Pgh Post Gazette: Bush bombs: The president fails to make a case for escalation

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07012/753203-192.stm

President Bush had one more try, in a televised speech Wednesday night from the White House, at getting the American people to believe he knows what he is doing in Iraq.

The measures that he outlined, principally an increase of 21,500 in the level of U.S. troops in Iraq, resounded badly. There is to the contrary, first, U.S. experience in Iraq to date; second, the actual situation on the ground there now; and, third, the clear lack of confidence in Mr. Bush's judgment on Iraq expressed by the American people at the ballot box in November and in the polls.

In pitching his "new way forward," Mr. Bush appeared before the American people much as a man would go to his family or a friend, say that he had lost all his money at the racetrack, but ask for just $20 more to put on a "sure thing" in one more race.

The problem is that Mr. Bush's gamble this time -- and given the situation in the streets of Baghdad, which he says the additional troops will address, with the reluctant Iraqis -- is with the lives of 21,500 more Americans, with more than 3,000 having died there already.