A truly horrible summer that seemed unending finally is fading away, and the cold winds of reality are blowing down the collars of a president and the key players in his administration. Those winds could foretell an even more terrible winter ahead.

The word in Washington and in the halls of the Pentagon is that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is seriously considering handing in his resignation sometime this month.

The generals who run the war in Iraq -- Central Command boss Gen. John Abizaid and ground commander Gen. George Casey -- came to town last week and let slip the awful truth about our efforts to stand up an Iraqi army and security force.

Although the Americans have spent a small fortune training and equipping more than 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and militia and police, the generals concede that only one battalion of perhaps 700 troops actually is capable of operating against the home-grown insurgents and the foreign jihad terrorists.

After two years only one battalion can stand alone without American guidance, backup, direction and fire support.

This was the only real hope of beginning to hand off responsibility for Iraq's future to Iraqis. And it has blown away on those cold winds blowing through the nation's capital.

The president was quick to slap down any thought of reducing the American presence on the roads and streets of Iraq -- a presence that the generals report is no longer stifling the insurgency but actually feeding it. A presence no longer converting Iraqis to Jeffersonian democracy but creating new converts to terrorism and resistance.

The president, at a news conference, ignored the best advice of his generals and the growing firestorm both in Iraq and America over the future of our occupation of Iraq. He declared: ``We're not leaving Iraq. We will succeed in Iraq.''

The president is still ''staying the course'' as the people following him fall further and further behind. We have written before, and will again: Staying the course only makes sense if you are on the right course. Otherwise you are just walking deeper into the swamp and the quicksand waiting ahead.

If that weren't enough, new life was blown into the prisoner-abuse scandal recently by a young West Point-educated captain, Ian Fishback, who didn't like what he was hearing about the physical abuse of Iraqi detainees by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division and asked his superiors for guidance on standards of conduct.

Eventually he went public and wrote to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the top-ranking members of the Senate Armed Service Committee. His actions helped ensure that an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that would flatly outlaw any cruel and unusual treatment of detainees in American custody anywhere worldwide would pass over Bush's veto threat and the Republican Senate leadership's attempt to block a vote. The amendment is sponsored by Sens. McCain, Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. Some who opposed it went so far as to say that our forces should be given the freedom to use the terrorists' own methods against those we capture.

If we are to become as cruel and inhumane as al Qaeda, then why fight al Qaeda? We will then have become no better than al Qaeda. And we might as well make deals with Osama bin Laden as we once sent people like Rumsfeld to do deals with Saddam Hussein.

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.

© Copyright 2005 Miami Herald

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