I can only wonder what all the people who were criticizing Katie Couric recently for what they called a stunt to boost ratings are saying now that President Bush did his own Labor Day cameo in Iraq. Of course, his trip had nothing to do with ratings, right? Wrong. And as for the burden on the military, protecting a president is easier than protecting a celebrity anchor, right? Wrong. When a privately employed news anchor goes to Iraq to report, the primary responsibility for protecting her falls on her employers and the security types they employ. When the president, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State show up, it’s the military’s job to make sure nothing goes wrong, which has to mean deploying forces to protect them when those troops might otherwise be doing something that was actually useful for the war effort.

The president’s reason to go to Iraq was entirely theatrical. He could have had the same conversations by phone. A few hours isn’t enough to actually see, do or accomplish anything except create images for television consumption. Which is precisely what the president did, with a little help from the much-criticized Ms. Couric.

It worked – because how could it not? Every newspaper in the country is sporting front-page pictures of the president and headlines of him hinting that troop withdrawals are possible in the future. That is, of course, what the majority of the country wants. But while the public wants troop reductions because we’ve come to recognize that this is a war we can’t win – or, to put it another way, a war we’re losing – the president suggested that it was the product of our success. He was there to declare victory, not acknowledge defeat. Talk about turning the world upside down.

How do you turn defeat into victory? This is how: You go to a remote air base in a province where security has improved slightly and ignore the violence everywhere else. You don’t mention that it’s a lot easier to get the losers in a civil war (the Sunnis in Anbar, which is where the president went) to cooperate than it is to convince the winners, the Shiites, who control most of the country. You talk about killings being down instead of the number of Iraqis fleeing for their lives being up. You talk about prospects for peace between Sunnis and Shiites instead of the fact that in addition to Sunni-Shiite violence, we now have an increasing number of incidents of Shiites killing each other. And perhaps most important – since everyone acknowledges that there is no military solution to the problem in Iraq without political progress, and not a single benchmark for political progress has been met, and the Iraqi legislature has spent almost as much time on vacation as George Bush, and not a single piece of legislation that they were supposed to enact and expected to enact has in fact been enacted – you turn legislating into a game of horseshoes, where close is good enough.

Of course, legislation is not horseshoes. You pass a bill or you don’t. It’s the law or it isn’t. The president didn’t win on immigration reform because he almost won – he lost. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s comments notwithstanding, making progress on legislation is essentially a meaningless concept (particularly for people on vacation). They didn’t pass anything. It doesn’t really matter if you fail by a little or a lot if you’ve failed completely. Turning benchmarks into mini-benchmarks, when they weren’t very big to begin with, doesn’t make lemons into lemonade.

Secret trips are always great drama for the press. The president sneaks out a side door. The reporters are sworn to secrecy. Everybody gets to be part of a great adventure. But when it’s over, what have you accomplished? If I had to guess, Bush’s star turn in Iraq may help Katie’s ratings more than his own. And it leaves Katie’s critics without a leg to stand on.

Susan Estrich is a syndicated columnist and author.