WASHINGTON - President Bush addressed three very different audiences on Thursday night, and he had to hope that each would hear a different message.
To an American public overwhelmingly searching for an exit from Iraq, Bush said that he was now ready to take his first, halting steps toward drawdown - even if what he described as a "return on success" was more akin, in the eyes of his critics, to a recognition that he has run out of additional forces to keep the troop buildup he began this year going, and now has no other choice.
To Iraq's leaders, who failed to take advantage of what the Bush administration characterized in January as their last chance to reach political reconciliation, Bush's message was that America would stay for the long haul. But at the same time he warned, once again, that time is running out to hold the country together.
And to the insurgents who have been fighting to force the U.S. out of Iraq - and to the mullahs in Iran - Bush sent a clear declaration that the U.S. was not leaving, and that it would be a force to reckon with for years to come. He was sending the same message, his aides said, to Iraq's Sunni neighbors, who fear that if America throws in the towel, the result could be even greater chaos and the rise of Tehran as the dominant regional power, perhaps backed by nuclear arms.
Bush's speech was the culmination of a month-long orchestrated game plan to change the political debate in Washington and the country. But in the end, the speech once again raised the question of what America's mission in Iraq really is - and how long it will last.
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And it was an indicator of the balancing act that will likely consume the last 16 months of the Bush presidency, as he tries to hold together wavering members of his party with promises of further drawdowns as soon as conditions allow while still talking about a role in Iraq and the region modeled on America's five-decade-long presence on the Korean peninsula.
Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model - a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East.
That, of course, is a very different goal than the "victory" Bush was touting less than two years ago.
On Thursday, he talked about "success," not victory, and suggested that the road ahead would be inching, province-by-province progress that would eventually enable the United States to focus on training Iraqi units, pursuing Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia and containing Iran.
