The conventional wisdom says that Bush is looking for a way out of Iraq and will probably cut and run relatively soon.

Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer in The Washington Post:

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad....

"There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy," [Judith S.] Yaphe [a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University] said....

Frank Rich in The New York Times:

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves....

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there....

I'm not sure I buy it. In recent weeks we've heard that troop levels in Iraq might drop by next spring, only to be told by Bush that we shouldn't count on that. Prior to that, Bush made clear that he still thinks it's all a "war on terror," embarrassing those in his administration who'd started talking about a "global struggle against violent extremism."

I don't believe Bush wants to cut and run -- and if other members of his administration are suggesting that they're looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, I suspect Bush is going to contradict them soon.

First of all, I think Bush thinks we're still winning -- or at least thinks that victory is in sight. All people love freedom! Therefore, victory is inevitable! I'm not joking -- I think he thinks there'll be a triumph someday, and he damn well wants to stay the course so he can rub doubters' faces in that triumph. And we know he's empathy-challenged; I don't think any amount of carnage could possibly generate doubt in his mind about the present course.

And I think Bush knows that his father lost an election (to a pot-smoking peacenik!) when he was a former war president; even though it looks as if the war is dragging down his approval ratings, I think W isn't eager to let the war go.

And I think he's got a point. Why do his poll ratings never go below 40%? I think the war provides a floor -- the GOP base still loves the war, and some swing voters still don't like to question a war president. W thinks the war gives him stature, and in the eyes of a lot of voters, alas, it does, even now. Yeah, he could start another war if he gave up on this one, and I have no doubt he would. (He may bomb Iran anyway.) But this is the war that got him reelected -- and I think he's loyal to it.

So even if an awful lot of people around him are ready to cut and run, don't be so sure he is.