"We’ll all be dead"

Because my television has been broken for two months now, I’m not suprised I missed this from Condoleezza Rice, appearing a few weeks back on 60 Minutes:

“You have conceded that lots of mistakes have been made in Iraq. Vice President Cheney says if he had to do it again, he’d do it the same way. Do you agree?” Couric asks.

“Well, I would certainly do it again,” Rice says.

Asked if she would do it the same way, the secretary says, “Nobody can go back and reinvent the past. We can’t do it, Katie.”

“But you can learn from your mistakes,” Couric remarks.

“I’m enough of a historian to know that things that look like brilliant policies at the time turn out to have been really stupid. And things that looked like mistakes at the time turn out to have been brilliant policies. I’ll let history judge those things,” she says.

Good thing for Rice, her boss has already discerned the verdict of “History” (which in Bush’s eschatology should always be capitalized):

The story of freedom has just begun in the Middle East. And when the history of these days is written, it will tell how America once again defended its own freedom by using liberty to transform nations from bitter foes to strong allies. And history will say that this generation, like generations before, laid the foundation of peace for generations to come.

In at least one sense, I’m sure Rice and Bush are equally correct. No matter how much farther things devolve in Iraq and Afghanistan; no matter now many more reckless, evidence-free adventures this administration pursues in the name of national security; no matter how many more constitutional protections evaporate in the pursuit of “freedom-haters”; no matter how many more “enemy combatants” are sold off to the US by Afghan warlords and the Pakistani ISI; no matter how how many poor people along the Gulf Coast are unable to receive the simplist opportunity to reconstruct their lives, there will always be a conga line of hapless, supplicant hacks who leap to the defense of this administration and its operatic incompetence. At some vague, distant point on the horizon, there will be a Michelle Malkin, willing to claim that the eradication of habeas for non-citizens in 2006 was a good and proper thing; there will be an Ann Coulter, eager to demonstrate (with so many footnotes) that George Bush’s opponents were contemptible traitors; there will be a Peter Schweizer, able to suggest with a straight face that George W. Bush was the craftiest, most forward-thinking and prophetic president since Ronald Reagan; and there will be a Victor Davis Hanson, capable of re-reading the Iraq War into a noble expression of the “Western Military Ethos,” just like Vietnam.

But really — who cares? As Bush himself shrugged to Bob Woodward, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”