'All Over the Place'

It's the GOP That's Come Unglued Over Iraq

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page A17

The president has fled the field from "stay the course," signaling not just the unwinnability of his war but the bankruptcy of his political strategy. For as the president and his party grope for an alternative plan of action in Iraq, Karl Rove's bright line between Republican resolve and Democratic defeatism has become irreversibly fuzzed.

"Stay the course," after all, was never intended to have a free-standing existence. Republicans invoked it only in dialectical contrast to "cut and run," their caricature of the Democrats' preference for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, or for partitioning it into three separate quasi-nations, or for redeploying our troops to neighboring states -- or, more simply, of the Democrats' mounting conviction that our presence in Iraq was growing more pointless each day.