In his acceptance speech, Bush spoke of his “duty to serve all Americans.” Vice President Cheney, however, noted that Bush ran on a clear agenda and the nation responded by giving him a mandate. Therefore Bush’s statement that “a new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation” will last as long as the echo of those words did in the auditorium where he gave his victory speech. At one of his rare press conferences, a day later, Bush said: “I’ve earned capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it.” It’s clear Bush and Cheney see this mandate and their moral certainty as all they need to justify anything they do.

That mandate will be used to return to business as usual: using the resources of government to serve the core Republican constituencies and to enrich those in power politically and economically. More money will be funneled to the religious right and favored defense contractors. Forty percent of the Pentagon’s budget already goes to Halliburton and other companies in no-bid contracts, and that percentage will increase as social programs are cut to spend more on the military.

Bush stressed in his speech that reforming the tax code and Social Security are his priorities for the next term for a reason. Shifting even more of the tax burden to the middle class is a way to reward the wealthy for their support. And better yet, it comes with no political cost, since Bush’s moral masses apparently worry more about the sanctity of life in a petri dish than their economic self-interest. Privatizing Social Security will generate billions in commissions for the financial services industry. And a portion of those profits will be faithfully recycled as campaign contributions to those who made the windfall possible.

Subjecting people’s retirement income to the vagaries of the marketplace will pale in comparison to subjecting people’s freedoms to the vagaries of the government’s security apparatus. Six months ago the Justice Department was arguing that Yaser Hamdi, who was born an American citizen, was so dangerous that he should be denied every one of his most basic civil liberties. When the Supreme Court said even Hamdi deserved his day in court, Justice shipped him back to Saudi Arabia and gave him his freedom rather than go before a judge to argue that someone who at best was a Taliban foot soldier was a grave threat to the republic.

But any abuse is permissible if the administration decrees someone an enemy of the state because we are at war — and we will be at war until Bush decrees otherwise. According to the White House’s lawyers, the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war do not apply. Any obligation, be it law or international treaty, can be ignored if it is inconvenient. Torture can be outsourced and, even when done by Americans, is permissible as long as the intent is not to murder. Since the intent of torture is to extract information, murder is never the goal, and so the circular logic winds up back where it wanted to be. The ends justify any means and the ends can be defined to be whatever is most convenient for the government.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the coming scandal, whether financial or merely moral, is that it may well go undetected and unreported. With solid majorities in both houses, a partisan Republican Congress will cease to provide a check or balance on the power of the executive branch. To call the Republicans in Congress the lap dogs of the White House is to insult Chihuahuas everywhere — they at least bark on occasion. It is no surprise that Bush has been the first president since the earliest days of the republic not to use his veto power. With ethically challenged Majority Leader Tom DeLay having an even larger majority in the House, there will be no challenge to the administration from that quarter.

Normally the judiciary could be counted upon to play its constitutional role and provide some brake on abuse of power by the White House. We are, however, only a couple of nominees away from an Antonin Scalia-Clarence Thomas majority that believes in the unchecked power of the executive branch.

Given that the administration is so assured of its own virtue and correctness, it sees no need to share what it is doing with the American public. As a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recently pointed out, the administration has waged an unprecedented assault on the public’s right to know. By restricting access to information and vastly expanding what is being classified, the administration has choked off public oversight of what the government is up to.

Some might think that whistleblowers will come forward and provide the information the public needs to know. They will only if they have a particularly strong desire to commit career suicide. FBI whistleblowers have been sent off to bureaucratic Siberias. And for those who can’t be assaulted directly, there are other tactics, like attacking the person’s family. When retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson pointed out that Bush was using a report, known to be false, that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium from Niger, the administration attempted to discredit him. When that didn’t work it thought nothing of damaging national security by revealing that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA employee.

Meanwhile, the FBI has spent months investing Halliburton’s contracts and years looking into the alleged leaking by Larry Franklin, a midlevel Pentagon intelligence analyst, of classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying firm tied to Israel’s far right.

Another Pentagon leak that has not been clarified is how its erstwhile favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, learned the United States had broken Iran’s diplomatic codes. He is said to have passed this information on to Iran in order to ingratiate himself to another patron.

Even when a leaker is identified, the damage done might never be made clear. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani who helped his country develop nuclear weapons, admitted on television that he provided nuclear-related information to other countries. Bush claimed to have brought him to heel as an accomplishment of his war on terror. But Khan was pardoned immediately by Pakistani President Musharraf; he has been under house arrest and kept away from the press ever since.

The White House knows the press will drop most stories after a couple of news cycles with nothing new and that stalling can stave off any lasting embarrassment. At most a couple of small fish wind up taking the fall — as has happened in the case of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Apparently staff sergeants are the highest-ranking responsible officials in our armed forces.

Can the Washington press corps be depended upon to uncover any further administration wrongdoing? Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the Watergate scandal to vault from obscure reporters to media stars. Today’s media, however, are largely either compromised or cowed. Corporate interests dictate what Fox News portrays as fair and balanced, which is why its viewers are far less well informed than those of competing networks. But it would be as much a mistake to think that people use the media to inform themselves as it would be to think that the media only seek to present the truth. The bottom line drives the latter effort. And many readers, viewers and listeners would rather have their worldview validated than be presented with conflicting information.

What’s more, never tiring of screaming about the liberal bias of the press, the right has successfully beaten much of it into submission. And the right sees no inconsistency in using its domination of talk radio, cable television and pathetically predictable print outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids and the Washington Times to do it. The press is now so timid that investigative reporting takes a back seat to providing an echo chamber for administration spokesmen in the name of balance.

And while its foreign policy has been a failure of monumental magnitude, the administration has been relentlessly successful at filling the airwaves with its alternative version of reality. When the New York Times reported that 380 tons of specialized high explosives, one pound of which was used to bring down Pan Am 103, had been left to be looted in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the reaction by the administration’s surrogates in the press was to attack. They said it was a liberal media October surprise and that Saddam Hussein or maybe the Russians had moved the explosives before the war. The Pentagon trotted out a couple of middle-grade officers to fill the air with smoke and claim they had not seen the explosives or had detonated several tons of them. That neither officer knew anything about the disposition of the 380 tons in question was irrelevant, as the press felt obliged in the interests of balance to aid in the obfuscation. By the time a Minnesota television station came up with videotape showing that the explosives were still under International Atomic Energy Agency seals after American troops had arrived, that incontrovertible proof was lost in the haze. So don’t look to the press to provide clarity or truth about the coming scandals.

If there is any silver lining, it is that zealots without constraints will eventually hang themselves on their own excesses. While you can fool most of the people twice, you can’t do it forever. This administration loves to talk about Saddam’s mass graves even though the most recent ones date from the mid-1990s. They never mention the estimated 100,000 Iraqis, half of them women and children, who have been killed while being liberated. But parallel realties can be constructed and maintained for only so long.

Eventually more people will realize that the Republican morality has no more depth than Bush’s intellectual curiosity. Then new ayatollahs will spring up and try to claim the mantle of the demolished majority, but they will also fail. Eventually the people will figure out that taxes are the price we pay for a safe and just society and that morality, like democracy, has to spring from within rather than be imposed from above.

It is therefore no surprise that the various inquiries into the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons “have so far left crucial questions of policy and operations unexamined,” according to a story in the Sunday New York Times. That is the intended result of the administration’s coverup strategy.

No doubt the memorials for President Reagan will also be used to help advance the strategy. Since he is best remembered for making Americans feel good about themselves without ever causing them to ask why, his long goodbye can be further used to support the notion that if our purpose is noble, our tactics don’t matter. If nothing else, his weeklong funeral will be a spectacle of distraction.

Stalling is a particularly effective part of this strategy because Washington policymakers know that if they can get through a few news cycles without any breaking news, the media will focus on something else. Promising an investigation while discouraging a rush to judgment buys the time required and allows the guilty up the chain of command to go unpunished.

The strategy is tried and true. For instance, on June 18, 2003, U.S. forces attacked an Iraqi village near the Syrian border because they received good intelligence about potential high-value targets being in the area. No one of high value died, but among those killed were a young woman and her 2-year-old daughter. When asked by journalists whether there would be a formal report on the incident, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, “Everyone will know that which is available to be known” when “the dust settles.” A year later, the dust has apparently still not settled.

Controlling the message is another essential piece of the strategy. Rumsfeld has already banned the use of digital cameras by troops, since he understands that what is seen is more important than what is said. And he knows that what is said is more important than what is done. The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq has an office of “strategic communications” with a staff of about 80. A full 95 percent of them are dedicated solely to generating stories in the American media, particularly small local television stations. Many of them are Republican political operatives and campaign staffers who are being paid huge salaries to protect the American public from the reality of Iraq.

The attack phase of the strategy is being left to surrogates, rather than to those, such as Rumsfeld, who will assume the responsibility for what happened as long as they are not held accountable. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., announced at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the abuses that he was “outraged by the outrage” over Abu Ghraib, and by the fact that “so many humanitarian do-gooders” were “crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations.”

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., went even further. He told a local TV reporter there was nothing wrong with terrifying a prisoner with an attack dog “unless it ate him.” He went on to say that treating prisoners roughly, even if some died, was acceptable, since interrogations are not like Sunday school. Let’s hope the next time an American is taken prisoner, the captors don’t follow the advice of these two distinguished senators.

Denial is also part of the strategy, especially since the truth can be so elusive in a combat zone. On May 18, U.S. forces bombed another Iraqi village near the Syrian border, this time killing some 45 people, about half of whom were women and children, according to a local police official. Gen. Mark Kimmit, spokesman for the coalition forces, initially asserted that the group bombed was a “high-risk meeting of high-level, anti-coalition forces.”

After videotape appeared that purported to show the gathering had been a wedding celebration, Kimmit responded, “Bad people have parties too.” Asked about the incident again on May 28, Kimmit said two senior officers had begun an investigation of it within the previous 48 hours. But nothing further has been revealed, and as with the attack a year ago, the media have moved on.

If even the most distinguished newspapers dutifully repeated the administration’s baseless assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before the war, why should anyone in the media now take the time or effort to pursue why a few innocent civilians were killed?

Another aspect of denial is refusing to provide information. When Congress received Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib, some 2,000 pages were missing. One of the missing documents was a report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the head of prison operations in Iraq, on rules for interrogating prisoners. Miller toured the prisons in Iraq last summer, when he was still commander of the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and recommended changes to interrogation procedures. Although Rumsfeld personally approved the use of “intensive interrogation techniques” against some of the prisoners at Guantánamo, just what those techniques consist of remains classified.

Scare tactics are the final element of the strategy. On the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, Attorney General John Ashcroft called a press conference to warn of new terrorist threats, even though he had no new intelligence and had not bothered to inform the Department of Homeland Security he was making such an announcement.

On June 1, the Justice Department struck again, making new accusations about Jose Padilla. He is the American citizen arrested in Chicago for allegedly plotting to detonate a dirty bomb. Officials at the Justice Department say they were just trying to educate the public by informing us that Padilla was also planning to blow up apartment buildings. Some wondered why Justice declassified this information now, since Padilla has been held without charges for two years and arguments in his case before the Supreme Court were made just last month.

Whatever the motivations, such announcements illustrate the belief that any manipulation is acceptable if it might help make us safer. Torture and abuse, throwing U.S. citizens in jail without the right to an attorney — these are all necessary because this is a two-front war, one against terrorism and one against defeat in November.

If the coverup strategy succeeds, we will likely never know who should be held ultimately responsible for Abu Ghraib. And the coverup strategy may succeed because it has no shortage of accomplices — those who do not question the political leadership that made the abuses not only possible but inevitable.

Powell will step down as secretary of state early next year regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. A little unfinished business like peace in the Middle East won’t prevent his retirement. The allure of private life will prove too strong as the boardrooms of countless corporations beckon. He will also be able to go back on the speaking tour and easily command double the $60,000 he used to make for his 20-minute motivational pep talk.

Now when he speaks, all he gets for his trouble is questions: questions about why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq when he assured the world a year ago they were there. Questions like the ones raised in a recent report by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.: It documents 125 occasions when Powell and the four other highest officials in the Bush administration made a total of 237 misleading statements exaggerating and distorting the threat posed by Iraq.

To add to his irritation, criticism from the left has not made him immune to carping from the right. When the Spanish voted their government out of office after it tried to take political advantage of the recent terrorist incident by blaming the Basque separatists, Powell got the blame. Some conservative commentators asserted he should have prevented a friendly government’s demise by its own hand by selling the administration’s policies better. For the true believers on the right it is always the salesman, not the product, that is defective.

But beyond the questions about his veracity and effectiveness, the biggest incentive for leaving government service is the book deal. Powell will have the $10 million advance of former President Clinton to aim for, and some publisher will no doubt be willing to help him surpass that record amount. With that much to spend, getting out at the end of this term while he can still enjoy it makes sense.

The book will be a much greater challenge than the last one, however. His autobiography, written by Joe Persico and published in 1995, was compelling because it told the story of an American dream, how he rose from modest beginnings to become America’s highest-ranking military officer as well as the first African-American to reach that level. The coming book about his days as secretary of state will have to deal what he accomplished in that office.

Powell is not without his fans. Those who worked for him and those for whom he worked will lament his stepping down. The State Department bureaucrats will miss him because Powell is the kind of general who always takes care of his troops. His stature helped boost State’s budget, allowing much-needed technological upgrades and additional hiring. He fought for and won the money to allow business-class travel on particularly long flights. He then ensured that perk would not be denied by a stingy boss by ordering that permission had to be obtained to fly anything less than business class. He also attended the swearing-in ceremonies of new ambassadors and honored those who were retiring from government service.

Those for whom Powell worked will also miss him. He is the consummate loyalist, and for good reason. Like Gen. Alexander Haig, who served as secretary of state in the Reagan administration, Powell earned at least three of his four stars on the bureaucratic battlefields of Washington, rather than holding progressively more responsible military commands. Powell owes his stature, status and wealth to the Republican elite who rewarded him for always faithfully serving them.

The combination of a military tradition of obedience to authority together with the mindset of a bureaucratic staff aide led to Harry Belafonte’s unfortunate description of Powell’s mentality as being reminiscent of a “house slave.” It was unfortunate because it diverted the discussion from what role the secretary of state should play to a debate about racial slurs and stereotyping.

Powell and his aides have nurtured the impression that he was often the voice of moderation and reason in arguments over policy within the administration. Supposedly, when he was nevertheless rolled by the neoconservatives, he felt it his duty to carry out the policy. Whatever objections he may have had must have been based on a difference in tactics, not on principle — at least not any principle worth resigning over. That may be because he has made a career out of promoting himself and calling it the national interest. He didn’t resign on principle because his overriding principle is self-interest.

That is why Powell has applied the famous Powell Doctrine on the use of military force so selectively. When a Democratic president wanted to use military force in Bosnia, Powell devoted himself to thinking of obstacles to prevent it. When Republican presidents have wanted to use force, Powell may have argued initially for another strategy, but in the end he always found it more important to obey his benefactors than to adhere to his doctrine.

Powell likes to compare himself to Marshall. But just as Dan Quayle was no John Kennedy, Colin Powell is no George Marshall. Marshall was the architect of the Allied victory in World War II. His vision created a new spirit of cooperation, mutual help and support between Western Europe and the United States, which led to the establishment of the NATO alliance and the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe. He is the only soldier ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize because he was seen as a true internationalist who promoted peace through cooperation and understanding among nations.

Powell will be remembered as the first African-American to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. But he will also be remembered militarily only for having twice defeated a feeble Iraqi army and for the conquest of Panama. His contribution to economic development abroad will be his support for the Millennium Challenge Account — a half-baked attempt to remake foreign aid by turning it into a source of pork for crony capitalists.

As for promoting peace and understanding, Powell will be thought of as the smiley face on a foreign policy designed by extremists who think understanding other nations is a sign of weakness. His successor will have to deal with repairing our relations with “Old Europe” and trying to see that NATO survives as a viable institution.

While Marshall sought to distance himself from partisan politics, Powell is already being trotted out on the campaign trail to go after any of the administration’s growing number of critics. He is also being used as a symbol of diversity in a party that counts Strom Thurmond, the equal opportunity sexual predator, among its heroes.

Powell will work hard in his book to construct a positive image of his legacy while at the same time trying to make up in gravitas what it lacks in gossip. He will cherry pick the historical record much as he did recently in Foreign Affairs magazine. In that article he asserted President Bush’s foreign policy is not unilateralist, does not favor military means over diplomacy and is not obsessed with terrorism. In the book, he will be equally selective and as implausible in arguing that he has left the world a better place than he found it upon entering office.

In so doing he will ignore the evidence to the contrary in the same way he made the case for invading Iraq. The fact remains that Powell has been the faithful good cop as the bad cops have run the show and brought America’s image to an all-time low in most parts of the world. Those who work for Powell and those he works for may miss him when he is gone. The rest of us should not.