What Bush still doesn't understand about Iraq and North Korea.

Two questions prompted by President Bush's press conference Thursday night: Does he believe what he said about Iraq and North Korea, or was he just yakking? And which prospect is more disturbing?

If the president believes what he said, he doesn't comprehend the nature of either crisis. If he doesn't believe it and was just reciting the usual grab bag of clichés, what was his point? To deflect attention from an as-yet-undisclosed policy, or to obscure the lack of any policy at all?

On Iraq, a reporter at the press conference cited the recent comment by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the insurgency is as strong today as it was a year ago and asked why we weren't doing better. President Bush replied:

I think he went on to say we're winning, if I recall. But nevertheless, there are still some in Iraq who aren't happy with democracy. They want to go back to the old days of tyranny and darkness and torture chambers and mass graves.

Does he really believe that this is the defining struggle in Iraq: the forces of democracy vs. the remnants of Saddam? Bush's own military officers and intelligence agencies have said, time and again, that the insurgency consists of several elements—some Baathist holdouts and foreign terrorists, but also disparate Iraqis who oppose the American-led occupation and Sunni tribesmen who fear disenfranchisement and dispossession at the hands of a new Shiite-dominant regime.

The incipient Iraqi government faces multiple struggles: the insurgency, the difficulty of holding together a Cabinet almost no one is happy with, the control of Kirkuk's oil, the autonomy of Kurdish militias, the role of Islamic law, and the awesome struggle of drafting a constitution that can muster support from a two-thirds majority.

To reduce these disputes to a black-and-white formula—democracy on the one hand, tyranny on the other—is not only wrong but dangerous; it ensures that, to the extent the United States can influence the course of events, its efforts to do so will be heavy handed and misguided and therefore will fail.

On North Korea, President Bush's remarks are more worrisome because they seem to reflect a passivity—stemming from miscalculation, self-deception, or sheer cluelessness—in the administration's policy.

A reporter asked about the Defense Intelligence Agency's recent finding that North Korea probably has the ability both to build atom bombs and to load them on long-range missiles. Bush replied:

That's why I've decided the best way to deal with this diplomatically is to bring more leverage to the situation by including other countries. It used to be that it was just America dealing with North Korea. And when Kim Jong-il would make a move that would scare people, everybody would say, "America, go fix it." I felt it didn't work … the bilateral approach didn't work. The man said he was going to do something and he didn't do it, for starters. So I felt a better approach would be to include the people in the neighborhood into a consortium to deal with him. … It's better to have more than one voice sending the same message to Kim Jong-il.