Facing rock-bottom poll numbers and the judgment of history, President Bush has little to lose politically in using the last 18 months of his presidency to try to prove critics of his war policy wrong. The president followed that path Thursday, finding promise in a "young democracy" in Iraq despite descriptions by his own administration of a deeply fractured society.

The rest of his Republican Party, however, is looking at something entirely different: elections for the House, Senate and the presidency that, absent a miraculous turnaround in Iraq or a suicidal stumble by Democrats, are headed for a debacle...

As the Senate debated and the House passed another troop withdrawal plan on Thursday, Bush saw cause for optimism in an interim report by his National Security Council that showed mixed military results from the surge of 30,000 troops to Baghdad and surrounding provinces. But the report showed scant progress on the political reconciliation that Bush said is the goal of the troop increase and "essential to lasting security and stability" in Iraq...

Jim Pinkerton, a top political aide to former President George H.W. Bush's administration, now at the [post-partisan] New America Foundation, said the president might be "the only one in Washington who still talks the language of 'freedom changes people.' The neocons have given up on that, the neocons have become in their own way realists -- the Arabs and especially the Iranians are the enemy. And we have to fight them. And Bush is still talking the language of 'no, we're going to transform the world through democracy.' "

"As he said in past, 'If it's just Laura and Barney who are sticking with me, I'm going to do this,' " Pinkerton said of the president's view of Iraq. "I wouldn't at all be surprised if we're in a situation extremely similar to what we see now on Jan. 20, 2009..."

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