Foreign policy experts on the left and the right said that, on Iraq, the principal focus will remain on Bush. "Kerry can let the administration stew in their own juices, and he can just essentially say incompetence has led them to this point," said Gary J. Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank. "I don't think the public really would even pay attention if he had an eight-point plan for fixing things."

That's exactly right, which is why Kerry is not obligated to provide such a plan in order to be elected. In fact, since the facts "on the ground" change so quickly, he's actually much better off not putting forth such a plan.

Noam Scheiber extends the idea on the New Republic's badly named &c. weblog:

Iraq is Bush's baby. Everyone knows it's Bush's baby. And if it keeps going badly, he's finished, regardless of how close he happens to be to Kerry's positions on the matter. Second, Kerry isn't left to argue that he has more credibility in executing the same policies. He's left to argue that Iraq has been a disaster, and that it's Bush's fault--which is almost self-evidently true. And, finally, declaring a timetable for withdrawing the troops would not be politically advantageous for Kerry. Doing so would give Bush cover to lay out a timetable of his own, which would be substantively disastrous but pretty useful politically for the White House. By not budging from his commitment to stay the course in Iraq, Kerry forces Bush to do the same, meaning he has to keep owning every inch of the disaster Iraq has become.

And what about the convergence of Bush's Iraq policies with Kerry's? Josh Marshall weighs in on this:

It has now become close to a commonplace that John Kerry's policies differ little from President Bush's. Where is the difference, we hear, since both candidates are for an openness to greater troop deployment, a fuller role for the United Nations and the country's traditional allies, and dropping support for the exilic hucksters who helped scam the country in the first place.

This is a weak argument on several grounds. But the most glaring is that what we see now isn't the president's policy. It's the president's triage -- his team's ad hoc reaction to the collapse of his policy, the rapid, near-total, but still incomplete and uncoordinated abandonment of his policy.

The president's actions, if not his words, concede that Iraq has become the geopolitical equivalent of a botched surgery -- botched through some mix of the misdiagnosis of the original malady and the incompetence of the surgeon. Achieving the original goal of the surgery is now close to an afterthought. The effort is confined to closing up as quickly as possible and preventing the patient from dying on the table. And now the 'doctor', pressed for time and desperate for insight, stands over the patient with a scalpel in one hand and the other hurriedly leafing through a first year anatomy text book.

In other words,

the president now argues that he is best equipped to guard the country from the full brunt of the consequences of his own misguided actions, managerial incompetence and dishonesty.