'Endgame for the president?' was the title of a column by Robert Kuttner in last Wednesday's Boston Globe. Pointing out that for more than a year now critics had been highlighting George W Bush's 'systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers', Kuttner suggested the US electorate might finally be waking up to the Bush administration's strategy of government by lying.

It's tempting to agree: in the past couple weeks the Bush cabal has seen its painstakingly spun web of fabrications tearing at several points.

The main point has been, of course, Iraq - ever since chief arms inspector David Kay testified before the US Congress that US intelligence was entirely wrong about Saddam's alleged WMD, and that - surprise, surprise! - such weapons didn't exist. A Bush loyalist, Kay tried to make the CIA the fall guy and exonerate the White House. But, declared Kuttner, that argument 'didn't fool those who watched last year as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strong-armed the CIA, sifted through raw, unconfirmed reports, and massaged the data until he got the story he wanted... The real story here is the political manipulation of intelligence, and it isn't going away.'
Other leading American newspapers and their columnists were equally adamant.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman ('Get Me Rewrite!', February 6) asserted scathingly that 'right now America is going through an Orwellian moment... Do you remember when the CIA was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the CIA's fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.'

Krugman is indignant, too, at the thought that more revisionism is surely in the works. 'You may remember that Saddam gave in to UN demands that he allow inspectors to roam Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may soon be invalid. Recently Mr Bush said that war had been justified because Saddam 'did not let us in'. And this claim was repeated by Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: 'Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?'

In an editorial on Thursday entitled 'Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress' (the reference is, of course, to Mr Clinton's favourite groupie, Monica Lewinsky, and the famous semen stain), the Los Angeles Times accused the Bush administration of complicity in 'arguably the greatest scandal in US history' and raised the spectre of impeachment. The paper fumed that 'The administration's systematic' - that word again! - 'abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former US intelligence experts - including several who quit in disgust - have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary Uncovered. The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offence?'
(Well, of course it is; and 'war criminal' might be added to the charge.)
Lastly, in a major editorial ('The Administration's Scramble,' February 6) The New York Times concluded that the Bushies' 'increasingly desperate attempt' to counter Kay's report had failed.

'The saddest spectacle,' editorialised the Times inter alia, 'was Mr Powell... on Monday, Mr Powell said he was not sure that he would have recommended an invasion had he known Iraq did not have stockpiles of banned weapons. The next day... he quickly retreated and said, 'The president made the right decision.' We have seen Mr Powell do this before. He does not make himself look better by dropping hints about his true feelings and then scurrying back to the loyal soldier's position when scolded by the White House.'

Indeed, he does not. Had Mr Powell a year ago declined the role of chief lies-bearer to the UN for the Cheney-Bush White House's impending attack on Iraq, had he had the courage to resign instead, the esteem in which he would have been held by pretty much the entire world would - as this column remarked at the time - have surpassed Muhammed Ali's, surpassed even Mandela's. Instead, he is today a nobody... a nothing... exactly as Belafonte predicted he would be by the time the Bushies were finished with him.
Sad is too mild a word. One would like to blame the hateful denizens of the Bush White House for the destruction of Colin Powell, but that would be inaccurate. Mr Powell has only himself to blame for the fact that - alas for the world! - he has turned out to be a coward.
So, now, in an election year, Mr Bush has the drear task of having to try to neuter a whole range of investigations.

To begin with, he tried to resist an investigation into Iraq's non-existent WMD, but felt the tide of public opinion turning against him and fell to trying to stage-manage one instead. Thus, Mr Bush's hand-picked commission will be mandated, not to examine his administration's possible corruption of the intelligence, but to investigate US 'intelligence failures' - and not specifically in Iraq but in general. And this commission will not be expected (nor indeed permitted?) to report until safely after the November elections. Even so: if the court of public opinion calls at least for the head of CIA director George Tenet, Mr Bush will doubtless be betting that Mr Tenet stays true to his Powell-esque record as a loyal, mea culpa-reciting fallguy for his boss's venality. And Mr Tenet may not.

The members of a second investigation - of the administration's vicious 'outing' of CIA official Valerie Plame in revenge for her ex-diplomat husband breaking silence over the likely non-existence of Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the planned attack on Iraq - will just have to be trusted by the Bushies to come up professing eternal bewilderment over the identity of the culprit. And indeed, one takes John Ashcroft's recusing of himself from the matter as a sign of White House confidence that it owns the commissioners in that one.

The president has tried to block the extension (by two months) of a third investigation - one into possible security lapses by his Administration in the months leading up to 9/11. But there, too, Mr Bush has had to give ground; and that report, the likeliest of the three to be more than a mere whitewash, will be out in time for its findings to be a factor in the coming elections.
In the meantime, however, Mr Bush has presented a budget which, according to columnist Bob Herbert ('Tuning Out the GOP's Siren Song', NYT February 6), is 'so irresponsible and deceitful it has rattled public officials and ordinary voters on the right and the left'.

Mr Bush's budget, says Herbert, 'would jack up military spending by seven per cent, to $26.5 billion. But that figure does not include the money needed to cover the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'll get those numbers later. After the election. What the budget does include are additional tax breaks for the wealthy, along with proposals that would deal potentially crippling blows to government support for education, environmental protection, veterans' programmes, low-income housing, child care and the like. What seems to be unsettling to large numbers of voters (not just hard-core anti-Bush Democrats) is the notion that events are slipping - or have slipped - out of control, that there is no endgame in Iraq, no plan to rein in runaway deficits, no strategy to put Americans back to work, and no limit to the Bush Administration's willingness to shower its friends with favours and public dollars'.

The upshot of all this - and perhaps also of the intense media coverage of the Democratic primaries and caucuses, with their attacks on the Bush White House - is that the president has slipped sharply in the polls, especially among that portion of the electorate you'd expect to be soberer and/or more attentive than the average: older folk, independents and Midwesterners. An AP poll conducted last week found, for the first time, more voters vowing 'definitely' to vote against Bush (43 per cent) than for him (37 per cent). And Bush's approval rating was languishing at 47 per cent, down nine points in a month.
Indeed, it was the same approval rating as Bush's father's at this point, 12 years ago - and 10 months before he lost the presidency to Clinton. And that panicky situation for the Bushies is having some very weird consequences.
For example.

Those only casually following the current excitement over the proliferation of WMD may be at a loss to understand why the US appears to be tamely accepting the silly little soap opera which took place last week in Pakistan, where the country's revered 'father of the Pakistan nuclear bomb' tearfully took the fall for Pakistan's exporting of nuclear material and know-how to various 'rogue states', and then was equally tearfully pardoned by President Musharraf.
The explanation is that Messrs Bush, Wolfowitz, Rove, etc, nostalgic for the sudden spike in the president's popularity which attended the capture of Saddam Hussein, are hoping niftily to net, in time for November, a much bigger fish. And so, over there in Afghanistan, poor American boys in uniform are being prepared for a huge spring offensive along the Afghan border in the hope of - gasp! - catching Bin Laden.

And who knows, as an elections gimmick it just might work. You and I know Bin Laden's capture will have as little effect on the Islamic resistance as the capture of Saddam has had on the Iraqi resistance. But mainstream Americans are simple folk, and would doubtless revel in the notion that Mr Bush was decisively winning the war on terror - the same 'terror' that Mr Bush is in fact inciting, with his crass grab at other countries' resources - and here's the point.
If Musharraf's government were now to be tarred with the nuclear-proliferator's brush, the US would be forced by its own laws to impose sanctions on Pakistan. And how would it then get Bin Laden out of his hole - and Mr Bush and his cronies (for so the cynical thinking clearly goes) another term with their hands in the till.

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