[Mitchell]

On the other hand, Pres. Bush has an underlying political problem, in that the country does not truly understand the rationale behind this war, and that is why much of the public questions the necessity of the war.

I'm not talking about the overtly antiwar crowd, but the mass of people in the center, and even many conservatives. They're going along with the President for now (this shows up as a high level of support in the polls, but I think the support is relatively shallow). If things get sticky, Pres. Bush is going to have to provide a more cogent, to-the-point rationale to avoid losing public support. I hope it won't be too late at that point; it would be less convincing then than now, since at a later date it might be portrayable as a supposed act of desperation.

(By the way, one can't judge public sentiment via FreeRepublic; FR is definitely not a representative sample of the U.S. population)

[The Great Satan]

Well, I hope we haven't outfoxed ourselves with this clever little charade. OTOH, it is very hard to see what else the administration could have done, under the circumstances. One of the scary aspects of this is that it means all the decision making has taken place in a vacuum, with no meaningful criticism from anybody but a very small circle of insiders.