"I Guess"

I think it's the flippancy at the end of the sentence that sets my blood boiling.

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- 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. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

First there's the continuation of the Big Lie - not everybody was looking at the same intelligence. The Germans and the French and even substantial elements of the US intelligence community were not sold on the existence of WMD in Iraq. The facts were sifted by those who wanted war to fit the policy. Those with access to unsifted information, like Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, who were on the ground in Iraq before Bush kicked them out, knew that the truth was that there were no credible reports of weapons stockpiles. When Bush says that members of Congress were looking at the same intelligence, he's referring to that sifted intelligence. In other words, he sold them on a lie.

A lie which Democrats were far too willing to buy for short-term political expediency:

Of course, Bush made the decision to overlook all the good intel — not to mention the claims of those poor forgotten inspectors — saying that Saddam wasn’t really a threat at all, or certainly not one requiring the response Bush himself ordered.

One overlooked thing about this is that not only Bush, but many supporters of the war — Dems and liberal hawks included — also have a vested interest in pretending that the good intel never existed and those inspectors never said what they said. Those inconvenient historical facts reflect rather badly on them, too. With so many opinion-makers having vested interests of their own in telling the story this way, history has been tidily rewritten, and Bush is able to make this claim without a peep of objection from his big-time network interviewer.

It's a little secret that everyone's willing to keep.

But it's the "I guess," with the hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi lives hanging on it, that really drives me insane. He wishes the intelligence were different, sorta... what he means is that he wishes nobody caught him in his lie, and he wishes the war wasn't such a disaster. Everything else is a dodge from responsibility. It's true in economic policy, too:

GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?

BUSH: You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

I'm a little upset that we didn't get the reforms to Fannie and Freddie -- on Fannie and Freddie, because I think it would have helped a lot. And when people review the history of this administration, people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator. And there will be a lot of analysis of why that didn't happen. I suspect people will find a lot of it didn't happen for pure political reasons.

Well that's just a standard-issue lie right there, from the largely irrelevant focus on Fannie and Freddie to the "innocent bystander" idea that he just couldn't direct his own regulatory agencies - over whom the Congress has far less control - to investigate CDSes and subprime lending and massive over-leveraging.

"I guess" I won't miss this guy in the White House. By the way, these 2-hour interviews about nothing seem superfluous when there's a financial meltdown going on.