Perhaps best answered by contrast with past wars. All conventional wars have concrete enemies who can be named with specificity, and the progress of the war can be measured on a map in terms of territory taken by an enemy. The concreteness of the strugge allows a definition of winning that is equally concrete and that translates directly into an overall plan: Push the enemy back on to his home ground, above all else; then, if possible, destroy or occupy that homeland to prevent future wars.

Sure, this "war on terror" or "struggle against whatever" is a different kind of war. And that's the problem: Bush doesn't seem to be able to define or even describe this thing in sensible terms. "They jes plain hate us", if truly reflective of Bush's "understanding" of the enemy, doesn't lead to a definition of victory. At best what Bush vaguely describes is an asymptotic never-ending struggle: If they just hate us, then all we can do is try to kill them faster than the supply of terrorists can be replenished.

Do you really think that we can ever truly win that way?

You exhibit the same conceptual blinders when you talk about a "tactical plan", lines of supply, military operations, military press conferences, etc. All those things reflect conventional military thinking in what is supposed to be a very new kind of war. And all of those things are considerations only because we launched a traditional military invasion of Iraq, as if we're trying to force the struggle to be a military one despite lipservice that it's not. Bush keeps asserting that "Iraq is the front line of the war on terror", and that should set off alarm bells. How can you have a "front line" in a war against a distributed, geographically mobile, non traditional, enemy practicing asymmetrical warfare? In that game, it's almost as if we're the ones walking obligingly into the killing grounds, not the terrorists who are supposed to blindly flock to Iraq where they can be conveniently killed.

Bush has lots of "iniatives", which is just a euphemism for things you fling at the wall in the hope that something will stick. All too often it's evidence of a misguided faith in magic bullets such as the invasion of Iraq and democratizing the Middle East. Bringing democracy to the Middle East sounds like a worthy goal in theory, but our experience in Iraq is already showing that it's nowhere near as easy as the Bushies claimed it would be, and there's solid reason to suppose that it's complicated things by introducing an effort tangential to the problem of terrorism.

Q: How do you know the Bush Administration is lying?
A: Their lips are moving.

I know you don't subscribe to that belief, Tom. So, assuming that all of Bush's pronouncements on the subject are sincere and aren't concealing duplicity, do you see a plan? If so, what is it? How does Bush define victory?