"Feaverish" or "Feaveresque"

The Times reporter, repeating the old, sorry tale that Bush doesn't pay attention to polls, appears to be surprised that a political advisor is dictating "policy" in the White House.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraqi war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polling, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.

That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

The cynicism is typical. It does not occur to the Cheney administration that the American public may be sentient enough -- just -- to be unimpressed by a document that refers to itself as a "national strategy" and yet contains no hint of strategy beyond more clapping and more backdrops with the word "Victory" repeated in a diagonal pattern.

The White House official said that while not all top officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the strategy document, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, "I have had multiple opportunities to read this document, to critique it, to send it back," with the goal of making "sure that what it says is a) accurate, and b) executable."

Indeed, as it contains nothing to execute other than the chanting of more gaseous bromides.

Sadly, though, our troops and the insurgents (oops, sorry, the ELIGs), aren't adequately playing their assigned roles in the elaborate plan.