Bush's final days: What W can teach Olmert about exit strategy

When Ehud Olmert finally, mercifully steps down from office, he could learn a thing or two from George W. Bush about an exit strategy, as the presidential middle initial rewrites history with a liberal supply of whitewash in his pen.

The final seven weeks of W's eight-year reign of incompetence are upon us, with Bush wandering around dispensing a two-pronged mix of partial admittances of guilt and defiant defenses of his record.

Prior to his heading off for pasture in Texas, the lame duck president seems to have entered an alternate reality where he is still a respected president, Iraq was linked to 9/11 (though you didn't hear it from him) and his greatest fault was only a lack of preparedness and the terrible misfortune of being misled.

This "Bush revision doctrine" has obvious appeal and could easily be adopted by Olmert.

Though he didn't march the country to war on cooked-up faulty intelligence, the same line of reasoning - that incompetence and poor leadership can be explained as merely a lack of preparedness - could work well in O's favor.

After all, the prime minister was thrust abruptly into the spotlight when Ariel Sharon suffered a catastrophic stroke. He was then blindsided by the Gilad Shalit abduction and the Second Lebanon War, both of which he could say he was "unprepared for."

It remains unclear what combination of political pressures and criminal indictments will finally force the lame duck Olmert to collect his belongings and clear out, surrounding February 10 general elections.

But if Olmert wants to take the time remaining to study Bush's technique, W is granting him ample opportunity.

In a speech given at the Saban Center last week in D.C., Bush gave his farewell remarks on his administration's eight years of Middle East policy, describing a region crucial to the United States, where altruism and the pursuit of security have led the Bush administration on a righteous campaign of ensuring peace and prosperity to the masses, despite what you may have heard.

As part of the new Bush narrative, the soon-to-be-former commander in chief was a man unprepared for war and easily duped and mistaken by advisors, the "I was incompetent and gullible" defense. By no means did he march this country to war under false pretenses during a climate of fear brought on by the September 11th attacks, rather, the intelligence was surprisingly flawed, a mistake in no way related to the incessant cherry-picking of friendly intel done by his administration.

In what will probably be his most-remembered line of the night, Bush said "it is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks," while then saying that the realities of that fateful day required defending the American people from belligerent enemies like Saddam marauding through the Middle East.

It was a two-fold maneuver on Bush's part, rewriting history and attempting to exit the stage having again linked the failed U.S. adventure in Iraq to the innocents killed on 9/11, making himself the last Republican since Sarah Palin to do so, if in a far more indirect way.

On the stage in D.C. Friday, Bush showed what is surely to be the norm for the pre-Obama whitewashing of the Bush presidency. The technique allows W to cleanse his hands of Iraq and the deceptions his administration engineered on the road to Baghdad, while at the same time writing it off as a fundamental, necessary theatre of the War on Terror.

The whitewashing may also serve to help the GOP exorcise the specter of W, possibly helping bring the party back to the White House in 2012.

The strategy was demonstrated again in an interview last week with Charlie Gibson, where Bush admitted that he had made mistakes in his presidency. The greatest of these, he indicated, were "the intelligence failure in Iraq" and being "unprepared for war", both of which would have been frank, revealing, possibly even sad statements, if it hadn't seemed that he was trying to write himself out of events that he himself helped orchestrate.

In these last days of his presidency, Bush reminds one of the character "Hud" from the first novel of famous Texas author Larry McMurtry, "Horseman, Pass By." In the book (and subsequent movie "Hud", starring Paul Newman) a wild-eyed good timin' and hard drinkin' ole boy heads home to handle his ailing father's estate, only to fudge the whole operation as the inevitable work it entails just gets too annoying and tedious.

At one point, he tries to deceive a cattle buyer by selling him a herd of diseased cattle - though Hud may have just been "unprepared" for ranching, or was possibly given faulty bovine intelligence.

While W was never a violent, womanizing sociopath like Hud in "Horseman, Pass By" (the title taken from a Yeats poem), Bush's work ethic in office and his bull-headed and ham-fisted foreign policy seem to run a clear parallel to the lackadaisical, care-free and reckless ole boy flooring his pink Cadillac over train tracks and small town streets of West Texas, leaving a trail of dust and broken hearts in his wake. Only with Bush, you can toss in the battery of environmental regulations he's attempting to roll back as he leaves office.

Or perhaps in his waning days as president, Bush could abandon the campaign of revision and sugar-coating and adopt the words of a fellow transplanted Texan, Davy Crockett, who upon leaving politics in Tennessee remarked "you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." W now heads back home, like Cincinnatus returning to the farm, only this time to the leafy environs of Preston Hollow in Dallas.

Even the recent purchase of this $2 million house in a tony Dallas suburb is instructive. It proves to many that the Western White House in Crawford was, in fact, a show ranch all along, fit for a show cowboy whose credentials to be president were no more than show as well.

When Olmert finally does retire, he could do worse than taking legacy-building lessons from Bush's once and future burnisher-general.

In the years to come, the whitewashing will continue, with the torch being carried most loyally by Karl Rove, who owes it to Bush after being the man most responsible for him being in this mess to begin with. Rove announced last week the opening of the "Bush Legacy Project", the goal of which is to "set the record straight" on the Bush presidency, according to a senior Republican strategist.

The Bush Legacy Project will be ground zero of the Bush revision endeavor, its partner in rewriting history the soon to be built George W. Bush Presidential Library and Freedom Center on the campus of conservative, old money Southern Methodist University in Dallas, one of the few universities, even in Texas, where a W library isn't unpalatable, or doesn't run the risk of being torched the opening weekend.

Regardless of what happens, Bush has already achieved the dream of most Texans: the big ranch outside the city. Furthermore, it's not a working ranch like Lyndon Baines Johnson's, rather a show ranch in every meaning of the word, and nowadays, without the need for rugged, "frontier Bush" photo ops, he can keep his hands clean and pay someone else to clear the brush from now on.

It's in these cozy environs that it's easy to picture Bush happy again. Jeb was always the smart Bush son, always the ambitious and responsible counterpart to Bush's "best guy to party with in Houston in the 70s" (or Midland in the 80s) persona. W's past eight years, where his first real job was the worst job on Earth, has now come to a close.

On some nights, one imagines Bush closing his eyes, the last 8 years have all been a dream and he's still governor of Texas. On the best nights, his mind travels back 14 years, and he's still the owner of (a whopping) 2% of the Texas Rangers, chewing tobacco in the luxury box wearing his old Texas Air National Guard bomber jacket, with politics merely the province of his father.

W, pass by

	U.S. President George W. Bush visiting the ancient desert fortress of Masada with outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.