For now, Bush is still a four letter word.

¶A war intended to eliminate (what were later found to be non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq “ended up with Iran and North Korea much closer to having deployable nuclear weapons.”

¶A war intended to help combat terrorism has led to the recruitment of more terrorists and the spread of Al Qaeda to Iraq.

¶A war intended to create a bulwark against the ayatollahs in Tehran turned into a “strategic gift to Iran” and the empowerment in Iraq of pro-Iranian Shiite theocrats.

¶A war intended to make Israel more secure has made that country more vulnerable to threats from Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.

¶A war intended to showcase American power has ended up underscoring “the deficiencies of U.S. intelligence, the incompetence of American administration and the limitations on the American military.”

¶A war meant to boost America’s global leadership “has driven U.S. prestige to an all-time low” over the last five years and alienated important allies like Turkey.

Updated 4:19 p.m. Dec. 11

In what critics are calling a blatant attempt to rewrite history, the White House has pulled two lists of countries included in the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing" from its Web site and altered others.

Scott Althaus, an associate political science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kalev Leetaru, coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the Cline Center for Democracy, called the changes to the lists, which were used in press releases prior to the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, part of Bush's "legacy at risk of being forgotten."

"Updating lists to keep up with the times is one thing," says the report titled "Airbrushing History, American Style." "Deleting original documents from the White House archives is another. Back-dating later documents and using them to replace the originals goes beyond irresponsible stewardship of the public record. It is rewriting history."

Althaus and Leetaru discovered the missing pages during academic research, and used archived web pages to plot what happened.
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The following article sites the Bush admins attempt to delete their original COTW list as a means of rewriting history. What's up with that?

Report: White House Deleted 'Coalition of the Willing' Lists

Costa Rica was on that list, but they got smart and said in effect, "Take our name off that crap!"

And you have that statement by Bush/Cheney about history looking upon them favorably. Of course, if you help to rewrite that history.

Bush visited his troops at Camp Victory in Iraq this month and said: "Iraq had a record of supporting terror, of developing and using weapons of mass destruction, was routinely firing at American military personnel, systematically violating UN resolutions ... Iraqis, once afraid to leave their homes are going back to school and shopping in malls ... American troops are returning home because of success." Only one shoe and one without a sharp stiletto was hurled at him by Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi who begged to differ.

... As Bush bequeaths this highly volatile situation to the next administration, he is now attempting to rewrite history and dodge responsibility for his role in starting the war. President Bush in recent interviews admitted that if he had a “do-over” he would “wish the intelligence had been different.” Yet despite this being “the biggest regret of all the presidency,” Bush seemed to suggest he would still have gone to war in Iraq – and leaves behind a daunting set of challenges in Iraq, the wider Middle East and around the globe for the next Administration and a rising generation of Americans.

Revisionist history about the Iraq war

Sunday, December 14, 2008

President Bush is trying mightily to rewrite the history of the Iraq war before his administration leaves power. He and members of his national security brain trust, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, would like to dispel the narrative that they misled the country into war. Instead, both Bush and Rice are trying to characterize the White House as the unwitting recipient of faulty intelligence.
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The president's attempt to disassociate himself from accountability for the phony pretext for war is simply outrageous. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were not just two guys in a crowd of "a lot of people" who were worried about Hussein's weapons capability. They were elevating the hysteria about Iraq at a time when some of this nation's most important allies were openly skeptical of U.S. claims of Hussein's weapons cache and capabilities. The Bush administration was sounding alarms - such as Rice's January 2003 suggestion that ceding to uncertainty might cause the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" - even though U.N. inspectors were coming up empty.

Most infamously, Bush's 2003 State of the Union address included the 16 words claiming that Hussein had tried to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium, even though red flags had been raised within the State Department about the veracity of the claims.
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In other words, his biggest regret wasn't regret over anything he did but rather regret over something that was done to him, a vague "intelligence failure" rather than a misguided decision to invade another country. Bush explained that "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."
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The main thing that changed over the course of 2002 wasn't anything about the intelligence, it was the fact that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. Consequently, a new, more alarmist intelligence estimate was written up. Then a more alarmist redacted version was released to the public. And the administration's public statements were more alarming still. There were real intelligence failures here, but they were and are dwarfed by the policy failure.
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As President George W Bush eyes his legacy, his presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, threatens to be a white elephant.

Bush has bought a $3m (£2.05m) house in a Republican enclave 10 minutes away from his proposed library and hopes to play an active role in the policy institute that will be established there. With his approval ratings at a record low of 20%, according to a CBS poll, he is keenly interested in shaping the verdict of history.

“I’d like to be . . . known as somebody who liberated 50m people and helped achieve peace,” Bush said in a recent interview. Laura Bush said last week that she saw the policy institute as a “great vehicle” for continuing her support for women’s rights in Afghanistan and the Middle East.