Mixed message about Iraq

PRESIDENT BUSH gave two speeches in one yesterday. The first reported steady progress in training Iraqi security forces, offering hope that the bulk of US troops would be able to leave soon. The other spoke of victory in Iraq in such grandiose terms that it seemed US troops would remain far into the future. Americans are losing patience with the war. Rather than the rhetoric of lasting struggle, Bush needs to devise a pullout plan and tell the American people how he will achieve it.

The president is right that the United States can't set a pullout deadline now with the Iraqis about to vote for a parliament that will lead to the creation of a permanent government. Yet he also said: ''Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad province to security forces. . . . We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys." These optimistic assessments suggest that the new Iraqi government will soon be able to rely on its own forces for security.

But Bush also said: ''In World War II, free nations came together to fight the ideology of fascism and freedom prevailed. . . . Today in the Middle East, freedom is once again contending with an ideology that seeks to sow anger and hatred and despair." If the stakes really are that high, it would be wrong to pull out of Iraq before the insurgency was crushed. To do otherwise would be as bad as leaving Germany in 1945 before Hitler had been defeated.

Despite Bush's rhetoric, the stakes in Iraq are hardly as high as they were in World War II. Patching Iraq up will be a messy affair best left, in the end, to the Iraqi people, divided though they may be. At some point, the security value of US troops will be outweighed by their role as foreign occupiers. The United States needs to push ahead with the training of Iraqi forces, do what it can to get a government together, and make plans for an exit.

In ''Victory in Iraq," a report prepared by the National Security Council to accompany Bush's speech, the authors proclaim that ''victory will take time." ''Iraq is the central front in the global war on terror," it says, and the long-term goal of US strategy is to create an Iraq that is ''peaceful, united, stable, and secure" --a partner in the war on terror, an engine for regional economic growth, and an exemplar of democracy.

These goals are restatements of the neoconservative ambitions that pushed the administration to war in 2003. They were fantasy-based then, and time has not made them more attainable. Somewhere in the White House there have to be political realists who will tell the president that he can indulge all he wants in Churchillian rhetoric, but he has to start unambiguous planning for a withdrawal from Iraq.