Last night, President Bush gave his much-touted speech on the new Iraq plan. I couldn’t handle watching it and instead dealt with a phantom bill from a credit card I don’t own. While I was on hold, though, I could hear Eric from the other room — sometimes laughing (incredulously, usually), sometimes swearing at the TV. He gave me an update afterwards.

I, for one, can’t understand the president’s logic and stubborn refusal to deal with the facts — and then fix them (or at least adopt a feasible plan to fix them). True, Bush acknowledged some mistakes he and his administration made, and he made a fairly accurate assessment of the Iraq disaster, but his plan just does not make sense to me.

I don’t believe that pulling out of Iraq will help. The Iraqi people didn’t ask for us to invade their country; we did that all on our own, so we should at least try to fix the mess that we created. So an immediate withdrawal doesn’t make sense to me. But to throw more US troops at the problem just will not work.

It’s like we have a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The water is spilling out, but instead of recognizing the issue and stopping the leak, we just dump more water in. I know it’s a flawed analogy, but it’s as close as I can get right now. Dedicating more soldiers to a flawed strategy will only make Iraqis, Americans and the international community more resentful if they don’t have a way to alleviate the problems. We have obvious and bloody evidence of this: When Baghdad began its most recent spiral into absolute chaos a few months ago, Bush and his generals pulled troops from other parts of the country to support those fighting in Baghdad. And look how well that turned out.

What we really need to do is search out the reasons WHY the situation is so terrible. (True, we shouldn’t have invaded in the first place, and we had too few troops to do so from the start, but we can’t change the past so there’s no point in arguing over or wishing about it.) There is no Iraqi infrastructure. There are no jobs. People are scared to go in the streets. The police and Iraqi military are undertrained and ill-equipped. The list goes on. Unless we — or the Iraqi government, or an international coalition — address the fundamental problems, there will be no security, and the US mission will fail. I hate to say it, but it sounds like common sense and I can’t understand how our leaders fail to see it. It’s like that obnoxious TV commercial that plays all the time during football games: A family is watching golf on TV, and the guy hits the ball into the rough. Everyone’s looking for it, but the family watching it on TV can see it clearly. “It’s right there! Right – there! Can’t you see it?” Sometimes, with politics, I feel like that. I know I oversimplify things, because if it were easy, then we wouldn’t have these massive and complicated problems. But if the logic is sound, you can extend it to work for any issue, no matter how complex.

It’s been almost four years, and the war is getting bloodier. Thousands of people are dying, even more are fleeing, and the violence doesn’t show any sign of stopping. This is too terrible a situation to “stay the course,” or to pretend to adopt a new policy merely by adding troops and shifting responsibility. We need a real change.