In the runup to the war five years ago, President Bush used scare tactics to frighten this nation into supporting an invasion of Iraq. At every opportunity, he warned the American people that an emboldened Saddam Hussein would use his oil wealth to arm the terrorists of al-Qaida with weapons of mass destruction.

Without invasion, the president warned us, "the danger is that al-Qaida becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world." Or so he said.

It is now five years later. Has the threat outlined by Bush been eliminated? In a roundabout way, the president has already answered that question.

In a speech last week marking the anniversary of our invasion, the president again defended his decision to go to war. He also warned that it was impossible to significantly reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq because doing so might open the door to al-Qaida.

"An emboldened al-Qaida, with access to Iraq's oil resources, could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations," Bush warned, cautioning that any effort to draw down our troops "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th."

So ... same as it ever was. Fictional weapons of mass destruction got us into this war; fictional weapons of mass destruction require us to stay. In fact, it is all so depressingly familiar that it seems fair to conclude that after five years of war, the sacrifice of almost 4,000 American lives and the expenditure of an estimated $1 trillion and counting, we have accomplished absolutely nothing in Iraq.

Of course, that's not how the president sees it. In his speech, Bush spent little time looking back over the last five years, which isn't surprising. Those who oppose searching the past for lessons are generally afraid of what might be found there. They fear the conclusions that history will draw about their culpability, dishonesty and incompetence in leading us into the worst foreign policy blunder in American history.

Looking ahead is easier. Looking ahead, the president claims to see a glorious victory, made possible by the "surge" of another 30,000 troops into Iraq a year ago.

"The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around," the president said last week. "It has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror."

That would be wonderful, if true. And there's no doubt that the security situation is better in Iraq than it was a year ago, and that the surge has played a role in that improvement.

However, most military officers will also acknowledge that in this war, as in others, progress is more often the product of your enemy's mistakes than your own brilliance. In this case, the U.S. and Iraq are benefiting from mistakes by al-Qaida that alienated it from the Iraqi Sunni community on which it depends.

It's also important to note that the president's blind optimisim — his talk of "a major strategic victory" — isn't echoed by senior military officers on the ground in Iraq. They speak proudly of progress in bringing down levels of violence, but they also note that such progress will be meaningless and perhaps temporary unless it is accompanied by serious political progress.

And as Gen. David Petraeus recently put it, no one in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation."

In announcing the surge in January 2007, the president also laid out a second goal: creating an environment in which U.S. troops could begin to come home.

"If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence," he promised the country, "we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home."

That day is no closer now than it ever was. More than a year later, we still have more troops in Iraq than we did before the surge began, and both Bush and Petraeus have indicated they support higher troop levels to protect the gains made so far. It's a Catch-22 — a year ago we needed more troops in Iraq because violence was up; today we need more troops in Iraq because violence is down.

The difficult reality is that while we went into Iraq for a whole variety of reasons — some real, some fabricated — we remain in Iraq for one reason only: We don't know how to leave.

Of course, the president, like Republican presidential nominee John McCain, has made it clear that he has no intention of ever leaving. But that is a minority opinion among the American people. In a recent poll, 68 percent of Americans said they want most of our troops out of Iraq within two years. Only 6 percent said they wanted troops to remain there for another five years or longer.

From the beginning, counterinsurgency experts have warned that unless the surge was accompanied by significant political change in Iraq, its effects would probably be temporary. Insurgents would initially be knocked back by the addition of troops, but they would eventually regroup unless the political situation changed.

And unfortunately, levels of violence have seemed to plateau and may even be inching upward again. Politically and militarily, we have gone from surge to stalemate. After five years, that's a far cry from a "major strategic victory."

— Jay Bookman, for the editorial board