Even a blatant lie, if repeated often and loudly, can be mistaken for the truth. So it is with the claim that the results of November’s election amounted to a public demand to bring our troops home from Iraq.

No matter how loud that claim is made, it is not even close to true. The election results were a vote against our bloody failure in Iraq. They were a demand for success.

Withdrawal, for those keeping honest score, was not the policy of the Democratic Party. Very few of its candidates advocated withdrawal. Even Sen. Chuck Schumer, who orchestrated the Democratic Senate takeover, told me in November, “I’d say 65 percent of the vote was a rejection of Bush’s stay-the-course plan and 35 percent were voting to take a chance on Democrats.”

Or, as columnist Charles Krauthammer noted, Democrats didn’t get a mandate on Iraq because they didn’t run on anything except being anti-Bush. To get a mandate, you have to run “for” something.

Those are the facts, and they were the backdrop to President Bush’s crucial speech Wednesday night on Iraq. The American people, frustrated and demoralized over the war, still seemed ready to give the president a final chance to make the case for changes that will involve new troops. Democrats and Republican critics who were already planning to block Bush’s plan, even before they knew it, did their country a disservice in a time of war.

That’s not to argue that what Bush said is automatically good enough and worthy of support. Far from it. The idea of adding more than 21,000 troops doesn’t make sense unless the strategy and tactics also change. That’s Bush’s challenge – he’s got to persuade us that his new plan will make a difference. That it’s not just “stay the course” in a new wrapper.

Almost nothing Bush has said about Iraq has happened as he said it would. The victory he repeatedly promised is now a national sore. Nearly four years after the invasion, things are getting worse. Even the execution of Saddam was botched, a fitting metaphor for the two governments – ours and Iraq’s – that seem unable and unwilling to get it right.

Most important, the possibility exists that it may simply be too late for us to salvage a decent outcome. Iraqi society is so seared with blood and hate that it is almost impossible to imagine a civil, stable nation emerging from the rubble.

Yet we have to hope Bush and his new secretary of defense and new commanders have found a new formula, one that quickly shows results. Like Winston Churchill’s line that democracy is the worst form of government except for the others, Bush’s plan, if it pans out, will be the lesser of all evils.

Withdrawal would almost certainly result in a slaughter and in Iraq becoming a failed state taken over by terror groups or Iran. Official partition, another bad idea, seems impossible to achieve without a full civil war. Any of those outcomes would be a disaster for Iraqis and the entire Mideast.

And they would all make Americans less secure. Which is why Bush’s speech Wednesday night could have been the most important not only of his career, but of our lives. Godspeed, Mr. President.