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President Bush's recent Iraq speech was billed as "major," a frequent trope of the White House spinners, and it was mounted before another of the military musters that the president's handlers favor as backdrops and surefire claques.

But for all the stagecraft, and despite a few more specifics than usual, the speech was more of the same.

Bush declared that despite the odd unpleasantness here and there in Iraq, all is on the upswing, and complete victory is down the road, if we just stick to the pavement.

The Bush vision of victory is Iraq as Happy Valley, a prosperous democracy where ancient antagonisms have melted under the warm sun of a model constitution, secured by an Iraqi military unriven by ethnic antagonisms and free of insinuated insurgents.

And standing as a peaceable beacon to the whole Muslim Mideast — the real goal of this war all along, for which all the weapons-of-mass-destruction alarmism only shilled.

At bottom, then, this was another reiteration of the administration's policy-by-bumper-sticker: stay the course.

In the real world, the developing Iraqi military is fractured into ethnic factions and, at places, little distinguishable from local militias. Areas declared secure turn out to have been secured only until the next bomb or ambush. Utilities aren't even up to their rickety pre-war state. Civil war is a likelier outcome than the fantastic victory that Bush touts.

The Democrats' reactions to the speech were a chaos of bluster and snippy complaint, much of it poll-driven and opportunistic. Few Democrats found their voices until the public had soured on the war on its own and had formed a gallery to which the pols could play.

A good part of the Democrats' problem is structural. Unlike parliamentary systems, ours does not allow for the opposition to elect a leadership and enforce policy discipline.

Republicans were similarly footloose in their reactions to President Bill Clinton's military intervention in Bosnia and — o, poetic justice! — even to his missile launches and air strikes against Iraqi military targets to keep Saddam Hussein boxed.

There is less distance between administration and Democratic views on key points than the mutually accusatory rhetoric suggests.

Far from wanting to cut and run as the right gleefully charges, and for all that some blather about "target dates," which are only deadlines on skids, most Democrats acknowledge that we can't abandon Iraq to … whatever.

And both parties want to see security devolved to Iraqi forces as quickly as possible and U.S. forces drawn down.

Theoretically, a working bipartisanship could still be formed, but politically it's too late. Bush undermined the potential for bipartisanship from the start, slighting his pledge to go to war only as a last resort, exaggerating iffy intelligence and then fighting the war without asking the public to lift a finger — no military draft, no taxes to fund the venture, no sweat.

Bush might yet draw more support, or at least temper the opposition, if he adopted realistic goals in Iraq, quit giving the treasury away to the rich and stopped slowly beggaring our military.

And showed resolve for putting matters aright by booting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has botched this business from runup to aftermath.

Alas, that would be asking a lot of a president who prides himself on, of all things, his inflexibility.