NO KIDDING: Greg Djerejian points to a statement by President Bush to the effect that things in Iraq may last for a good long time yet.* I'll admit that, unlike a lot of people, I've been less disturbed by the sometimes slow progress in Iraq (I think I pitched it as at least 10 years before the war began), and so I haven't paid a ton of attention to the various statements about how long it'd take, but aside from the unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" moment, I always thought Bush had been rather clear on this (this is not to say anything about what Dick Cheney or Rumsfeld may have said). Perhaps I was wrong.
In any event, the thing this particularly brings to mind is an issue of The New Republic I ran across when organizing some of my books and magazines, which had a cover story about how Bush was going to pull out of Iraq really soon and cut short the transition process in that way. The magazine, of course, was from the spring of 2003. I suppose it's reasonable to argue we should've left after the elections in January (though I don't hold that view), or that we should start thinking about leaving (though I oppose timetable logic for all the usual reasons), but was there ever a period in which Bush got any credit for not abandoning things the moment they got slightly difficult? Or did the conventional wisdom just shift instantaneously from "he's going to leave as soon as he possibly can, because he obviously doesn't care about the Iraqi people at all" to "he's so incapable of seeing the situation for what it is, which is why he doesn't have the sense to leave?"
*and none of what I'm about to say applies to him: he just provides the peg
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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