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Repentant Bush: Look Who’s Talking!

The rare admission came in an interview with the ABC TV. The outgoing president told the network: “The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”

But is the US leader who will leave the White House on January 20 repentant for the war that has killed nearly a million people including more than 4,000 US soldiers? Not exactly.

Bush still insists his decision to go to war against Iraq was right even though he declines to speculate on whether he would still have gone to war if the intelligence had said Iraq did not possess WMD. “That is a do-over that I can’t do,” he insisted in the ABC interview that was conducted at Camp David.

Clearly, this president still lives in the make-believe world that he has created for himself where ephemeral things like reality and facts do not trouble him.

So even when someone inside him nags him saying perhaps he was after all wrong in invading Iraq even when he did not have the credible intelligence to prove Saddam’s country was a clear and present danger to the world, another voice tells him to stick to his guns and not look reality in the face. It’s this lack of courage and conviction that makes leaders to hold on to their beliefs and delusions even when it is proved that they are out of sync with reality.

So even after the total devastation of Iraq and loss of a million lives for a lie and even when his popularity ratings have touched a record low largely thanks to the mess in Iraq and its aftermath on the economy, he continues to console himself that what he did was after all right. And it’s not just on the issue of Iraq that the US leader refuses to face reality but on everything else.

From Afghanistan to Iraq and from the disastrous response to the devastation after Hurricane Katrina to his handling of the Wall Street crisis, the Americans have never been more unhappy as they are with this administration. Yet asked what Americans would say when he leaves office next month, the outgoing leader said with a straight face: “I will leave the presidency with my head held high.”

But we are not so sure, nor are the Americans. History is likely to remember him as someone who squandered his people’s mandate as well as the world’s immense goodwill for America. He leaves behind a country — and the world — that is more vulnerable and less secure than the one he had inherited.