EDITORIAL
Bush's Iraq update: clearer plans needed

If an increasingly restive American public expected a clear explanation and plan for an end game out of President Bush's major address last night on Iraq, it did not get it.

Bush, aware that support for his invasion of Iraq is sliding, made an impassioned argument that our effort there is the right thing to do.

And in the end, it may indeed turn out to be the right thing to have done. But to date, and despite the pomp and care with which the speech was surrounded, that argument has not been successfully made.

A half-dozen times the president sought to link our invasion of Iraq to the surge of international terrorism symbolized by the attacks of 9/11.

The wording was careful; he made no direct association between Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein. But the connection was there for anyone who chose to make it.

Iraq, the president said, is where the terrorists who attacked New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and other spots around the world "are making their stand."

But what came first? The emergence of Iraq as a central battlefield in the war on terrorism or the U.S.-led invasion that has indisputably led to a surge in violence?

If Iraq is, as the president said, the "central front" in the war against terror, how did it get that way? The answer, clearly, is because the United States decided to invade.

What's still needed is a clear description of what we hope to accomplish, what that will look like when we get it and how we plan to get there. This emphatically does not mean imposing a timetable. It means doing a better job than simply saying we are there because it is the right thing to do and Americans finish what they start.