Last week, President Bush decided to cut and run from staying the course. The Iraq message has shifted, even if little else has, and one felt a little sorry for Republican candidates who had been parroting "stay the course" throughout the election campaign only to find that the party line has suddenly changed.

Others, who have been trying to distance themselves from those toxic coattails, might find some solace in the president's last-minute, and somewhat desperate, attempt to defuse the Iraq issue in time for Nov. 7.

To admit that the war is going badly, even to admit to a couple of mistakes, cannot have been easy for such an inflexible individual as Bush, who is unreceptive to what some in his administration sometimes derisively call reality.

The mistakes that Bush admitted to -- not anticipating that the Iraqi Army would melt away and that civil servants wouldn't show up for work when American troops entered Baghdad -- are but a tiny fraction compared with the many errors now being documented in dozens of new books.

The books agree that the Bush administration entered Iraq like a dim-witted child stumbling into a Middle Eastern bazaar and smashing things. America's performance has been so pathetic that one hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry. Perhaps, in the run-up to the election, Bush believes that if he throws a few mistakes to the wolves he can draw attention away from the mother of all mistakes: invading Iraq in the first place.

My favorite example of American innocence abroad, recounted by Peter Galbraith in his book "The End of Iraq," is the tale of an American coming up to Kurdistan to bully the Kurds into giving up their militia, the Peshmerga. The Kurds agree to disband their militia, and form instead three separate units, a rapid reaction force, a counter terrorism strike force, and a mountain ranger unit.

The official leaves, saying "how important it was that the Kurds, masters of Iraq's largest militia, were willing to give it up for the sake of national unity," Galbraith writes. However, "some doubt may have crept into his mind [when he] asked for the Kurdish translation of mountain rangers. 'Peshmerga,' was the reply. . . . Had he asked he would have discovered that rapid reaction force and counterterrorism strike force are also rendered into Kurdish as Peshmerga."

The Iraqi flag flies nowhere in Kurdistan. The Iraqi government is forbidden to send armed forces into the region, or even to collect taxes. Even Iraqis must submit to passport control upon entering the region. The unity of Iraq is a myth perpetuated to placate Americans.

As for the rest of Iraq, Bush says that "Americans have no intention of taking sides in a sectarian struggle or standing in the cross fire between rival factions." Yet there we are in the battle for Baghdad, staving off attacks from Sunni insurgents and bombing Shi'ite neighborhoods to kill Shi'ite militia leaders in a civil war that the Bush administration still denies exists.

With Bush's generals admitting that their campaign to pacify Baghdad is failing, and that they might need more troops, I turned to an old Time magazine that described Vietnam after the first three years as a "dirty, ruthless, wandering war, which has neither visible front lines nor visible end."

Like Bush in Iraq, President Johnson had hoped to bring some soldiers home in 1965 when South Vietnamese troops had been properly trained to take on their own security. "Now there is no more talk of being out by 1965 -- or any other year in the foreseeable future," Time said in 1964. "After three years of intensive effort and considerable pain, including the expenditure of $3.3 billion in aid and the loss of 262 Americans killed, 1,196 wounded or injured . . . the war is still not being discernibly won." So Johnson sent in more soldiers.

We would be grateful today if our expenditure of blood and treasure in Iraq were that low after three years.

Time wondered back then "how long American opinion will accept being told that the war is endless." A US official was quoted as saying, "only a fool would pick a date when we can consider the job done, three years? Five years? Ten? Fifteen?"

That war lasted another 11 years, leaving more than 50,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese dead, but victory remained elusive. In Iraq this time around there is no chance that the American people will be that patient.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

©2006 Boston Globe

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