Remember when Bill Clinton got all that grief for his admission of youthful marijuana use?

Whatever reality-altering substance George W. Bush is on, it's sure stronger than a little uninhaled weed.

God, this is getting old.

Last Wednesday's Bush speech at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis--military audiences being the only kind that can be ordered to be respectful of this president any longer--was supposed to be a major new statement of Bush administration policy goals in Iraq. The simultaneous release of a 35-page National Strategy for Victory in Iraq was supposed to show the country and the world that the Bushies had a plan. Any plan.

It doesn't. The most striking aspect of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq is that it contains no strategy for victory in Iraq. Once again, it doesn't even define victory. No measurable goals, no benchmarks for success, nothing.

Bush's assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq is so utterly delusional that it doesn't matter, anyway. You can't decide how to get somewhere if you don't know where you already are and you don't know where you want to go.

The speech and the document are more of the same: more lofty rhetoric, more touting of nonexistent progress, more stay-the-course, more freedom and democracy and blah, blah, blah. It is a complete and utter abandonment of responsibility for a horrific mess entirely of the president's making.

Civil war in Iraq has already begun. The government put in power by Bush and his cronies, the one taking orders from the American embassy, is torturing prisoners and running death squads. The new Iraqi military being trumpeted by Washington is comically inept, serving mostly to funnel recruits and weaponry to the insurgency. Bush's touted electoral process is riddled with fraud and Sunni voter suppression. Women have far fewer rights than under Saddam, and Sharia law is being enforced by clerics' goons in much of the country. Leaders from across Iraq's political spectrum want a negotiated settlement and want a timetable for US troops to leave. The Iraqi public is overwhelmingly hostile to Americans. The insurgency continues to grow in scope and ferocity. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups have found a new operating base in the world's most lawless country. Untold numbers of Iraqi civilians continue to be caught in all the crossfire. Young American soldiers continue to die.

Amazingly, Bush's speech reflected none of this. The speech has to be considered a cruel joke in Iraq and, for that matter, in most of the rest of the world. It was intended for a domestic US audience, and intended solely to stop the hemorrhaging in public support for the war and for the president.

It won't. Americans--and, bless them, a few Democrats, too--have begun to ask some hard questions of Bush's Folly. The questions didn't go away when the White House tried bullying critics, and they won't go away after this bit of cheap cheerleading.

We've heard all this before. It took Bush exactly 27 seconds to fraudulently invoke 9-11. We're fighting "them" over there so that we don't have to fight "them" (evidence, please?) over here. The enemy is "terrorists" who, being inhuman evildoers, are waging war "against humanity"--all part of the continuing White House effort to peddle the long-discredited myth that the insurgency is fueled by foreign fighters motivated by religion, rather than by home-grown nationalists motivated by a foreign occupation of their country. Even the Pentagon doesn't believe that crap.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these fairy tales is how out of step they are with Bush's own puppet government in Iraq. In late November, a broad cross-section of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders met under the auspices of the Arab League in Cairo and indicated they wanted a negotiated end to the bloodshed, a concept that, so far as the Bush crew is concerned, might as well be in Arabic. They also demanded a timetable for US withdrawal. They also declared that an insurgency to rid Iraq of foreign occupiers is justified. If our own puppets don't want our "help" in Iraq, what the hell are we doing there?

By the terms laid out by Bush this morning, this war will literally last forever. There will always be "terrorists"; there will always be Iraqis willing to die to be free of foreign occupation, just as there would be if America were somehow overrun. It's not hard to grasp. It is so obvious, in fact, that there is a school of thought that Bush and his chickenhawk cabal wants permanent war, wants a permanently anarchic Iraq.

It won't happen. Plenty of Republicans are coming to the realization that this issue is going to cost them elections in November 2006. There is nothing like the fear of losing power to force changes in policy.

To that end, the fate of all those Iraqis caught in the crossfire is firmly in the hands of the American public. It's one thing for opinion polls to show that half the country wants an immediate withdrawal, more than half thinks the White House lied, and a solid majority thinks the war was a mistake. It's another thing entirely for the public to get so mad about it all that they force the architects of this unnatural disaster out of office.

Rep. John Murtha, in making his pivotal call for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month, noted that Congress and the White House were way behind the American people on this issue.

They still are.