One of the grimly fascinating aspects of observing the Bush administration these past few years has been the question of when the president will actually face reality.

I don’t mean grasping the underlying fact of our time: that the West faces a mortal and metastasising threat from Islamist terrorism allied with stray weapons of mass destruction. To his great credit, the president understands that, and has always understood that.

The problem is that he seems to understand nothing else. Constructing a viable, flexible, practical strategy to defeat and defang this threat seems utterly beyond his grasp.

I originally thought the Iraq invasion was, in fact, a sane if ambitious attempt to grapple with this. Saddam Hussein had to go, he was a monster and a danger, his state was crumbling. Why not intervene, secure the country, impose order and start the long, slow process of democratic nation building? Only a democratic space could begin to offer a more hopeful alternative to the lure of Islamism in a beleaguered Arab world.

But this, it now seems clear, was never practically on the agenda of the Bush administration. George W Bush never sent even faintly enough troops to achieve this objective; and when that became crystal clear, about a month after Baghdad fell, he still refused to budge.

He never fired anyone, keeping Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, on past any rational period. He never ramped up force levels to deal with the insurgency. He gave awards to the architects of failure. He insisted with increasing emphasis that black really was white, merely because he said so. And any failures he couldn’t avoid he blamed on the generals.

I naively assumed that would have to change. The American people only narrowly re-elected Bush in 2004, and decisively rejected his war management last month. His new defence secretary Robert Gates is a grown- up. The Baker-Hamilton commission can still give the president cover for a face-saving redeployment of forces out of the south of Iraq, into Kurdistan, and a reduction in overall force presence. An Al-Qaeda resurgence in Anbar could be dealt with by forays from the Kurdish region, or from the air, or by shrewd alliances with local tribes.

But no sane person could conclude that the original project, of a united, self-sustaining democratic Iraq, was still possible as Iraq hurtled towards a Hobbesian maelstrom. The only way even to conceive of reversing that would require a massive infusion of new troops and a decades-long commitment. In other words: starting from scratch.

The columnist Tom Friedman put the options clearly enough last week: the president could choose between 10 months of careful retrenchment and withdrawal or 10 years of a drastically overhauled nation-building and troop build-up.

Given the complete collapse of civil order, the lack of any reliable individual or even groups who can impose order in Iraq, and the mood of the American and Iraqi people, 10 months seemed increasingly the only realistic option.

Maybe it could be combined by outreach to Syria and Iran. Maybe an international conference could be convened. Maybe the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians could help. All this was potentially on the table. The leverage of a scheduled American withdrawal might even have been used to secure some concessions from neighbouring states leery of watching Iraq descend into chaos.

This, at least, was and is a realistic view of what the actual options are. But we found out last week that the president is still resistant to any notion that he might have failed so badly that his country and the world require him to change course. His press conference last Thursday with Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, was an alarming glimpse of a president in almost clinical denial.

“I know there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq,” Bush said. But he insisted: “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there.” No timetables, no draw-down, complete affirmation of Maliki.

It would be poignant if it weren’t so dangerous. On the same day Maliki told ABC News that he expected Iraq to assume complete responsibility for its own internal security by June of next year. By Bush’s logic (“so long as the government wants us there”) that means he doesn’t even have 10 months. He has six.

If in June Maliki asks the US to leave, what will Bush do? What if Maliki, pressured by his only source of real power, Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric and leader of the Mahdi army, actually accelerates this request and asks the Americans to leave before then? Does Bush have a plan?

One would expect any responsible president of the United States to have such a plan. But Bush is not a responsible president of the United States. He is a reckless gambler of other people’s money and other people’s lives.

It seems as if his prime objective is being able to stay the course in Iraq until the day he leaves office and hands the mess to a successor. It seems as if he cannot acknowledge any outcome that could acknowledge any failure. He won’t even follow the face-saving recommendations prepared by his father’s wise men. Even now he is insisting that he’s not Richard Nixon, staggering towards an exit in Vietnam, but Harry Truman, constructing the essential architecture for winning the next long cold war.

The hope is that his declarations of no change of course are as credible as his insistence only a month ago that Rumsfeld would remain defence secretary until January 2009. Maybe it’s a last-ditch poker face in an intractable situation.

Or maybe — gulp — he really does believe that Iraq is still fixable, that Maliki will soon emerge as a unifying national leader, that American troops will manage to calm a civil war, that trained Iraqi troops will fight for a united democratic government rather than for sect or tribe or vengeance.

I hope it’s the former, with sanity soon to re-emerge. But I fear it may be the latter: and that his brinkmanship is something he has tragically mistaken for strength.

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