Debriefing Bush

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." That, in a nutshell, is George W. Bush's valedictory thought about invading Iraq, in interviews with Charlie Gibson on ABC this week.

"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is [sic] a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

But the historical record shows that the "lot of people" consisted mainly of Dick Cheney and his henchman, relying on a swindling Ahmad Chalabi and torturing CIA intelligence into a false case against the Iraqi regime he was salivating to replace.

"We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, "and I want you to make it" at the UN.

A few days later, according to the Washington Post, Powell was "taken aback" by "a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some."

In blaming faulty intelligence for a misbegotten war, Bush is exposing himself to history's choice of branding him either a fool or a lethal liar.

He would have done much better by looking back to George Washington's farewell words as he left the presidency:

"The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

The Foundering Fathers

HBO has made John Adams a lot less lovable than Tony Soprano and, despite all the critical tiptoeing around it, picked a poor time to demythologize the making of the American miracle.

In this week's next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid attending the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, a former friend he has come to envy and despise.

This is a typical moment in seven hours of relentless "realism" to offset a century of Hollywood biopics that glorified the Founding Fathers beyond human recognition and now attempts to balance the books by presenting them warts and all but ends up with a visually spectacular exhibition of warts.

It was only in middle age that, as a child of immigrants, I fell deeply in love with the makers of the American Revolution while touring the stately homes of England to view huge tapestries celebrating ancestral slaughter that created a ruling aristocracy who passed along generations of splendor to a few who live at the expense of misery for the many.

Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin fought a war to escape all that and, by some miracle, found a way not to replicate it but create something magnificently new in history that endures to this day.

That they were vain, petty, self-seeking--in a word, human--is not surprising, but a televised tapestry of their faults is no more a cause for self-congratulation than the wall hangings in those palaces built on exploitation.

What the magnificent Laura Linney as Abigail Adams keeps warning about in pillow talk would have been helpful to the producers of the HBO epic. "Ambition," she keeps saying sadly. "Vanity."

American Traditions: Bush's Second Strike

In the second half of the twentieth century, Republicans expressed fears that core American values could be subverted by a foreign ideology. They were right.

After years of tearing down the separation between church and state, George W. Bush is now politicizing the military to a point that should impress his allies, Pervez Musharraf and Nouri al-Maliki.

Tomorrow, as General David Petraeus testifies before Congress, the antiwar group MoveOn.org will run a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the headline: "General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House."

The Standard calls this “disgusting,” and such Generals as Washington and Eisenhower who became Presidents would likely agree.

Washington spoke about “an insidious foe...plotting the ruin of both, by sowing the seeds of discord and separation between the civil and military powers of the continent.”

In his farewell address, Eisenhower famously warned against “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” by the military-industrial complex, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of...defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”

Now Bush is breaking down the barriers between military and civilian by attempting to use Petraeus and “the generals” who agree with him, after replacing those who don’t, as a battering ram against Congress to keep them from challenging and changing his disastrous policies.

The invective of the ad against Petraeus is misplaced. He is doing his job in the way that the Commander-in-Chief has defined it. It’s that definition that is now not only causing ruin in Iraq but subverting the Constitution.

Bush as George Washington

The cliché about people gone over the edge used to be thinking they were Napoleon. George Bush, who never falters in his patriotism, is convinced he’s George Washington.

The delusional attempt to impersonate a great military commander is understandable in those who feel overwhelmed by stress and impotent to deal with it.

Yesterday Bush told a huge hangarful of Air National Guard members: “Our first Independence Day celebration took place in a midst of a war--a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom.

“Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war--pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life.”

The President did not wear the dress-up flight suit of the “Mission Accomplished” speech on the aircraft carrier so no one had the heart to tell him that Iraq is not colonial America, the al Qaeda folks are not Redcoats and he is not Washington crossing the Delaware--not until January 2009 when the proper attire may be a straightjacket.