He's almost destroyed the country -- and I mean the U.S., to say nothing of Iraq. Just because (a) a little cabal of neo-cons wanted to impose a new world order; (b) U.S. elections have deteriorated into mud-slinging irrelevancies tabulated by corrupted systems; and (c) enough fundamentalists thought it was the most important thing of all to have a "good Christian" in the White House who wouldn't allow any abortions. How are we ever going to get out of this? Sounds like give-it-up cynicism, I know. Well, reforms usually aren't accomplished by cynics, so we slog onward...

Read Mark Danner's Iraq: The War of the Imagination which is to come out in print in the December 21 New York Review of Books. Danner is critical of the "it's Rummy's fault" line, which Woodward advocates in State of Denial and which was trumpeted by the MSM. Instead, he follows Ron Suskind's thesis in the One Percent Solution. Rather than the Iraq debacle being the result of clashing powerful egos (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powsell) and an ineffectual NSA (Rice) resulting in a dysfunctional "interagency", which Rumsfeld ultimately took advantage of, Suskind sees the mess as the result of the Bush and Cheney practice of governance which avoided the interagency process.

Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason." Suskind suggests why in an acute analysis of personality and leadership:

Of the many reasons the President moved in this direction, the most telling may stem from George Bush's belief in his own certainty and, especially after 9/11, his need to protect the capacity to will such certainty in the face of daunting complexity. His view of right and wrong, and of righteous actions— such as attacking evil or spreading "God's gift" of democracy—were undercut by the kind of traditional, shades-of-gray analysis that has been a staple of most presidents' diets. This President's traditional day began with Bible reading at dawn, a workout, breakfast, and the briefings of foreign and domestic threats.... The hard, complex analysis, in this model, would often be a thin offering, passed through the filters of Cheney or Rice, or not presented at all.

Having also read Fiasco by Thomas Ricks, I was puzzled by the same flaw that Suskind finds in Woodward's book--somehow Bush and Cheney just don't contribute to the disaster as much as Rummy and others under him did. But Nelson trumps Suskind in the severity of his critcism--it's one thing to live in a world of imagination and it's another to be "mad."