The Iraq war is not over. Afghanistan is a mess. The economy is a mess. Nothing's been done about climate change. And all around the world people have cheered a guy who threw a shoe at the president of the United States. So what's Bush's legacy? On the foreign policy front, his people are trumpeting his so-called promotion of democracy abroad. And that's how Bushies are talking about the war in Iraq they are bequeathing to the next guy. Here's Condi Rice from Meet the Press this past Sunday:

RICE: This Iraq, at the center of the Middle East, a powerful Arab state that is a friend of the United States and democratic, is going to make the Middle East a fundamentally different place.

DAVID GREGORY: Do you believe that over time, then, the United States will emerge with what will be considered an unambiguous victory in Iraq?

RICE: I believe that it will be, as time goes forward, absolutely clear that Saddam Hussein's Iraq would never have allowed the Middle East to change, and that this Iraq has the potential to anchor a more democrat, a more prosperous, a more peaceful Middle East, and, by the one, one that--by the way, one that is friendly to the United States.

From Iraq, it's just a few skips and a jump to more democratic Middle East, right? Not so. Democracy activists in the region have been complaining about Bush's policies--especially the Iraq war--for years, noting that Bush has set back the cause of democracy in the Middle East.

All the talk is Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. As President-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team on Monday morning, the headliner was indeed the junior senator from New York State. While this move remains a surprise and perhaps even a gamble--I've had my say on this--it could be that the more important pick of the day is retired General James Jones to be Barack Obama's national security adviser.

One of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's many accomplishments was to wreck the national security apparatus of the United States government--with key assists from Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. For years, Foggy Bottom and the CIA were at war with the Pentagon and the White House, while the national security adviser (that would be Rice) became not a policy broker (as the job requires) but an enabler. She allowed ideologues to run wild and to trump expertise. She made sure that dissenting opinions were not placed front and center before the president. Foreign policy became the territory of a small band of arrogant know-it-alls who, it turned out, did not know nearly enough.

On Bush and Cheney's watch, the system broke down--by design. It's imperative that the foreign policy machinery of the US government be revived and restored. There needs to be a working balance between the intelligence community, the military, and the diplomats. There needs to be a free flow of ideas. The views of true experts inside and outside the government ought to be factored into major decision-making. And it is the job of the national security adviser to ensure this happens.

That mission will fall to Jones. At a press conference on Monday morning, Obama said that Jones

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is a big deal--but it ought to be difficult for Obama-backers to raise a full-throated cheer for it. Obama's chief selling point at the start of the campaign was that he had been right on the Iraq war. Powell, of course, was not only wrong; he had lent his prestige to the invasion, fronting for the Bush White House on the phony WMD case. And while some may view Powell's Obama endorsement as a stab at rehabilitation, Powell has never fully come to public terms with his role in the Iraq WMD scandal.

On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw gently approached the matter:

BROKAW: I want to ask you about your own role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Barack Obama has been critical of your appearance before the United Nations at that time. Bob Woodward has a new book out called "The War Within," and here's what he had to say about Colin Powell and his place in the administration: "Powell didn't think Iraq was a necessary war, and yet he had gone along in a hundred ways, large and small. He had resisted at times but had succumbed to the momentum and his own sense of deference -- even obedience -- to the president. Perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, Powell had been the `closer' for the president's case on war." ...What's the lesson in all of that for a former -- for a new secretary of state or for a new national security adviser, based on your own experience?

POWELL: Well, let's start at the beginning. I said to the president in 2002, we should try to solve this diplomatically and avoid war. The president accepted that recommendation. We took it to the U.N. But the president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action.I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there. And it is not just my closing of the whole deal with my U.N. speech. I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong. But three months before my speech, with a heavy majority, the United States Congress expressed its support to use military force if it was necessary. And so, we went in and used military force.

My unhappiness was that we didn't do it right. It was easy to get to Baghdad, but then we forgot that there was a lot more that had to be done. And we didn't have enough force to impose our will in the country or to deal with the insurgency when it broke out, and that I regret....

BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?

POWELL: Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public. It was the reason we took it to the American people, to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then, Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction.

That last sentence is a syllogism. Of course, without WMDs, Iraq was not the threat it would have been had it possessed WMDs. The point was that it did not possess WMDs. And as Michael Isikoff and I showed in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the Bush administration purposefully exaggerated the error-ridden WMD case that was in itself based on faulty and incomplete evidence. But Powell dumps all the blame here on the intel gang for screwing up the intelligence. That's too convenient a dodge. Here's a case in point: the Bush White House claimed that aluminum tubes obtained by Saddam Hussein could only be used for nuclear centrifuges. Yet the nuclear scientists within the intelligence community with the most expertise on the subject disputed this. That did not stop Dick Cheney and Condi Rice from making claims on this matter that were utterly false--claims that analysts at Powell's Department of State would have known were false.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Condoleezza Rice has an article in which she tries to define an "American Realism" approach to foreign policy. It is full of foreign-policy speak. Here's an example:

How to describe this disposition of ours? It is realism, of a sort. But it is more than that -- what I have called our uniquely American realism. This makes us an incredibly impatient nation. We live in the future, not the past. We do not linger over our own history. This has led our nation to make mistakes in the past, and we will surely make more in the future. Still, it is our impatience to improve less-than-ideal situations and to accelerate the pace of change that leads to our most enduring achievements, at home and abroad.

At the same time, ironically, our uniquely American realism also makes us deeply patient.

Yes, we can be patient, and impatient. Wise, and dumb. Selfless, and self-interested. Inward-looking, and outward-peering. Warm, and cold. Caffeinated, and non-caffeinated.

In the course of this long article, Rice tries to glide past the Iraq mess, noting,

The cost of this war, in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagine.

Puh-lease. When she was national security adviser during the run-up to the war, the White House she served did all it could to suppress realism when it came to assessing the costs of a potential war with Iraq. Secretary Rice, remember Lawrence Lindsey? In late 2002, as the Bush gang were beating the war drums, Lindsey, director of Bush's National Economic Council, estimated the cost of the war could reach $200 billion. How did the Bush White House respond? It got rid of Lindsey. And it did the same to Army General Eric Shinseki when he said it would be necessary to keep hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq after the invasion to secure and stabilize the country. Rice has plenty of chutzpah to claim now that the aftermath was unpredictable. As national security adviser, it was her responsibility--more than that of anyone else--to bring together Bush's national security team and make sure there were decent predictions and plans for what would come after the initial invasion. She did not do so.

Her attempt to define a coherent foreign policy strategy for the United States is--or should be--overshadowed by her own record of failure.

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