The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication.

The title of Coll's piece is "Deluded," and that's an apt description of Bush and the neo-cons who urged him on and provided what passed for intellectual justification for his invasion of Iraq -- or, you could used the adjective I keep returning to, "pathetic."

About some things, most things, really, I'm totally uncertain about how history will view them. Maybe, like the scene from Woody Allen's Sleeper, it will turn out that everything we know (or think we know) is wrong, and deep fat, steak, cream pies and hot fudge are really good for us -- stranger things have happened, paradigms have been overturned, white and black have exchanged places, it could happen. But about Bush, I have absolutely not an iota of doubt at all: history will look upon him as a very, very bad president, one of the worst, if not the worst, we've ever had.

Oh, the Right will get over its current disenchantment with him, just as they did with Reagan, and they'll mount an attempt to deify him, as they've done with Ronnie (a medicre president at best), but they won't get any traction on it, because people who lived through the horrors of this time will just want to forget it ever happened, and people who didn't won't find any evidence to support the canonization. I mean that he's so bad that there just won't be a believable case than can be made for him once partisan loyalty no longer puffs him up, even taking into consideration the fantastic propaganda capabilities of the Right. It will not fly, and Bush's rep will do nothing but drop like a stone once he's got nothing to offer in the way of power, prestige or influence.

I was going to write that I hope the guy's not looking forward to a fulfilling retirement, but on reflection I assume that he'll get a nice, high-paying sinecure of a job, perhaps connected with Major League Baseball, or the oil industry, and he'll be happy enough. He'll make enough money, and be surrounded by sufficient numbers of toadying sycophants that he probably won't even notice (unobservant, incurious, and insensitive man that he is) that he's been shunted aside to the dead letter office, and no one's really interested in what he thinks or has to say.

And, boy, won't we all be happier then. "I survived the Bush II Presidency and all I got is this massive debt, chaos in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation and the disrespect of the entire civilized world" t-shirts will be all the rage.