It was high time president bush spoke to the nation of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago, it was our war, and we claimed it proudly. To be sure, there was a minority that never bought into the expedition and genuinely believed that it would come to grief. But most of us recognized that a culture of terror had taken root in the Arab world. We struck, first at Afghanistan and then at the Iraqi regime, out of a broader determination to purge Arab radicalism.

No wonder President Bush, in the most intensely felt passage of Monday night's speech, returned to Sept. 11 and its terrors. “In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country,” he said. “We did not seek this war on terror. But this is the world as we find it.” Instinctively, an embattled leader fell back on a time of relative national consensus.

But gone is the hubris. Let's face it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, “not to make them American” is now – painfully – beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq.