Bush's 'missed opportunities'

by Mark Silva

The ever-impartial folks over at Vanity Fair have rounded up some talking heads for an "oral history'' of the Bush administration.

And they have some fairly rough words for the retiring president.

Larry Wilkerson, the former assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell who has been outspoken in his criticism of the Bush White House - particularly the hand that Vice President Dick Cheney has played - says former Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage called Cheney's office "the Gestapo,'' and says Powell's task was "cleaning the dog---- off the carpet in the Oval Office.''

This and more can be found in the February issue, with an article prepapred by Todd Purdum and Cullen Murphy, on sale New Year's Eve in New York and Los Angeles and Jan. 6 throughout the rest of the nation:

 John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council and later to the secretary of state, says that "one of the great tragedies for this administration has been the damage caused by its detainee policies... The Justice Department really never lived up to its name.... It was often the Department of Litigation Risk."

 Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor, talks about how stunned the Germans were that the U.S. used their source (codename: "Curveball"), whom they were unsure about, as the single source for Powell's U.N. presentation about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction: "I was astonished that the Americans used Curveball, really astonished. This was our stuff. But they presented it not in the way we knew it. They presented it as a fact, and not as the way an intelligence assessment is--could be, but could also be a big lie. We don't know."

 Bob Graham, retired Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that one of our biggest challenges will be getting the rest of the world to trust the U.S. again: "One of our difficulties now is getting the rest of the world to accept our assessment of the seriousness of an issue, because they say, You screwed it up so badly with Iraq, why would we believe that you're any better today?"

 Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to Bush, calls the failure of immigration reform Bush's real regret: "Immigration was one of his most heartfelt issues.''

 Matthew Dowd, Bush pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign, contends that Karl Rove's strategy for winning was all about painting one side as good, the other as bad: "Karl wasn't receptive to ideas that would've called the country to certain things and brought them to a common purpose and a sense of shared sacrifice. Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good."

According to Dowd, Vanity Fair reports, "The headline in [Bush's] presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It's missed opportunity, missed opportunity."