Spare us another White House campaign to convince the American people that it's absolutely necessary to continue the same effort in Iraq. If I'm counting right, this is the fourth time in the past 12 months that President Bush has embarked on this type of campaign.

The situation has deteriorated so badly in Iraq - and the American people know it - that rhetoric will not make a difference. The only way Bush is going to get attention, let alone support, starts with firing his existing national security team, replacing it with a bipartisan team and finding a different strategy in Iraq.

In January 1968, President Johnson, reeling from criticism of his war in Vietnam, got rid of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and brought in Clark Clifford. Clifford soon leveled with Johnson: The war couldn't be won; it was time to begin diminishing the American presence and looking for a diplomatic way out. That should be Bush's model now. The thought that we are going to have to endure more than another two years of his “we must stay the course” rhetoric is utterly depressing.

Rather than making another series of speeches about why a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq is not in the United States' interests, Bush must finally get rid of his failed wartime secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and bring in someone such as former Georgia Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, who commands the respect of the military and Republicans and Democrats.

The bitter irony in Iraq right now might well be that Bush is correct when he says that just getting out would cause more problems than it would solve. But I want to hear it from a team of advisers that has more credibility than the one that got us into this mess in the first place - a team willing to take a fresh look at everything.

Two Persian Gulf specialists, Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman, suggested recently that a civil war in Iraq was all but a reality now and that U.S. policy has to be restructured to minimize its negative consequences. That might even mean a greater American troop presence in the region, a major effort to deal with a mass of refugees (often a byproduct of a civil war), major diplomatic and even military actions to prevent a civil war from spreading to the whole region, and plans to prevent Iraq from becoming a terrorist stronghold the way Afghanistan did under the Taliban.

Meanwhile, Bush has given the first of several speeches - leading up to Sept. 11's fifth anniversary - about the need to “win” in Iraq and criticizing Democrats who want to set a timetable for withdrawing troops “before the job is done.” He also said, apparently with a straight face, that “amazing progress” is being made. Over the next two weeks he will be returning to the theme that has worked so well for him in the past: linking the effort in Iraq with the war on terrorism and the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

My instinct is that he's going to that well once too often. It won't work.

James Klurfeld is a columnist with Newsday