Unite and Fight

Can the clichés! Give Iraq's Sunnis a good reason to support the government.
By Fred Kaplan
Updated Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:49 PM PT

The war in Iraq is reaching its most critical stage, a stage that should be supported by civilized people and powers everywhere—Western, Eastern, and Middle Eastern—regardless of their views about the war at the outset. Yet, just as President Bush should be recalibrating and refining a case for this support, both to the American people and to the rest of the world, he's rehashing canned clichés and shallow falsehoods, which will only deepen the disaffection.

On Monday, at a White House press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Bush was asked whether he thought the Iraqi insurgency was getting harder to defeat militarily.