Robert Kagan puts words to the misgivings I (and many others) feel about what’s been happening in Fallujah and Najaf: Lowering Our Sights.

That is what President Bush has been saying all along. But Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely. He does not seem to demand better answers, or any answers, from those who serve him. It’s not even clear that he understands how bad the situation in Iraq is or how close he is to losing public support for the war, a support that once lost may be impossible to regain. Bush politicos may take comfort from polls that show the public still trusts Bush more than Kerry when it comes to conducting the war. That won’t be worth much, however, if the public turns against the war itself. The tragedy may be that Bush will not understand until it is too late. In which case we will lose in Iraq, and the dire consequences that he has rightly warned of will be upon us.

Steven Den Beste comments:

It’s not like I think the press has suddenly stopped trying to paint the situation as black as it can, of course. I understand the risk of becoming too depressed about the situation after reading the deliberately slanted reports from Reuters. But there are some things which come through, both in the microscopic about this particular crisis and more globally on the overall management of the war, which are causing me some trepidation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m afraid we’re being too “nice”. I think we’re trying too much to be cooperative and understanding. We seem to be worrying more and more about “how they would react to us” and less and less about “getting them to worry about how we would react to them”.

It feels like the edge is off. There’s a certain ruthlessness needed to fight and win a war, and in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration showed that ruthlessness. But now it feels like that’s beginning to fade. It feels like the fire is going out.

It feels like the Bush Administration has decided to put the war onto the shelf until after the election. That’s what it feels like. And that worries me. This war is much too important to permit such considerations to affect its prosecution.

UPDATE: Also read Wretchard’s comments at Belmont Club.