The insurgents' strategy is not to create another Vietnam. Their forces are not analogous to the hierarchical armies of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Some responsible Sunni sheiks and leaders may be drawn to participate in writing a new constitution, but there can be no full representation of insurgents. Apart from the nearly insuperable obstacles of getting Sunnis to endorse a Shiite Islamic republic and Kurdish autonomy, ultimately there is no "they" there to negotiate with. The insurgents have no concrete program; their game plan, after all, is a bloodbath. If they cannot strike at Americans, garrisoned in their forts, they will kill soft targets such as Iraqi policemen, local officials and even children. Their strategy is to perpetuate anarchy, perhaps triggering a civil war: the worse, the better; their models are Lebanon and Somalia.

"Bush is in a tough spot, one of his own making," retired three-star Marine Gen. Bernard Trainor told me. "Bush has to try to make the best of a bad hand. This administration did not really pose the what-if and what-then questions in planning. Now I hope they are. I haven't seen evidence of it yet. I'd like to think that people in the second and third tier understand. Whether the top three understand -- the president, [Dick] Cheney and Rumsfeld -- I don't know. It's hard to say. If you look at the evidence of the first administration, the answer would be no."

While other administration officials tried out the new post-war-on-terror slogans, Bush's longtime packager Karen Hughes, nominated as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, testified in her confirmation hearing before the Senate last week. Her rhetoric was filled with high-flown abstractions about "limits on the power of the state" and "respect for women," and stentorian phrases against "tyrants" and in favor of "freedom."

But U.S. diplomats in Iraq must attempt to negotiate through Iraqi ethnic, religious and sectarian politics to help produce a settlement that "doesn't quite live up to Jeffersonian principles," said Trainor. Women's rights, for example, will almost certainly be undercut in the new constitution. And Shiites are insistent that the new state be Islamic. "Right now the goal is to get the Iraqi national security forces into some sort of reasonable shape and draw down our forces. Our presence is an irritant, but perhaps it's a lesser of evils, at least for the time being. These are the things that should have been discussed early on." (Trainor's book, "Cobra 2: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," coauthored by Michael Gordon of the New York Times, will be published next year.)

In the closing days of the 2004 election campaign, President Bush returned time and again to the theme that aroused the most fervent support for him. "The outcome of this election will set the direction of the war against terror, and in this war there is no place for confusion and no substitute for victory." He ridiculed his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry. "His top foreign policy advisor has questioned whether it's even a war at all, saying that's just a metaphor, like the war on poverty," Bush said. "I've got news: Anyone who thinks we are fighting a metaphor does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to win the war and keep America secure."

But that "war," like the campaign, is over, and it has been rebranded. A new metaphor has been ordered up for duty. Just as Bush has leapt from reason to reason for the Iraq war, from weapons of mass destruction to the "march of freedom," so he now jumps from slogan to slogan. His changeability, in the short run, according to Trainor, may be a hazard. "Bush has to keep up a brave front. If he shows any signs of changing course perceptually, that could be a problem for him not only domestically but also on the battlefront. Any backing off from the hard position has a strong chance of giving encouragement to those who wish us ill. What happens when you aren't seen as exercising control? What happens when you are seen as less than all powerful? That's the position they are in right now."

The undermining of democracy by sacrificing credibility to justify endless war was early described by the historian Thucydides in his "History of the Peloponnesian War": "The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man."

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