The president gave a long speech in Cleveland today; stuck in my car, I had the mixed blessing of listening to it in its entirety, and to the refreshing, apparently unscreened Q&A session with the crowd that followed. Although I'm cynical about his intentions in some ways, his idealism in this setting was palpable, as was his utter ignorance. Describing the struggle to secure peace and freedom in Tal Afar, a town that is apparently doing well at the moment, he portrayed the horrors of terrorist rule poignantly. Much later, asked about his thinking on the war on terror, he described the views of those who oppose his policies in the GWOT with an appalling display of misunderstanding and condescension. He said something like, "I understand that there are some who think 9/11 was an isolated incident; I just disagree." That (paraphrased) sentence comprised his entire understanding, his entire account, of the views of those who oppose his counterterrorism strategy.

For the president, debating national security is a matter of patiently repeating himself, not an occasion for thinking. He just doesn't seem to know, after three years of war, that there are serious, reasoned claims on the other side of the argument, not merely sentimental ones. He apparently thinks that those of us who oppose the war in Iraq are simply tired of losing lives of our forces and that we have no serious strategic rationale for disagreeing with him.

His ideological bubble, displayed in the context of a long, relatively freewheeling discussion (of course, it was mostly a monologue, but it was open by the standards of what we tend to see from him), was truly frightening. His confusions and ideological rigidity aren't news any more, of course, but when you hear them in action, they still can take your breath away.

In remarks on or around this weekend's three-year anniversary of the invasion, President Bush and Vice President Cheney described two administration two goals for Iraq without acknowledging that they clearly conflict. One aim is creating a stable country with some kind of democratic system, to show the Middle East a functioning alternative to Islamism. Another aim is to show terrorists our resolve so as to discourage further attacks.

The latter goal really amounts to another version of the president's notorious bring-'em-on comment from earlier in the war, using Iraq as a battleground to draw terrorists into conflict to show we can't be driven out -- in effect, as the site of a geopolitical game of chicken. Some bloggers have noticed that this choice of locale is egregiously unfair -- disastrous for Iraq's battered infrastructure and cruel to its battered people, for whose sake, as well as our own, we undertook to liberate their country from dictatorship. In fact, the "better to fight them there than fight them here" meme not only collapsed into obvious incoherence (insofar as that argument was supposed to function as a guarantee) on 7/7, but it carries a trace of imperialist thinking. What, after all, can Iraqis possibly think about our implicit invitation to jihadists to fight us "there"? Considering that Iraqis end up dying in suicide bombings in larger numbers than American forces, they must not take too kindly to this purpose of our presence. (Even when killing Iraqis, terrorists are attacking an American project.) But aside from the effect of losing hearts and minds and aside from issues of unfairness, our "showing our resolve" goal also weakens the remaining stability that is our other alleged goal. What gives? "Who knows," indeed.