Michael Kinsley: Yrotciv in Iraq

Bush's backpedaling on the war.
Posted Friday, Sept. 22, 2006, at 7:38 AM ET

Harold Pinter wrote a play a while back called Betrayal. (Rent the movie: It's terrific.) The plot was a fairly mundane story about an adulterous affair among affluent London literati. What gives the tale its haunting magic is that Pinter tells it in reverse: starting with the couple breaking up and ending with that first, ambiguous flirtation.

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So, it's been used by some of the masters. And it's a good trick: disorienting, as modern art is supposed to be, and with built-in poignance. But that doesn't mean that anyone can pull it off. Frankly, I would have pegged George W. Bush—whose awareness of his own weaknesses is one of his more attractive traits—as just about the last person in the world who would try this literary jujitsu. But in his own narrative of his own war (the one in Iraq), he has done it. If you trace the concept of "victory" in his remarks on Iraq, and those of subordinates, you discover a war that was won three and a half years ago, and today has barely started.