The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, acknowledged today that Mr. Bush had wanted to deliver his speech before Christmas. But he said it would be wrong to interpret the delay as a sign of presidential indecision.

"That would be the wrong inference to draw," Mr. Snow said. "It's a complex business, and there are a lot of things to take into account.

"You would expect and desire a commander in chief, in looking at a situation, to examine military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns, internal political concerns within Iraq, regional ramifications, how you get people to work in concert with one another," Mr. Snow said. "It is enormously complex."

Mr. Snow said the president continues to get the best advice possible. "And so, as he considers the options, he's not going to get rushed on it," Mr. Snow said. "He wants to make sure it's done right."

Actually, Tony, we would expect and desire our commander in chief to already know the military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns and every other concern. You see, Tony, this war was Bush's idea. He should know the options. He should have known them four years ago.

It is absurd that the President is spinning the media and the public by saying he's on a "listening tour." It is ludicrous that the media accepts it. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, it's clear the American people have given up on Bush's war. They've been spun too many times to believe anything Bush says about Iraq anymore.

By the time Bush makes a "decision" based on his "listening tour," the US death toll in Iraq will far exceed 3,000. God only knows how many more Iraqis will have to die. That's beyond absurd. To use the words of Senator Gordon Smith, that's criminal.

"Our objective is to help the Iraqi government deal with the extremists and killers, and support the vast majority of Iraqis who are reasonable people who want peace," Mr. Bush said after an Oval Office meeting with the Iraqi vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, the leader of the most powerful Sunni Arab party in Iraq.

Mr. Hashemi, sitting next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, said he and Mr. Bush agreed on the overall goal. "We have no other option in Iraq but to achieve that success," Mr. Hashemi said. "And with the cooperation of with our friends, Mr. President and the American administration, we will join forces to achieve that success in the pursuit of peace."

The Iraqi leader acknowledged that his country is enduring great suffering but said, "There is a light in the corridor."

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Hashemi offered a hint on what the new strategy might be, or how deeply they had discussed it. Neither man used the word "victory" in describing their aspirations, although Mr. Hashemi said he was confident of Washington's commitment to "the unforgettable, the long-awaited success."

Mr. Bush had been expected to speak to the American people about Iraq before Christmas. But a spokesman for the National Security Council said today that the talk will now take place after the New Year.

The spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the president is continuing to ask detailed questions of his advisers, many on operational details involving military considerations under review, and that the answers will not be ready until after Christmas.

Mr. Johndroe's announcement that Mr. Bush will address the American people in early January, rather than before Christmas as White House officials had indicated earlier, came shortly after the president held a video teleconference with several American commanders, the departing secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, acknowledged today that Mr. Bush had wanted to deliver his speech before Christmas. But he said it would be wrong to interpret the delay as a sign of presidential indecision.

"That would be the wrong inference to draw," Mr. Snow said. "It's a complex business, and there are a lot of things to take into account.

"You would expect and desire a commander in chief, in looking at a situation, to examine military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns, internal political concerns within Iraq, regional ramifications, how you get people to work in concert with one another," Mr. Snow said. "It is enormously complex."

Mr. Snow said the president continues to get the best advice possible. "And so, as he considers the options, he's not going to get rushed on it," Mr. Snow said. "He wants to make sure it's done right."

But Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority leader, said there should be no delay. "It has been six weeks since the American people demanded change in Iraq," Mr. Reid said in a statement, referring to the results of the November election. "In that time, Iraq has descended further toward all-out civil war, and all the President has done is fire Donald Rumsfeld and conduct a listening tour. Waiting and delaying on Iraq serves no one's interests."

The internal administration debate is focusing acutely on whether - and how - the United States should press the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to take more aggressive steps to crack down on militias, among other issues, following a specified timeline.

That course was among those recommended last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which called on the United States to link continued political and military support for Mr. Maliki's government to benchmarks it would have to meet.

The administration has been generally opposed to putting overt pressure on Mr. Maliki, but on Monday Mr. Snow left open the possibility that the United States would seek a way to get Mr. Maliki's government to achieve stability faster and get American troops home.

"There are going to be the best efforts to succeed as quickly as possible," Mr. Snow said. "The president has made it clear to Iraqis and to the United States that we want to have this succeed, and we want it to succeed as quickly as possible."

Mr. Snow refused to say whether the president remained firmly opposed to establishing timetables for American withdrawal - which would presumably coincide with Iraqis' reaching certain benchmarks in securing the country. However, he indicated during his regular afternoon briefing with reporters that the president would address the issue during an expected speech laying out his plan. He later said he had meant to imply only that the president was open to various options.

HANNITY: What happened this time, though?

RUMSFELD: I think that this time the outcome of the election, just to put it right up on the table, created a situation where I personally believe, and the president agrees, it is better for someone else to be leading this department with that new Congress. And it's better for the military; it's better for the department; and it's better for the administration. And I feel comfortable with that.

Right about now is when it could come in real handy to have a President who reads. A book learning wonk. A guy not allergic to the printed word. George W. Bush even admitted it himself. I think his exact quote was: "I don't read." And you know what, I believe him. Then this summer, something happened. I think it was part of that midterm campaign thing, when the President claimed his beach reading list included Camus' "The Stranger" and what he referred to as "Three Shakespeares." Three Shakespeares? Sounds like a customer at Baskin- Robbins ordering up a triple scoop of smart. And very suspicious coming from a man famous for struggling through the same page of "My Pet Goat" for 10 minutes.

The whole reading deal is important here because he should have been tempted to give the Iraq Study Group Report a brief scan before repeating "The Study Group agrees with me." Unh. No. They don't. He said this during a joint press conference with Tony Blair that could have been a Tivo of any of his previous eighty gazilliion press conferences with Tony Blair. Tony looks and sounds like a statesman and George like an eighth grader trying to fake his way through a book report on a classic he didn't bother to skim. Does the term "Cliff Notes" have any meaning here?

At the risk of switching milieus, we're stuck in "Groundhog Day." Doesn't matter what happens, we wake up the next morning and instead of hearing Sonny & Cher singing "I Got You Babe" we get the president playing the same lame game he has for three years: "Its a tough time. Going to take some hard work. We're working hard." His supporters say he's resolute. You know what, resolute isn't always a good thing. Butt cancer is resolute.

We won't even get into the ironic nature of his "hard work" mantra. How odd to be coming from a guy who pre- president was the poster child for social promotion. But an exhortation to hard work isn't the only blunted arrow in his nebulous quiver. In response to what measures he might take based on the report, he gravely intoned, "We will take every proposal seriously and will act in a timely fashion," which is Presidential Dismissal Speak for, "yeah, whatever."

The Baker-Hamilton Group's report was not the chronicle of clarity itself. It came to the considered opinion that ... Iraq is messed up and mostly, its our fault. For this we spent a million dollars? Too bad they didn't have time to get into other blistering exposes like, the Pacific Ocean is moist. Wood is not your foremost option for conducting electricity. Wine- peanut butter -- not a match. The board goes back.

The President refused to comment on specifics in the report by dipping into his bottomless bag of vague generalities. "My message is this: I want to work with the Congress, I want to work with people in both parties." Yeah, sure he does, the same way a five year old with a magnifying glass wants to work with ants. The bi- partisan Study Group provided 79 recommendations for alleviating the chaos in Iraq. Unfortunately none of them involved the President and his entire Cabinet resigning, proving perhaps, this study group should've studied more.

Will Durst is a political comic, syndicated columnist, AM radio talk show host and defense liability.

The Bush administration's Iraq adventure is beginning to remind me of that section in Catch-22 when mess officer extraordinaire Milo Minderbinder buys up the entire Egyptian cotton crop. At first Milo thinks he's getting the deal of the century, but in the end he just gets stuck with a shitload of cotton that he can't sell. Next thing you know, he's covering raw cotton with melted chocolate and trying to serve it as a dessert to the guys in the mess hall. People are choking everywhere, throwing up, and Milo just keeps smiling, pretending it's delicious...

The Iraq war is sort of the same thing. Bush and Rumsfeld and all of those clowns went into that country with their heads full of idiot fantasies -- Arab kids joyously throwing flowers at GIs, liberated Bedouins buying Dockers slacks in bulk and quoting Thomas Jefferson in cyber-cafes, young Muslims packing meeting halls in Mosul and Tal Afar to hear Tom Friedman preach about globalization. That exactly didn't work out, and now four years later George Bush is in the unenviable position of having to invite to the White House a Holocaust denier and proud love slave of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, and then shake his hand, smile, and sell him as America's best hope for democracy in "free" Iraq.

A pessimist would call that a real shitty situation, but I'm counting on Bush to balk at that suggestion and take the optimistic course, the obvious chocolate-covered cotton move. Which is this: instead of making some craven apology for getting in bed with a Holocaust denier, Bush should just deny the Holocaust himself!

I'm not saying there's no downside to this move for Bush -- he'd never be rid of Abe Foxman, for one thing -- but if he made Holocaust denial official U.S. policy, just peevishly said something like "Heck, it's not like it's ever been proven" at an afternoon press conference, then he could at least have pretended that he wasn't forced into this devil's alliance with Al-Hakim. Throw your arm around him and smile: Things are going exactly as planned! Nothing is fucked here!

That's what the old Bush would have done, anyway. The old Bush, the guy we all learned to love in the early part of this decade, he and Karl Rove would have seen this situation as an opportunity, an intellectual challenge. The pre-indictment Rove anyway would never have backed down. He would have issued the appropriate Holocaust talking points, and after three weeks of Rush and Hannity and Savage taking shots at Hamptons liberal Steven Spielberg and the big-foreheaded Irish Kinsey-lover Liam Neeson and the sexually ambiguous pickle-slurping creep Adrian Brody, and everyone else who's ever been in a Holocaust movie, the polls even on that issue would have come around eventually, no doubt about it.

Because the old Karl Rove understood that there's only one real sin in American politics, and that's apologizing. You act like you know what you're doing, people in this country will buy whatever you're selling. They'll eat chocolate-covered cotton. They'll eat worse. They'll crawl on their knees to eat wet dogshit and beg for more. You just can't ever flinch as you ladle it onto their plate.

The old Bushies understood this, but this newest incarnation is too broken and demoralized to remember the strategies that got them to the top. They are being held back now, ironically, by the tiny, anemic quotient of restraint and decency parasitically embedded in their policies. If Bush had simply invaded Iraq, ransacked the place in search of WMDs, seized its oil wells, captured Saddam Hussein and impaled him on a pike, and then declared victory and pulled the troops out, leaving the non-oil-producing regions of the country to tear themselves apart in an insane chaos of civil war and religious violence, his approval rating would still be in the high sixties, maybe even the seventies.

Instead, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" prophesy has sadly come to pass -- but why was that inevitable? Why couldn't we just break shit and then saunter out of the store, both middle fingers trained at the cashier's face? After all, we're America! Who would stop us? The world would have been horrified, but to hell with the world; here in America, all people care about is American casualties and American taxes. If our soldiers were out of Iraq now and we weren't still spending a billion bucks a minute on this war, most of America would still be on board with the original decision to go in -- even if the Iraq we eventually left behind was a Rwanda-like, smoldering-cemetery of a state. After all, the American population has successfully blown off plenty of massacres before -- even ones we helped cause, like Indonesia in the '60s and Guatemala in the '70s and '80s. Iraq could have been the same kind of easily-ignored little coffee stain on the American conscience.

But that train has left the station, and the reason for that is that this administration apparently really is wedded to its nutty dream of building a Switzerland full of happy neo-capitalist Muslims in the middle of Asia minor. If Bush had been just a little more evil, just a little more of the cheap vicious fuckhead we all thought he was for so long, we'd be out of Iraq right now and engaged in the next policy "success" -- i.e. a "Tehran Spring" and a subsequent taxidermy of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, with the "Mission Accomplished" money-shot cued up for the first Monday in November 2008.

Instead, it's Ahmedinejad who is toying with us, as the Bush administration flounders in the lethal middle ground between mindless military bravado and reluctant, halfhearted consideration for the constraints of civilization and international law. Having entered Iraq without any semblance of an occupation plan, our blockheaded leader is belatedly acting like a man concerned with his legacy as a nation-builder, a Dr. Frankenstein who cannot bring himself to kill his monstrous dream of Iraqi democracy. And it's this fatal weakness that is producing perhaps the very worst consequence of this war, the stunning international political victory of Ahmedinejad, the Holocaust-denying Iranian reptile.

Last week, two things happened. The first is that Bush received Al-Hakim, a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric who has very close ties to Iran and Ahmedinejad. Bush is cozying up to Al-Hakim because he can't afford to kiss Ahmedinejad's ass publicly and Al-Hakim is the next best thing, a person whose cooperation will be necessary if the security situation in Iraq is to be improved. By itself this was a kind of humiliation for Bush, a recognition that he can't provide for Iraq's security by himself, even with the world's mightiest army, and still needs to play supplicant to some prehistoric ascetic in a beard and cape.

The second thing that happened is that the nation of Iran hosted an "academic conference" held to consider the "scientific question" of whether the Holocaust took place. Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, opened the conference by attacking what he termed "Western restrictions on scientific and scholarly study," saying that the West did not allow Holocaust denial because it would lead to questions about the nature of the Israeli state. Following Mottaki was our own David Duke, who claimed that the West had a "Holocaust mafia" that squelched dissent on the issue.

Let it be noted for the record that one very good reason that the United States did not recognize this excellent event by dropping a MOAB in the middle of it is that our President Bush was more or less exactly at that moment meeting with an important Iranian ally to beg for help in untangling America's hopeless political mess in Iraq. And while we can't give Ahmedinejad credit for planning this sequence of events -- the Holocaust conference was announced long before Al-Hakim's visit -- there's no doubt that the general trend of his diplomacy in the past years, as opposed to Bush's anyway, laid the foundation for this incredible political checkmate. Conceived as a blow to the heart of Islamic extremism, Bush's insane pursuit of the Iraqi democratic mirage has instead forced the United States into the role of a formal appeaser of some of the vilest state ideology seen on earth since Hitler's time. And it couldn't have worked out any better for Ahmedinejad, who in just four years has not only seen the United States take out his most dangerous military enemy in Saddam Hussein, but has seen the conditions laid for both a Shiite resurgence in Iraq and the dealing of a crippling blow to American geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East. It makes one wonder how much the Iranians helped us along down this path to begin with, whether those reports of Ahmed Chalabi chilling in Tehran in the weeks before the war might actually be true. Perhaps future historians will find an alternate source for some of our original "solid information" about Iraqi WMDs.

Who knows. What we do know is that as of last week, we have officially been played like a fiddle by one of the world's all-time evil bastards. And we also now can say for sure that the famed cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Bush-Rove-Cheney crew has been proven to be a crock. Those guys are ruthless when it comes to winning American elections. But when it comes to war and diplomacy, they're a bunch of kittens. You can't Swift-Boat Moqtada Al-Sadr. When it comes to real enemies, our leaders are useless.

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had a feast this week and his main course was George Bush with an apple in his mouth. Has it ever been more embarrassing to be an American?

The long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group is now in the public domain, and while it offers no sure-fire remedies, it does represent an opportunity to cure the severe case of denial from which U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has been suffering. The report amounts to a comprehensive indictment of American strategy in Iraq and recommends a series of changes, including a few that directly contradict some of the White House's most dearly held convictions. It's clear, however, that Washington's approach to Iraq and the broader Middle East have been a colossal and costly failure. The best course to take is by no means obvious, but the need to abandon the current one is precisely that.

As is frequently the case when an American president nears the end of his time in office, senior White House officials are working feverishly to burnish the legacy that their boss will leave behind. Theirs will be an uphill battle, especially when one considers that the incoming defense secretary, Robert Gates, has publicly conceded that the centerpiece of Bush's presidency, the war in Iraq, is not being won. By repeatedly misidentifying individual events as turning points, Bush and his most trusted advisers have repeated a key error of Vietnam-era administrations, only to watch helplessly as the situation continued to deteriorate. Gates has served notice that he has no plans to be a sycophant who regurgitates the White House's fantasies about how "well" the war in Iraq is going. What remains to be seen is whether the man in the Oval Office can be persuaded to discard the policies to which he has clung for so very long.

The report contains two key tests of Bush's willingness to face facts. One is a call to actively press for a resumption of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. This will be essential if the United States is to regain any amount of trust in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The other is a recommendation that Washington end its self-defeating refusal to engage Damascus and Tehran. This is the only possible way to stabilize Iraq. If Bush finds either step too distasteful to take, his legacy will be one of defeat, disaster and delusion.

It is hard for anyone to accept that they have championed a path of folly, least of all the leader of the world's most powerful country. There is no other way, though, for Bush to salvage his presidency. The beauty of democratic systems in general - and of America's in particular - is a capacity for self-diagnosis. If Bush fails to take advantage of what is almost certainly his last chance to avail himself of this happy circumstance, he will richly deserve the scorn of history that surely awaits him.

The recommendations made to President Bush by the Iraq Study Group (ISG is the acronym in English) comprise the greatest humiliation ever suffered by a seated American leader. They expose the delusion of the Bush Doctrine and the unilateralism of American decision-making that led to the defeat in Iraq. And, most of all, the report was a lesson in realpolitik for a group of amateurs called neoconservatives, who kidnapped the foreign policy of the United States.

Nothing much new was proposed by the bipartisan group, presided over by ex-Secretary of State James Baker III and comprising veteran heavyweights of politics and past American administrations. New, or better yet, perhaps excessively hopeful, its very existence presumes that a president who is ignorant about foreign policy, stubborn and limited in his ability to reason, and with an ideological vision of international conflicts, can backtrack and accept the Group's recommendations (there are 79 of them).

The key conclusions are sensible and stable and can be summarized briefly as follows, since simple solutions are generally the most efficient. Here we go: a) a timetable for the withdrawal of American fighting forces; b) strengthening the decision-making and capacity to take action of the Iraqi government; c) reaching some kind of understanding with Iraq's key neighbors, notably Iran and Syria; d) a comprehensive effort to address the Palestinian question, as a way to attract other Arab countries in help stabilize Iraq.

The main problem is that these recommendations, as numerous Washington critics have already pointed out, seem more appropriate for the Middle East as it existed 15 years ago - more or less at the end of the first Gulf War. Two important factors have changed since then. The first is the growth of ideological radicalism - and not only Islamic radicalism. The second is the loss of American credibility - and its defeat in confronting its adversaries.

Beyond this, two facts of enormous relevance have barely begun to show their consequences, and both were provoked by the invasion in 2003. First, the Americans, observes the Financial Times, in one strike destroyed the millennium-old order in Mesopotamia: that of supremacy of Sunnis over Shiites (the ethnic cleansing to which the Iraqis are so dedicated, at a cost of 5,000 deaths per month, is a consequence this). And the second: Iran was elevated to being the main power in the region, with direct influence over what happens from Heart in Afghanistan, to Baghdad, and including all of southern Iraq. Never in his wildest dreams did the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's Islamic revolution, contemplate such an expansion of Iranian influence.

The Iraq Study Group observes that the situation in Iraq cannot be separated from another far older dispute in the region, the Arab-Israeli conflict. James Baker III goes as far as to say that Washington will never attract other Arab states to help stabilize Iraq (he says this - almost in passing) if it isn't capable of exercising some influence over Israel - something that Bush the Father (to whom Baker was a principle advisor and counselor) knew how to do.

But the recent war in the South of Lebanon against Hezbullah (who was supported by Syria and Iran) was a political failure and a military fiasco - provoked by Israel's new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a man who the Americans sincerely doubt can properly evaluate events. On the Palestinian side, without going into an explanation of its deepest causes, there is administrative chaos, a political split and an internal war. Under these circumstances, where would it be possible to move forward? And with whom?

For those that appreciate psychoanalyzing people involved in historic decision-making, the destructive conclusion of the Baker group - that the United States is losing the war in Iraq - brings up the relationship between Bush the father and Bush the son. The father ordered a stop to the first Gulf War in March of '91 because he feared the chaos that would accompany the fall of Saddam from power and the resulting Shiite uprising in the South of Iraq. Bush the son suggested going to the field to settle the account that his father had left open. It's as if Uncle Baker has come to show the boy the consequences of his irresponsibility.

But there is a universal lesson in the world presented by the Iraq Study Group. Facts eventually impose themselves on ideological visions of reality and, in general, show the incalculable cost in human life of forgetting this. Nearly always, the consequences of actions taken out of ideological bias are contrary to those intended by the responsible party, as is the case in Iraq. This should be of value for Bush, just as it is for [Venezuelan President] Chávez or [Brazilian Prime Minister] Lula.

Leaders that lull themselves to sleep tend to respect and recognize reality only when it's too late. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the greatest living American historian, opens his recent book on war and the American presidency with a quote from Hegel: "some politician never learn anything useful from history."