week spent on Iraq (a low estimate; some experts believe the true figure is double that rate), the cost over 12 years would be $4 trillion, $380 billion. But that does not factor in hidden costs such as replacement materiel, special benefits, reenlistment bonuses, etc. And will the budget be reviewed by the DOD, the White House Office of Management and Budget or the Treasury? Furthermore, such financing of the war is done through supplemental budget requests. Once enacted by Congress, the spending is borrowed by selling Treasury bills mostly to Chinese and other Asian banks. The Chinese use the interest to finance their military modernization, which we have scolded them is not permitted. Where are the DOD analyses justifying this strategic tradeoff?

On the question of a timetable, either the president or the secretary of defense lacks credibility. If it's the secretary, and there are no analyses, no metrics behind his comment, then the president must immediately repudiate his statement. In his speech Bush, unfortunately, failed to clarify his administration's internal confusion. Until he does, the administration cannot claim to speak with a single voice.

In his call for "sacrifice," Bush strove to sound somber, but his tone was more gladiatorial than anguished. His speech superficially recalled the Vietnam speeches of Lyndon Johnson, another president who tried to muster public support for a war that increasingly resembled a quagmire. But Johnson's speeches were filled with a sense of the sobriety of the venture and moment. Even as he urged patience, as Bush did, and said the nation was being tested in Vietnam, as Bush did about Iraq, he spoke of moral ambiguities. In his State of the Union address of 1967, for example, Johnson said of the Vietnam War: "No better words could describe our present course than those once spoken by the great Thomas Jefferson: 'It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.'" And Johnson warned the country against "arousing the hatreds and the passions that are ordinarily loosed in time of war."

Johnson was an anguished president, a reluctant warrior, personally devastated by the loss of life and fully aware of the tragedy of the war to himself, his presidency and the nation. Vietnam was a war he inherited; he had made no single decision to go to war. From the beginning, he knew he presided over a disintegrating policy. He believed that if he withdrew from Vietnam, he would provoke a right-wing backlash as virulent as McCarthyism and sacrifice the Great Society. Johnson grappled with bad and worsening prospects. He was always skeptical about the war and tended toward pessimism. He gathered as much information as he could and reached out to the most informed people he could. He especially sought out senators he respected who had serious reservations, like Richard Russell and Mike Mansfield.

"You can't listen to those tapes of Johnson without hearing a man in utter agony, knowing he's trapped," Leslie Gelb, director of the Pentagon Papers project inside the Defense Department during the Johnson administration, and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. "Bush doesn't think he's trapped. Bush has reduced everything to will. I've never seen any self-doubt or agonizing, or anyone who works with him suggest that."

From the thoroughly favorable political position of national unanimity after 9/11, Bush pursued a war of choice in Iraq, relying on shaky, distorted and false intelligence. Skeptics were driven into a corner and punished. The administration became an echo chamber.

Immediately after the invasion, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neoconservative deputies systematically excluded knowledgeable experts from participation in reconstruction. The State Department's extensive "Future of Iraq" project was sidelined, and Rumsfeld refused to permit 32 State Department experts from being hired by the new U.S. Office of Reconstruction, as David L. Phillips, a member of the State Department's project, recounts in "Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco." Phillips' firsthand account is a chronicle of epic disaster. He reveals that it was not only the U.S. State Department and the intelligence services that were ignored. On the question of disbanding the Iraqi army, it was the U.S. military's senior experts who were shunted aside. "The Bush administration had committed one of the greatest errors in the history of U.S. warfare," he writes.

In his speech, Bush said that once the Iraqi army is re-created, we will leave. Iraqification has become the linchpin of U.S. policy. "To me the reason we didn't win in Vietnam isn't that we failed to arm the South Vietnamese armed forces or give them air cover at the end," said Gelb. "The reason they lost is that they didn't have a government they felt was worth defending and dying for. Without that, no army is going to fight. It won't take 12 years, it will take forever."

The crisis in Iraq has been produced by deliberate decisions taken by the Bush administration against the advice of the State Department, the military and others. "Their lack of planning was criminally irresponsible, grounds for impeachment," said Gelb. "Of the things that have happened to the U.S. in warfare, this was the single greatest dereliction of duty. It wasn't as if the military wasn't telling them they needed more troops. They still don't know what they are doing."

Bush's speech did not mark a new foreign policy. It did not resolve the political conundrums of Iraq. It cannot advance the combat-readiness of the feeble Iraqi army. Rather, his speech was an exercise in public relations to revive his own political situation.

Unlike Lyndon Johnson, he does not grasp the tragic dimensions. Like Johnson, he is giving hostages to fortune. Everything he says can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion. His fortitude appears as recklessness, his determination as cluelessness.

This story has been changed since it was first published.

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