A few quotes. First from Dubya's press conference today, his new favorite line:

We're not succeeding nearly as fast as I wanted.

But, a bit later on, he tried to qualify that.

Most of the deaths, most of the violence, is within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad, as well as in Anbar province.

So, it's not like there's mayhem everywhere. We don't see huge death tolls in the middle of the empty desert. There's only trouble where the people are.

While this press conference was going on, WBUR was doing a show in which they asked soldiers what they thought of the war. One of the guests was Jeff Englehart, a specialist from the First Infantry Division, who heard Dubya's plaint that he was "not succeeding as fast as I wanted", and had this response (at about 27 minutes into the audio stream):

I think Bush has been known for empty rhetoric and he hasn't produced anything. When I was sent there with my fellow soldiers, when we went with the first ID, we were sent in with plastic doors and windows you could break with a rock and it was very obvious from even on the Kuwaiti side, when we were going into Iraq, that this war was horribly planned out.

And just to see that last month was, especially, one of the bloodiest months of the war --- I just don't see any progress being made. It's time for this administration to be held accountable for the failures that they've been known to make. And we as a people need to start holding them accountable, and stop listening to a lot of this Orwellian Doublespeak.

Well, we have one of the troops here saying that there's a choice --- you can support the troops, or support the policy, but you can't do both. Personally, I support the troops.