Washington Decoded

Commission Confidential

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By Max Holland

    In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

     Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by TWELVE books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington Decoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore.

    In what’s termed an “investigation of the investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book’s critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission’s executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place—and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

     Shenon’s narrative is built from extensive interviews with staff members and several, if not all, the commissioners. He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush administration so that the White House would not bear, in November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent the attacks.    

    The Commission includes these specific revelations:

• Kean and Hamilton appreciated that Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National Security Council (NSC) during the presidency of Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German reunification. The commission co-chairmen also knew of Zelikow’s October 2001 appointment to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest, among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?”

• Karen Heitkotter, the commission’s executive secretary, was taken aback on June 23, 2003 when she answered the telephone for Zelikow at 4:40 PM and heard a voice intone, “This is Karl Rove. I’m looking for Philip.” Heitkotter knew that Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all contact with senior officials in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, she gave Zelikow’s cell phone number to Rove. The next day there was another call from Rove at 11:35 AM. Subsequently, Zelikow would claim that these calls pertained to his “old job” at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

• The full extent of Zelikow’s involvement with the incumbent administration only became evident within the commission on October 8, 2003, almost halfway into the panel’s term. Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’ call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that he be questioned under oath about his activities. General counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview, brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed—his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine—were mentioned in the résumé. Zelikow blandly asserted to Marcus that he did not see “any of this as a major conflict of interest.” Marcus’s conclusion was that Zelikow “should never have been hired” as executive director. But the only upshot from these shocking disclosures was that Zelikow was involuntarily recused from that part of the investigation which involved the presidential transition, and barred from participating in  subsequent interviews of senior Bush administration officials.

• Some two months later, as Bob Kerrey replaced disgruntled ex-Senator Max Cleland on the panel, the former Nebraska senator became astounded once he understood Zelikow’s obvious conflicts-of-interest and his very limited recusal. Kerrey could not understand how Kean and Hamilton had ever agreed to put Zelikow in charge. “Look Tom,” Kerrey told Kean, “either he goes or I go.” But Kean persuaded Kerrey to drop his ultimatum.

• In late 2003, around the time his involuntary recusal was imposed, Zelikow called executive secretary Karen Heitkotter into his office and ordered her to stop creating records of his incoming telephone calls. Concerned that the order was improper, a nervous Heitkotter soon told general counsel Marcus. He advised her to ignore Zelikow’s order and continue to keep a log of his telephone calls, insofar as she knew about them.

• Although Shenon could not obtain from the GAO an unredacted record of Zelikow’s cell phone use—and Zelikow used his cell phone for most of his outgoing calls—the Times reporter was able to establish that Zelikow made numerous calls to “456” numbers in the 202 area code, which is the exclusive prefix of the White House.

• Even after his recusal, Zelikow continued to insert himself into the work of “Team 3,” the task force responsible for the most politically-sensitive part of the investigation, counter-terrorism policy. This brief encompassed the White House, which meant investigating the conduct of Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke during the months prior to 9/11. Team 3 staffers would come to believe that Zelikow prevented them from submitting a report that would have depicted Rice’s performance as “amount[ing] to incompetence, or something not far from it.”

     In Without Precedent, Kean and Hamilton’s 2006 account of the 9/11 panel,  the two  co-chairmen wrote that Zelikow was a controversial choice

. . . [but] we had full confidence in Zelikow’s independence and ability—and frankly, we wanted somebody who was unafraid to roil the waters from time to time. He recused himself from anything involving his work on the NSC transition. He made clear his determination to conduct an aggressive investigation. And he was above all a historian dedicated to a full airing of the facts. It was clear from people who knew and worked with him that Zelikow would not lead a staff inquiry that did anything less than uncover the most detailed and accurate history of 9/11.

    Shenon’s radically different account of the commission’s inner workings promises to achieve what none of the crackpot conspiracy theorists have managed to do so far: put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute.

     The Commission will be reviewed in the February issue of Washington Decoded.

   

The Politics (and Profits) of Information: The 9/11 Commission

See also: “The Making of a Washington Expert ”

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By Max Holland

 

    The commission that investigated the events of 9/11 has been highly praised and sharply criticized, but one aspect of its task has virtually escaped notice: its responsibility to leave behind a complete, lasting, and easily accessible public record of its investigation. For all the good work that the panel did, some of its decisions have eroded the public’s right and ability to understand what happened on September 11, 2001.

    Raising this issue may seem a quibble, given that the 9/11 Report is one of the best-selling government documents of all time. But history shows that reports of comparable magnitude, and the first reaction to these reports, have been inexorably colored by exigencies of the day. Time has a way of changing initial public opinion. Indeed, one media flap (like the still-unresolved questions about the Pentagon’s ABLE DANGER data-mining program), can destroy a commission’s carefully cultivated reputation in a matter of days. Consequently, the true measure of such investigations is not just their final reports or recommendations. These panels are ultimately judged on the totality of information they bring into the public realm; what they make knowable, in other words.

    Traditionally, this deeper purpose has meant that final reports of important commissions have been supplemented by publication of the public and private hearings, staff reports and the actual documents used to compile the findings. Take a look at the shelf space occupied by some major probes since 1945: these include the 1946 congressional inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attack (40 volumes); the 1964 Warren Commission investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination (27); and the 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies (15).

    By contrast, the 9/11 Commission climaxed in the publication of a single, 567-page volume—without an index. The relative poverty of this effort at the culmination of a twenty-month, $14 million investigation reflects a downward trend in the government’s obligation to disseminate information to the public. This policy began in the 1980s, when, for ideological reasons, the Reagan administration reduced the number and availability of government publications. The worrisome tendency has accelerated with the advent of the Internet.

    Much of this story concerns the US Government Printing Office (GPO), whose lineage as the principal agent for delivering public information goes back to 1860. “Keeping America Informed” is the GPO’s motto, and over the years its imprimatur has acquired symbolic and legal significance. The sober look of a GPO volume conveys weight and authenticity. The symbolism is embedded in the law as well. The US Code still states that “all [federal] printing . . . shall be done at the Government Printing Office.”

    The 9/11 Commission’s first departure from customary practice was its decision not to use the GPO. On May 19, 2004, the commission announced that W.W. Norton, a private New York publisher, would publish the “authorized edition” of its final report. According to the commission’s press release, Norton was selected based on the criteria “affordability, accuracy, availability, and longevity.” There was no mention of a role for the GPO, which had long done a sterling job by these standards.

    Nothing in the law stops private publishers from also printing government documents, as such documents are not covered by a copyright. Sometimes several different publishers will put out an edition of the same report. About 35,000 commercial copies of the Warren Report were in bookstores one day after the GPO published it in 1964, and there was every reason to believe the same phenomenon would occur with the 9/11 Report. Certainly, never before had a publisher other than the GPO been the first to publish the report of a comparable government investigation.

    Five days after the commission’s announcement, The New York Times pointed out that Norton had a long-standing relationship with Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director. This relationship was not known to the commissioners when they selected Norton; nor had Zelikow, who was responsible for pushing the idea of a commercial publisher, recused himself during the process.

    While Zelikow was not in a position to receive a tangible benefit from the 9/11 contract, the fact remained that anointing Norton was akin to giving his publisher a license to print money (Norton’s gross proceeds would amount to approximately $6 million). After the Times article ran, the commission altered its stated plans. It was announced that the GPO would post the final report on-line the day of release and would also print an “official government edition.”

    Two factors in the commission’s decision to privilege a private publisher were the supposed cost and availability of a GPO edition. But the GPO edition ended up costing only $8.50, while the retail price of the Norton paperback, an inferior book in terms of its manufacture (binding, paper quality, and size), was $10. Nor was it true, as Zelikow reportedly presumed, that the GPO would produce something that would be hard to get. There is no provision in the law that prohibits GPO-published works from being sold in chain stores or local bookshops.

    According to historian Ernest May, a consultant to the commission, the unprecedented arrangement with Norton precipitated a “dreadful moment” the day before publication. Writing in The New Republic, May recalled that “an aide to a powerful member of the House telephoned the commission asking angrily about a rumor that the report would be issued by a private publisher. “It’s a report to Congress,” the aide thundered. The person on our end of the line remarked that stories about the commission’s publication plans had been featured in The New York Times weeks earlier. “We don’t read The fucking New York Times,” was the reply. “Fortunately,” observed May, “the individual decided not to pursue the complaint.”

    The 9/11 Commission’s second departure from long-standing tradition is possibly even more troubling. It concerned how the panel chose to disseminate other aspects of its inquiry, ranging from its staff reports to its public hearings. Historically, only the GPO could be expected to publish the entire opus of an investigative body at anything approaching an affordable price to the public. Of greater significance, GPO publication also assured inclusion in the permanent holdings of the 1,250 institutions that participate in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), an arrangement between research libraries and the federal government that dates back to 1813. Every depository library, in return for free copies of GPO publications, becomes legally bound to make these authentic documents freely available to all citizens without discrimination. Depository libraries, which are scattered across the nation, are thus the bedrock upon which public access to government information has always rested.

    The 9/11 Commission, however, never submitted a printing requisition to the GPO for publishing the many supplemental volumes that are in fact part of the report. The panel regarded this obligation as having been discharged when it made its staff monographs, interim reports, and public hearings available on the Internet. To be sure, such access is highly desirable and ought to be part of standard procedure now. But should web publication alone be the new norm? The American Library Association (ALA) thinks not, with respect to significant government documents.

    The ALA’s “Key Principles on Government Information” make clear that Internet access is no substitute for publication of a work in that most venerable of forms: a book. Information should be presented in a format that promotes usefulness, and that means complex information must be disseminated in a printed and bound volume. The reasons are not hard to understand. For one, publication via the Internet discriminates against citizens without on-line access, as well as those without a broadband connection. Reading a document amounting to hundreds of pages is unwieldy on a computer, even one with a fast connection. Printing it out is one solution, but that unfairly shifts the burden and cost of production onto readers, and still results in something less accessible than a bound book. Internet publication, argues the ALA, should complement the printed dissemination of government information, not replace it, particularly when the subject is something as critical as the September 11 attacks.

    A May 2005 article, “Government Information in the Digital Age,” written by three University of California–San Diego librarians, also makes some important points about the problems inherent in Internet-only publication. In contrast to the robust FDLP system, which establishes multiple collections of printed documents, Internet publication concentrates power in the government’s hands, allowing it to retract information whenever it sees fit.

    Some small publishers have bridged the gap left by the 9/11 Commission. For a hefty price of $395, Oceana Publications is putting out a complete, four-volume set of the 9/11 Commission’s hearings. Hillsboro Press has published the commission’s staff monograph on terrorist travel, and PublicAffairs Reports has printed twelve of the seventeen initial staff studies and excerpts from some of the commission’s hearings. Such entrepreneurship is desirable, but runs against the grain of long-standing practice regarding the dissemination of vital government documents.

    Because there is no GPO version of them, two of the staff monographs, one on terrorist financing and the other on civil aviation, will probably never be published in book form. The commission’s hearings—which represent the inquiry’s only unscripted venue—are not likely to be purchased by many libraries given the cost, a sum well in excess of what the GPO would likely have charged. Put another way, for the foreseeable future, the one-volume final report is the only guaranteed bibliographic entry to be found for the 9/11 Commission at depository libraries.

    If making a private publisher the printer of first resort and relying exclusively on the Internet for dissemination of supplements to the report were the first two departures from accepted practice, what the 9/11 Commission chose not to publish at all is at least equally remarkable.

    Comparable investigations have made available at least some portion of the raw information upon which the respective reports were erected, even at the risk of challenging the very conclusions a particular report might have drawn. The Warren Commission, for example, decided it was far better to present the entirety of the evidence in all its rich complexity than be charged with hiding information. Other, comparable panels have weighed the evidentiary part of their responsibility differently, but in no instance was a final report released without publication of some portion of the primary documents accumulated during the investigation. This is the only method by which the public can assess the accumulated evidence and judge the soundness of the investigation itself.

    The overwhelming majority of records cited in the 9/11 Report are not only unpublished—worse yet, by the commissioners’ collective hand they are closed to the public until at least January 2009. Undoubtedly, there is highly classified information about intelligence sources and methods that must remain secret. But it is equally certain that the great bulk of this information could be released sooner. There is no better authority for this assertion than Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission. “You’d just be amazed at the kind of information that’s classified,” Kean told The New York Times. “We’re better off with openness.”

    It’s easy to talk about openness, of course, but harder to do something about it. In this case, there is a real chance to do it. The National Security Archive in Washington has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all the documents cited in the 9/11 Report’s footnotes; the results to date prove that the release of redacted documents was, after all, feasible. That the commission made no effort in this direction speaks volumes about the nature of its bipartisanship, because the timing of the availability of sources always has meaning.

    What is the meaning of opening the files, now in the possession  of the National Archives, only after January 2009? Well, that is the month that a new president will be inaugurated, which means vital information will have been denied at least through the November 2008 election. Neither George W. Bush nor a likely candidate related to Bill Clinton will have run for president having faced a public steeped in the primary information from the government’s own files.

    Postscript: While Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean were conspicuously lacking in discipline when it came to making their panel’s documentary trail available, they nonetheless found the time and energy to reap the benefit of  their service. In August 2006, the co-chairmen published Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. Not to be outdone, Ernest May, in February 2007, published his own edited and abridged version of the 9/11 Report, complete with a “first-hand account” of how the panel went about its work.

    Exploiting one’s service for personal gain is hardly a new phenomenon, and not even objectionable most of the time. But in this case, the behavior of these public servants leaves a bad odor given the 9/11 Commission’s lack of respect for a fundamental obligation.

         This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 1 November 2005

                                                        © 2005 by Max Holland

An Old Schism Haunts the 9/11 Commission

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By Max Holland

    Although attention largely focused on the solemn ceremonies, the most remarkable feature of the events marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been the 9/11 Commission's reversion to its repressed partisanship.

    The precipitating factor was the seal of approval Thomas Kean bestowed on a controversial ABC miniseries that tended to ascribe a larger portion of the blame for 9/11 to the Clinton administration (although, in truth, the Bush administration did not go unscathed). Kean, a Republican former governor who chaired the commission, had been instrumental in keeping the panel on a more or less bipartisan page. But the price of unity had always been that everyone within sight was described as in some way to blame, which is another way of finding that no one was. The docudrama strove to accomplish the opposite. Thus, Kean's endorsement of The Path to 9/11 as "true to the spirit" of what had happened was tantamount to tearing up an agreed-upon script, a provocative thing to do just weeks before a national election. Some of his former Democratic colleagues responded in kind.

    Generating an aura of political bipartisanship had never been easy. In April 2004, during the public-hearings phase of its investigation, the panel gave every sign of becoming unhinged, with the sessions in Washington coming to resemble an intensely combative congressional investigation. Democratic members sought to pin the lion's share of responsibility for 9/11 onto the Bush administration because it had ostensibly disregarded an ample warning. Republicans countered by depicting a Clinton administration that had vacillated after U.S. embassies and the USS Cole burned.

    Under increasing criticism, the commission managed to close ranks, and in July 2004 it delivered a report that was an instant and widely praised best-seller. The government's subsequent, and massive, reorganization of the intelligence community, instigated in part by the report, also burnished the commission's image.

    In the two years since the report's publication, some of the sheen has worn off, as it has become apparent that to achieve unanimity the commission took a bipartisan dive. The report is compelling when the subject is Al Qaeda and its plot. But whenever the issue is how Washington let that plot be carried out, the historical analysis is underwhelming. The narrative reads like "an elephant rolling a pea," as a review by Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist, put it. "Especially disturbing [was] the inability of the commission—or, more likely . . . its unwillingness—to assign any blame among intelligence managers or policymakers." The only thing worse than this lack of accountability was the commission's decision to deny the public access to the information it had assiduously collected from government files. This barring of access insures that the panel's non-interpretation will reign supreme until at least January 2009.

    The authors of the 9/11 report tried to mask this deficit with a catchy theme: 9/11 happened, first and foremost, they maintained, because of a "failure of imagination" in two successive administrations. Problem is, the facts the commission presented not only failed to support this idea, they eviscerated it. If there truly was a failure of imagination, how was it that CIA director George Tenet declared war on Al Qaeda in 1998? Similarly, on August 29, 2001, an FBI agent (identified only as "Steve" in the report) e-mailed an FBI analyst (named "Jane") and demonstrated a very lucid conception of the stakes. "Steve" angrily wrote that "someday [Americans] will die [and] the public will not understand why we were not more effective" in tracking down Khalid al Mihdhar. Thirteen days later, al Mihdhar helped crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

    There was no failure of imagination. But there was a failure of will and implementation, an inability to come to grips with a lethal, implacable threat. What the ABC docudrama managed to do was reopen a political divide that the 9/11 commissioners had so scrupulously sought to paper over.

     Another notable feature of the fifth anniversary is the rise of conspiracy theories about what happened on September 11. According to recent polls, about 36 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government had an as-yet-undisclosed hand in the catastrophic events.

    This development, in one sense, was entirely predictable five years ago, and nothing can be done about it. Nearly 65 years after the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, there still exists a hard-core group who believe Franklin Roosevelt knew about the exact coordinates of the surprise attack, but let it proceed because he was hell-bent on entering the war.

    The "paranoid style," as historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it in 1964, has always been a feature of American politics. Still, there is something unsettling when, two years after release of the 9/11 report, the doubters total more than one-third of those polled. The reason for this may be the report's failure to satisfy Americans' thirst for a coherent explanation for the calamity. Here, the aftermath of the 1941 assault on Pearl Harbor provides some insights.

    After the surprise attack on the base, Roosevelt appointed the so-called Roberts Commission, headed by Justice Owen Roberts of the Supreme Court, to investigate why the United States was caught unawares. As with any such inquiry, the selection of who would do the investigating was of paramount importance. That would turn out to be the panel's Achilles' heel, in addition to the brevity of its probe and lack of access to critical information. Roberts, a Republican, was chosen because he had made his mark investigating the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. The four other panel members were military men, two hand-picked by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and two by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. What made this odd was that Knox and Stimson headed the very departments that were the subjects of investigation. One of the generals selected by Stimson, moreover, was a close personal friend of thirty years' standing.

    Critics rightly pointed to these built-in conflicts when they charged the panel with having a hopeless bias against the U.S. commanders in Hawaii, while de-emphasizing, if not ignoring, equal or greater mistakes that had been made in Washington. Ultimately, the Roberts Commission did not put questions about the attack to rest; its performance generated controversy and spawned conspiracy theories.

    Something of the same phenomenon may be happening with the 9/11 panel, and for similar reasons. It would have been more appropriate for Jamie Gorelick, who served for three years as Clinton's deputy attorney general, to appear before the panel solely as a sworn witness; instead she was one of the most active of the ten commissioners who shaped the report.

    Likewise, historians will one day ponder why Philip Zelikow was selected as the commission's executive director. A friend of Condoleezza Rice's since their days together on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, Zelikow was a key member of Rice's transition team in 2000 and 2001 and was instrumental in the pivotal decision to demote counter-terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke. After 9/11, Zelikow remained an outside adviser to Rice, helping to draft the administration's 2002 national security blueprint for unilateral, pre-emptive military action—the framework for the invasion of Iraq. Without Precedent is the title of Kean's recently co-authored memoir about the commission's work, an apt choice considering that the panel featured a staff director who had to oversee the investigation, testify, and recuse himself simultaneously.

    Since February 2005, Zelikow has been counselor to now Secretary of State Rice. It's a textbook case of what Ralph Nader calls Washington's "deferred bribe syndrome." [Disclosure: From 1999 to 2003, this author worked at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs while Zelikow was its director.]

    The fifth anniversary of 9/11 also afforded George Bush a natural opportunity to deploy a president's ultimate asset, an address to the nation from the Oval Office. And once again, Bush used the occasion to promote his foreign policy of crackpot Wilsonianism.

    Bush's cleverness (and presumably Karl Rove's) rests on his dressing up an untenable, insolvent policy with words that tug at the heart and mind of nearly every citizen. What American would declare him- or herself squarely opposed to democracy? Or against freedom?

    Immediately after 9/11, the administration faced a choice: to address, via politico-military means, the threat posed by Al Qaeda, or to exploit the occasion to smite all of America's real or presumed enemies. The president has repeatedly assured Americans that what he is doing is only the contemporary version of FDR's call to arms to defeat fascism, or Harry Truman's policy of containing communism. Ten years from now, Condoleezza Rice has claimed, the Bush era will be seen as the flowering of a new golden age of U.S. power and diplomacy, akin to the period when the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO laid the groundwork for a prosperous and democratic Western Europe.

    The only thing more astounding than the administration's staggering hubris is the smugness of its ignorance. Bush has not reinvented a contemporary version of containment but rather is engaged in a twenty-first-century version of rollback, an aggressive policy of combating communism that had been discredited by the mid-1950s.

    Bush's latest mantra is that the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein stripped of power. Who would deny that? It's also true that the world would have been a better place in 1950 if Joseph Stalin had been deposed. But presidents from Truman to Bush's own father moved cautiously against the citadels of communist power, avoiding war until the Soviet empire imploded because of its own internal weakness. Bush and Rice would have Americans believe that the same nation that contained the Soviet empire for forty-five years was incapable of keeping Saddam Hussein in check.

    By invading Iraq pre-emptively and under a false premise, Bush opened a second front before defeating Al Qaeda, giving it another theater of operations, a powerful recruiting tool, and training grounds. Meanwhile, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Widening the war to include Iraq also squandered much international goodwill toward the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. World opinion, although intangible, always matters, but seldom as much as it does here.

    Judging from the president's fifth-anniversary address, he remains bent on exaggerating Al Qaeda's deadly but limited menace into a polarizing, world-historical clash. His analysis threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the ideology of jihad has been, if anything, spreading. Five years into what Bush initially termed a crusade, there is a growing mismatch between the president's aim of remaking the world and America's not unlimited means.

    If this isn't crackpot Wilsonianism, then it's a simpleton's view of history from a president who has watched one too many John Wayne movies.

      This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 September 2006
                                                       © 2006 by Max Holland