An opening of the flood Gates? Hardly.

It may not be popular with the public. It doesn’t matter….”

That was Vice President Dick Cheney speaking about the Iraq war on Sunday. Everyone is interpreting the Rumsfeld firing as a sign that the Bush administration has – overnight – come to the realization that its policy in Iraq has failed and that, all of the sudden, public opinion matters.

Don’t count on it. Despite last night’s returns, there’s no evidence that suggests the Bush administration is not still hopelessly isolated on Iraq. All one had to do was listen the Bush-Rumsfeld-Gates presser minutes ago when Rummy described Iraq as a “little understood” war that is “not well known” and “not well understood.” Translation: The American people are dumb.

That’s been a guiding principle of Bush’s Iraq strategy all along. Relax, the American public has been told, we know what we are doing. They may have offered up Rummy as a sacrificial lamb, but something makes me doubt that the president and vice president woke up this morning suddenly believing the American people are more wise than they.

We’ll know just how “changed” the Bush administration now is when Gates’s confirmation hearings begin. Like Condi, Gates is an old-school cold warrior and a Soviet specialist. The question is whether he still believes in proven bedrocks of American foreign policy such as containment, or whether, like Condi, he believes that 9/11 was a paradigm shift that has rendered those bedrock principles obsolete. Stay tuned.