Sunday's speech showed glimmers of frankness, then reverted to caricature.

President George W. Bush came close to delivering a frank and forthright speech on Iraq Sunday night, but in the crunch, he reverted to form and the by-now-predictable mix of fact, distortion, and fantasy.

His tack these days—developed over the course of four earlier speeches carried by daytime cable and polished to a shine for his prime-time network address—is to admit past mistakes yet project absolute confidence in the course ahead; to acknowledge dissenting views yet denounce them as "defeatist"; to trumpet total victory as the only alternative to defeat yet fail to define the term in any realistic fashion.

On matters of substance, it is hard to tell whether the president believes what he is saying, and it's harder still to gauge which possibility would be worse—that he does or he doesn't.

For instance, at the start of his Oval Office speech, Bush said that the very holding of last week's Iraqi elections "means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror." He went further at this morning's press conference, saying in his opening remarks that Iraq's "rulers now derive their power from the consent of the governed." During the Q & A, he added, "My optimism about a unified Iraq moving forward was confirmed when over 10 million people went to the polls."

First, nobody knows, nor will anyone know for several weeks, how many people voted. Second, and more important, nobody yet knows how they voted. If they voted along a hard line of identity politics (Sunnis for rejectionist Sunnis, Shiites for fundamentalist Shiites, Kurds for secessionist Kurds), then the prospects for Iraqi democracy—for a politics that can forge consensus across regional and sectarian lines—don't look so good.

Third, and still more important, democracy—as Bush himself has occasionally noted—is about more than elections; it's also about, and critically requires, democratic institutions. Yet Bush is now talking as if the mere casting of ballots (even before their counting) has set the course of the fate of Iraq and, more, of the whole Middle East. The rulers "now" derive power from the consent of the governed. Really? Already? America "has" an ally in the fight against terror. Oh? Will a government beholden to the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani share intelligence and devote troops to help defeat Islamo-fascism worldwide?

For a brief spell a few weeks ago, President Bush departed from his monochromatic view that the Iraqi insurgents consisted entirely of Saddamists aching for a comeback and jihadist terrorists aiming for a caliphate. He acknowledged a third—and much larger—group: "ordinary Iraqis" who simply oppose occupation. Now he seems to have dropped the complexity. "The mission of American troops," he said in Sunday night's speech, has been "fighting Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists."

The omission of the third group—those who are fighting strictly against the occupation—is not a small matter. To ignore this group is to misunderstand the insurgency's dynamic, the main ingredient of its appeal, and the dilemma that underlies the stateside debate over whether to withdraw U.S. troops.

Here is where President Bush gets things most flagrantly wrong. In his Sunday night speech, he noted that many Americans are asking "if we are creating more problems than we are solving." He went on:

That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terrorism. If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only Americans would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.