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The year was 1971. A cartoon in the Boston Globe showed then-President Nixon, dressed as a fortune teller and looking pleased with himself, sitting in front of a crystal ball predicting the end of the Vietnam War by 1972 — which, not incidentally, was an election year. Across the table is a battle-weary US soldier, leaning on the table and asking, "Any chance of moving the election up a year?"

Today's soldiers in Iraq would do well to ask President Bush the same question, times three.

Writing in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh tells of a plan under review by the Pentagon and the White House to remove all US combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2008 — also an election year.

But that doesn't mean the bloodshed will end in 2008 or anytime soon after:

"We're not planning to diminish the war," Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me..."We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting — Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower."

Clawson admits "we're in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq," but he assured Hersh that "the President is prepared to tough this one out":

There is a very deep feeling on [the president's] part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.

Way to go, red-staters.

It's bad enough that this deluded president sees his thin margin of victory as a mandate for his war. But his is a delusion in two parts, and it's the second part that makes me nervous:

Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments...Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

Divine purpose? Are we supposed to believe that God rigged the election in Bush's favor? Shouldn't He be above that sort of thing? But incredibly, that is what our president apparently believes, and his top advisers, such as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, like it that way:

"They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway," [a] former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. "Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House," the former official said, "but Bush has no idea."

Which pretty much sums up the entire Bush presidency.

As for the plan to shift to a bombing war, it seems more a political strategy designed to lower American casualties as the 2006 and 2008 elections near, rather than a viable military strategy to actually win the war. Hersh quotes Andrew Brookes, an expert on air power and military strategy:

"Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?" Brookes said. "No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town."...Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn't work in Vietnam, did it?"

And there's the V-word again, which began this post. We've come full circle, in more ways than one.