All Intensive Purposes

Ambassador Khalilzad aside, George Will starts and ends with a comparison of Winston Churchill and George Bush:

When late in the spring of 1940 people of southeastern England flocked across the Channel in their pleasure craft and fishing boats to evacuate soldiers trapped on Dunkirk beaches, euphoria swept Britain. So Prime Minister Winston Churchill sternly told the nation: "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

Or by curfews, such as the one that cooled the furies that engulfed Iraq after the bombing last week of a Shiite shrine. Wars are not won simply by facing facts, but facing them is a necessary prerequisite.

Last week, in the latest iteration of a familiar speech (the enemy is "brutal," "we're on the offensive," "freedom is on the march") that should be retired, the president said, "This is a moment of choosing for the Iraqi people." Meaning what?

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Today, with all three components of the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002, the country would welcome, and Iraq's political class needs to hear, as a glimpse into the abyss, presidential words as realistic as those Britain heard on June 4, 1940.

Strangely, Will's version is not what most people will recall that Churchill said after Dunkirk. The famous lines, though stirring, were perhaps less realistic:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

(Perhaps apocryphally, as the House of Commons thundered in response to these lines, Churchill whispered to a colleague, ""And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!")

As John Lukacs describes in Five Days in London, there were some days in May, 1940, when some in Britain considered the road to surrender, but by the time he gave this speech in early June, Churchill had prevailed to thwart this.

Will's faith that the right presidential address can turn fix what ails Iraq is what you would expect from a pundit. But in a war, what good is a pseudo-event? Maybe what we need is not Churchillian words, but a new policy. Churchill, famously, found a rhetoric to match the crisis. Bush, as even Will now seems to see, hopes the crisis will match his rhetoric.