A day after his "major" address on Iraq, it was back to "stay the course" with Sen. Lieberman, glad-handing the Iraqi president, refusing to put any pressure him, and claiming "progress" was being made.

From the front page of the Courant, this wasn't the headline he wanted to see (pdf of front page here):

A day after saying in a major campaign speech that "we must get tougher with the Iraqi political leadership," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman met Tuesday with Iraq's president and had a pleasant conversation that ended with the two men agreeing progress is being made....

Asked if he followed through on Monday's "get tough" message, Lieberman said, "This is a question of allies working together. With a friend, you don't essentially put a gun to their head."...

"If anyone asks what progress has been made in Iraq as a result of American involvement, look at this man," Lieberman said. "He has taken the place of Saddam Hussein."

Not every Senator agreed. Like, say, Sen. Clinton (D-NY):

Not all senators were so encouraged after meeting with Talabani. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who attended the meeting, afterward sharply criticized U.S. policies and cited a lack of progress.

"The writing is on the wall and it doesn't say, `Mission accomplished,"' Clinton said.

And, of course, Sen. Kerry (D-MA):

"We don't need misleading speeches. We don't need slogans. We need leaders who will tell it straight and stand up to this administration and say it's time to change course. Ned Lamont is providing that kind of leadership," Kerry said.

Sen. Lieberman put forward no specifics and even went back to claiming there were "terrorists in Iraq" before the war started:

At the Capitol, though, Lieberman would not specifically define what he meant by rejecting an open-ended commitment, saying his own goal "is not as neat as a deadline but a deadline is a deadly and disastrous alternative."...

Even the news about the National Intelligence Estimate, which found that the Iraq war had spread terrorism, did not deter Lieberman.

"Are there terrorists in Iraq? Of course there are. That's a reason we went in," he said. But he would not comment on the report itself, saying, "We don't know what it says. We have to see it."

And two days after brushing aside the National Intelligence Estimate as meaningless, and one day after the report was partially declassified in an attempt to hold back a tide of bad headlines, this wasn't the headline Sen. Lieberman or President Bush wanted to see on the front page of NYTimes.com:

Portions of the report appear to bolster President Bush’s argument that the only way to defeat the terrorists is to keep unrelenting military pressure on them. But nowhere in the assessment is any evidence to support Mr. Bush’s confident-sounding assertion this month in Atlanta that “America is winning the war on terror.’’...

In short, it describes a jihadist movement that, for now, is simply outpacing Mr. Bush’s counterattacks.

“I guess the overall conclusion that you get from it is that we don’t have enough bullets given all the enemies we are creating,’’ said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.