LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day,
President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for
Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he
insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own
allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq
plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32
percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two
presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson
then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted
further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long
extrication from that quagmire....

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11
and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young
Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from
a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the
start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had
served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio.
Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48
percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district
that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel,
are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call."
The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no
avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and
their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed
the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as
"a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a
matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need
to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a
grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's
inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics
from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a
9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's
"Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not
because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered
"better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was
easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk
"war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al
Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."

But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a
doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last
year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I
look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he
learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions."
But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr.
Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the
general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be
required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security
that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11
- "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as
if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it....

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet"
about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice
president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The
country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes
the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the
fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck
us four years ago next month.