If, as is likely, the president doesn't recite those words, Bush could be the first president to seek re-election while under censure for negligence and deception regarding the U.S. going to war.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader has called for Bush's impeachment for his handling of both the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq.

Meanwhile, a year after the fall of Baghdad, more American troops than ever are being killed or wounded, as Iraqi nationalists launch their most-concerted insurgencies since the invasion. Coalition forces this week have been fighting both Sunni and Shiites throughout Iraq.

And the death toll mounts. Just as the Vietnamese Tet offensive in 1968 convinced many people back in the U.S. that our policies there were not working, so the recent strengthening of Iraqi resistance ought to produce even more skepticism back home.

Now Bush's staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, will be coming to the U.S. next week to meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York and Bush in Washington. The main theme will be Iraq, but they are not being called "crisis meetings." Right.

But as the body bags pile up, with about 630 Americans killed, and more than 3,000 wounded, Bush's approval rating has plummeted from 70 percent at the start of the Iraq war to 43 percent today.

Remember, it was about 90 percent after 9/11 when people thought he was going to fight a war against terrorism and not launch an invasion of Iraq, draining off our resources.

What can the president say to the young wife who responds to losing her husband in Iraq not with humility but with anger toward the president?

"On Christmas Day, I visited his grave. He did not give his life. It was cruelly taken from him by your rush to war," said Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas of Illinois.

"You inherited peace and prosperity," she continued, "and created murder, mayhem and massive debt. ... We don't need a trigger-happy president."

As more veterans return from Iraq, dead, alive or wounded, the more veterans and their families are speaking out against the war because they wonder why they were in Iraq at all.

Why? That's just what Dan Rather recently asked the American soldier who fled the military in the middle of his Iraqi service.

Camilo Mejia of Miami, who now is in military prison awaiting court martial, said, "that's the problem. I don't have an answer, I don't have a good answer.

"I cannot say I did it to help the Iraqi people. I cannot say that it was to make America and the world safer. I cannot say that it was for democracy," Mejia continues. "I cannot say that it was to prevent terrorism. I cannot find a single good reason for having been there and having shot at people and having been shot at."

I can't either, except to blame a president obsessed with the wrong war.

Sometimes the language we use helps explain why the world is so hazy — so cloudy, in fact, that if you see through the mist you, too, don't have an answer.

Iraqis defending their country, or least trying to take it back, are called militants, insurgents, terrorists, gunmen and militiamen by American leaders. Their attempts to resist the invaders are called "anti-American uprisings." And coalition forces respond with troops, rockets and bombs to "pacify" them.

Like Mejia, I don't have a good answer, except to bring the troops home now. In 1968, LBJ didn't have an answer. Bush's answer is wrong, so it's time for him to step aside.

Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at cary@thedailystar.com.