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This article is clearly a very important contribution to our understanding of the failures of the foreign policy of the Bush administration. It is a remarkable coincidence that it appears on Free Republic within an hour of the article directing readers to view C-SPAN's "After Hours" interview of investigative reporter Bill Gertz responding to questions by Frank Gaffney about his book, "Failure Factory." It is significant that these two sources complement and confirm each other. Both discuss quite candidly the fecklessness of the Bush administration and especially its failure or to clean house in the State Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence apparatus with the predictable result that Bush's policies everywhere were undermined by liberal apparatchiks.

It is my view, and I so posted here at the time, and that Bush lost control of his foreign policy and any hope of implementing the so-called Bush Doctrine when the weapons of mass destruction were not found as advertised. Later, in a postmortem of his incumbency in the Bush administration, Karl Rove astonished me in a press conference in which he confided that he had gone to George Bush and implored him to conduct a defense of his administration which was being impaled with the slogan, "George Bush lied and people died." Astonishingly, Bush declined to do so and even forbade Rove from conducting such a defense of the administration. The rest is history, we all know that everything sloughed down hill both domestically and in foreign affairs thereafter.

I also posted immediately after the debacle of the 2006 election that part of the reason for the catastrophe at the polls was Bush's inability or unwillingness to exploit the bully pulpit and articulate conservative policies which the party and the people could understand and rally behind. We now see the two strands coming together, the Bush administration died a victim of its own rope -a -dope habit both at home and abroad.

Both Bill Gertz and Richard Perle have contributed greatly to our understanding of the events which make up the outworking of this process. I have always been fascinated by this undeniable reluctance on the part of George Bush to fight his corner. I have never thought that he was motivated by mean considerations. Rather, I believe that it comes from his upbringing and his Christian character which finds politicking and self congratulation, or even exculpatory explanation, to be somehow unseemly or ungentlemanly. He regards himself as a statesman not as a politician as a Christian and not a party man.

Whatever Bush's motivations, he nevertheless bears a very heavy responsibility for failure to pick up the verbal cudgels because his obligation to do so is not exclusive to his own legacy but it is to his party, to his conservative friends, and to his nation. His inexplicable and certainly unjustifiable silence has gravely injured them all.