a head of my own

Another great attack on Bush's war from two grieving parents:

"President Bush had said he wants to support the 1,800 [troops] who've died by continuing the war until we win.

"Well, continuing the same thing without changing what you're doing is like the classic definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

"So if we're not going to do it differently, it's just going to be throwing 1,800 more bodies on the same scrap heap."

The article goes on talking about the secret attempt by the Bush administration to test the waters in light of a change of course that they clearly see as inevitable now that the public's mood about the war has shifted:

Only the slightest of hints suggest that the Bush administration is in the process recalculating its position on Iraq.

A front-page story in the Washington Post last weekend reported that US policy makers are indeed re-evaluating what is possible there.

An unnamed "official" was quoted thus: "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground...

"We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

[...]

Some saw it as evidence that the Bush administration really is accepting that Iraq will not achieve democracy and constitutional government, and that the United States will accept something short of that as constituting victory.

But one reader who is deeply involved in Iraqi politics saw it as a sort of temperature-taking exercise: The unnamed official, he said, was putting out the idea of re-evaluating Iraq policy in order to see what sort of reaction it received.

Whoever is right, Iraq doesn't seem likely to end up a free, democratic country any time soon.

I'm afraid Bush will have to wait a long time to see what his legacy is really going to be.