In an effort to strengthen U.S. resolve to continue the war in Iraq, President Bush Thursday gave a speech full of passion, but short on specifics on how the United States will prevail. Most troubling is that the president’s vision of progress in Iraq conflicts with what U.S. military officials are saying about conditions there.

In his daytime speech, the president said that 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting alongside U.S. forces. While this may be technically true, it is not an accurate picture of the competence of Iraqi forces. Last week, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that only one battalion, or 300 troops, were capable of operating independent of American forces. In June, military commanders said that three battalions were adequately trained and equipped to operate independently. Gen. Casey didn’t shed much light on the shrinking numbers. “Things change in the battalions,” he told senators.

“It doesn’t feel like progress,” Sen. Susan Collins told Gen. Casey. She was being polite. It isn’t progress.

President Bush also should have listened more closely to Gen. Casey before insisting Thursday that the United States did nothing that “invited the rage of the killers.” Gen. Casey told the Senate committee that U.S. troops are fueling, not stopping, the insurgency. He suggested that troop reductions would “take away one of the elements that fuels the insurgency.”

The president made no mention of reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, instead repeating that more sacrifice, more time and more resolve are needed to win the war there.

Further evidence that President Bush did not address what fuels the rage of insurgent fighters and terrorists is his threat to veto an amendment overwhelming passed in the Senate Wednesday to clarify what interrogation techniques are allowed. The 90-9 vote in favor of an amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, came in response to incidents of prisoner abuse in Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

“Confusion about the rules results in abuses in the field,” Sen. McCain said, noting that the Abu Ghraib scandal and other prisoner abuse allegations were “harming our image in the world, terribly.”

The amendment, which would ban “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. custody no matter where they are held and limit acceptable interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army Field Manual, was attached to a defense spending bill.

The president has threatened to veto the bill if it contains the anti-torture measure, which is gaining support in the House. This would be a mistake as renouncing and prohibiting the mistreatment of prisoners would help restore confidence among the moderate Muslims the president says must condemn the terrorists acts of their own countrymen.

President Bush did offer, for the first time, concrete examples of U.S. success in preventing terrorist attacks. He said that at least 10 al-Qaida plots, including three in the United States, had been disrupted. Five al-Qaida casing operations in the United States had also been stopped, he said.

The United States has helped achieve much in Iraq – a constitution has been drafted and elections will be held next week – and has disrupted al-Qaida plots. But overstating the successes while not acknowledging the failures makes the war in Iraq and the larger war on terror harder to win.