In vain the conservatives cried, “Let Reagan be Reagan!” But the Ronald Reagan who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt and described FDR as his favorite president was the same man who left Roosevelt’s domestic legacy untouched and brought the Cold War to a bloodless end by following Truman’s containment policy.

In politics, too, Reagan represented an end, not a beginning. His political base consisted of transplanted Midwesterners like him in California, and he rode to power on the backlash against the Civil Rights Revolution and the counterculture by the white working class and middle class, many of them, like him, former Roosevelt Democrats.

Today’s right is profoundly different from Goldwater-Reagan conservatism, though they share a common tactic: Unable to repeal popular liberal programs directly, each has cut taxes to create deficits that might inspire major spending cuts in the future. In this respect, George W. Bush is the heir of Ronald Reagan.

Martin Andersen, President Reagan’s domestic and economic policy advisor, 1981-1982:

I think the way to look at Reagan’s legacy is to make believe you are a historian 100 years from now, and look back at what happened in the 1980s, when the political dust has settled — unlike the last 48 hours, when everybody is being nice to everybody. I can’t be sure, but I think there will be three things in Reagan’s legacy.

First, historians will look at the sweep of history when communism started, spread, and see that it ended on Reagan’s watch. He didn’t do it himself, but he was the political leader of the free world, and deserves a certain amount of credit.

Second, the threat of an all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States went away, an extraordinary thing. Again, he was president of the United States, when the threat ended, the Berlin Wall came down, and he and Gorbachev became buddies, and Gorbachev is coming to the funeral now.

And third, he was president during a period of prosperity that began in 1982. There are a lot of reasons the economy kicked up then; one was tax cuts, and another was the threat of all-out nuclear war fading away. And the early 1980s was the beginning of the computer revolution, which has been an exploding galaxy. These are the three main things.

Things like Iran-Contra might not even be a footnote. All the complaints, they might not be big enough to be part of the Reagan legacy.

John Judis, senior editor for the New Republic:

I lived through Ronald Reagan’s two terms as governor of California and his two terms as president, and was forever bewildered by his political success.

Reagan was committed to a very simple-minded and apocalyptic worldview, but he could articulate it in terms (like the vision of America as a “city on a hill” and the Soviet Union as “the evil empire”) that resonated with Americans. At the same time, he was a former labor negotiator who loved the give and take of politics and was always willing to compromise when he faced an unyielding majority. He was ideologically dogmatic, but politically flexible and astute.

He entered politics after Goldwater’s crushing defeat, but he showed in his 1966 gubernatorial election that conservatives could win voters outside the local chamber of commerce or John Birch Society chapter by appealing to growing social concerns among white working-class Democrats about civil rights and about cultural and political radicalism.

He turned a narrow intellectual movement into a political majority. This new majority was founded in part on hatred and resentment, but Reagan’s methods were so subtle that he didn’t leave a personal legacy of hatred behind him.

As president, Reagan’s record is decidedly mixed.

But Reagan deserves lasting credit for helping to end the Cold War. How much Reagan’s aggressive policies and military buildup during his first term contributed to this result remains to be seen; but in 1985, Reagan recognized that the new Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to take the Soviet Union out of the Cold War.

They also were beginning to wind down the disastrous war in Nicaragua. In Washington in 1988, conservatives were sporting buttons reading, “Support the Contras, Impeach Reagan.”

By the time he left office, Reagan’s foreign policy enjoyed more support from Democrats than from conservative Republicans. It’s well to keep that in mind as George W. Bush and his minions seek to summon Reagan’s memory to justify their disastrous policies in Iraq.

Frank Mankiewicz, former president of National Public Radio and press secretary to Sen. Robert Kennedy:

The legacy of Ronald Reagan?

We’ve been reading these last few days that it was dedication, decency and honesty — the Wall Street Journal, in a full-page editorial, virtually proposed him for sainthood, or at least that his face appear on every coin and paper currency. But the verdict, of course, will be mixed. Taxes went down and then came back up. Foreign policy included triumphs at the Berlin Wall as well as failures in Afghanistan, and particularly Iran-Contra.

But it seems to me we all have left out an evaluation of the main influence on any legacy Reagan leaves us — the influence of Hollywood. It was there he not only learned his lines but his characters. Hollywood had mastered, in that Golden Age of the ’30s, what Americans want to be told about what kind of people they are as well as what they expect of their heroes, and Ronald Reagan mastered all that, and mastered it well — the optimism, the candor, the will to win; he was a true role model. In addition, he learned more of Hollywood’s values; for example, he and Nancy had many gay friends and never thought about it, and he forever told fanciful stories, and made them seem true, about how racial prejudice had long been banished. I think his legacy, and it is one Americans should think about this week and in the future, is that you could learn more about America on the sets of Warner Bros. than at any state house or in the halls of Congress.

Andrew Cockburn, co-author of “Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein”:

Somewhere out there, in one of America’s secret jails, a prisoner is mourning the passing of an old friend.

Saddam Hussein may have had his differences with some of our recent chief executives, but when the going got tough, Ronald Reagan was always there for the Iraqi dictator.

The liaison can be dated from the summer of 1982, two years into the bloody Iran-Iraq war. Iraq was losing, with Iranian forces advancing deep into Iraqi territory. Saddam was desperate for help, and he found it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Ronald Reagan decided that Iraq must not be defeated. Almost immediately, despite the fact that Iraq was then on the official list of terrorist nations, U.S. support began flowing to Baghdad, including precursor chemicals for chemical weapons.

The friendship was not without occasional disputes. In 1986, it emerged that Reagan, while aiding Saddam, was also providing assistance to the Iranians. In fact, during a bloody battle on the Fao Peninsula in January that year, both sides were operating with U.S.-supplied intelligence data. Reagan had to apologize to Saddam for two-timing him, make up for it by stepping up assistance to the Iraqi dictator.

There was one last favor for Reagan to bestow on his Baghdad pen pal. After an Iraqi chemical attack slaughtered some 5,000 Kurds in the city of Halabja in March 1988, there were moves both internationally and in Congress to issue protests and sanctions. The Reagan administration quietly stymied all such efforts. That’s what friends are for.

In the light of their friendship, it would be only fitting if Saddam, wherever he is, were allowed to join with other world leaders, past and present, in expressing his condolences at the passing of a faithful ally.

Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. COHA research fellow Jessica Leight contributed to his response:

As journalists and Sunday talk show hosts struggle to surpass each other in coining panegyrics for the late President Ronald Reagan, they have hardly touched the Iran-Contra scandal, one of the most significant foreign policy debacles in recent U.S. diplomatic history.

Dismissed by many as a relic of the Cold War era, the Iran-Contra affair in fact represents a crucial — if at the time almost unnoticed — portent of foreign policy explosions that would unfold under the tenure of Reagan’s ideological heir and reverent protégé George W. Bush. What was later to become reckless aggression in Iraq began under Reagan as the Central American wars of the 1980s, marked by a driven ideology, a contempt for both international organizations and the pesky mechanisms of congressional intent and oversight, and the utter subversion of democratic processes.

The remarkable continuity between the Contra war and Iraq is not merely a coincidence, but rather reflects the return of a host of key players in the Iran-Contra affair, all of whom were discredited in the subsequent investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.

Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte and Otto Reich, who under the Bush administration have been major figures in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, were key players in sending arms and weapons to the Contras and Central American death squads.

As the funeral procedures continue, analysts and policymakers alike might do well to recall this enormous blemish on Reagan’s supposedly “Teflon” record — and more importantly, with this occasion to take note of the increasing evidence that equally egregious policy lapses in this hemisphere are being implemented by the current administration. The Iran-Contra affair may be in the past, but the dangerous brand of quasi-legal and ideologically driven foreign policy it represents is alive and flourishing.

Steven Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980″:

Agree or disagree with him, Reagan deserves to be considered alongside Franklin Roosevelt as the most consequential president of the 20th century. Like FDR, Reagan has become the central figure of an era of American life. Just as FDR remade his party and cast a long shadow over the next generation of American political life, Reagan transformed the GOP, and his shadow over our subsequent political course is proving to be similarly long, and may still be lengthening.

He did not achieve all his main objects such as shrinking government. Yet it is a melancholy reflection on the limits of politics that even the greatest and most successful politicians often end their careers with a large note of failure hanging over their head. Lincoln died with the question mark of reconciliation and reconstruction; Woodrow Wilson left office amid the failure of the League of Nations treaty; FDR died, and Churchill left office, with World War II won, but with the seeds of the Cold War clearly germinating. Reagan left office with the Cold War still going, and with astronomical budget deficits that threatened the nation’s well-being for as far as the eye could see — a seemingly long-term legacy of failure.

Yet within a breathtakingly short time, the Cold War was over and the nation’s biggest fiscal problem, prior to Sept. 11, was what to do with its budget surpluses. Both events lent a large measure of vindication to Reagan’s designs. His huge budget deficits, Lou Cannon has remarked, now look like the wartime deficits of the final campaign of the old war, and therefore as a bargain. Although other leaders at home and abroad deserve their share of the credit for these happy events, it is hard to conceive of their advent without Reagan.

Since the Abu Ghraib story broke in late April, the organization’s work — primarily taking firsthand testimonials from Iraqis, many of them quite disturbing if difficult to verify — has been cited in major media including the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine.

Fifteen years ago Kindy, a devout Methodist, helped found Christian Peacemaker Teams, whose motto is “Getting in the way.” His first mission as a human rights observer was to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip in 1994.

In the fall of 2002, Kindy and some of his fellow activists went to Baghdad in the hope that a presence of American pacifists might help halt the march to war. After President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May 2003, CPT activists in Iraq shifted their focus from trying to stop the war to documenting life under the American-led occupation. Kindy says they’ve since collected over 200 accounts alleging abuses by the U.S. military, which they hope will garner media attention, fuel a letter-writing campaign by sympathetic church groups and help in lobbying U.S. policymakers.

But convincing occupation officials to soften their military tactics and detention procedures has been an uphill battle, particularly in the face of mounting American casualties. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, with whom Kindy had several personal encounters, spoke frequently about his efforts to win “hearts and minds” through simple acts like helping bake bread in a villager’s home. Sassaman was a battalion commander who oversaw operations around Abu Hishma village among other areas in the notorious Sunni Triangle. As pockets of Iraqi resistance began to flare up late last year, Sassaman’s relations with Iraqis became markedly different. He became infamous last November for enclosing the entire village of Abu Hishma in razor wire after an attack on one of his convoys occurred nearby. “If our base gets attacked,” Kindy remembers him saying, “we open up in every direction.”

Despite having heard numerous harrowing stories from released Iraqi prisoners, Kindy was still caught by surprise by the brutality exposed at Abu Ghraib. “Detainees were saying that the worst times were in the intake stages. The assumption was that when they were in temporary facilities or U.S. military bases scattered across Iraq they were more likely to be tortured,” he says. “We thought that once they got to the permanent facilities, like Buca camp down in the south or in Abu Ghraib prison, that things improved because there was a routine in place.”

Kindy returned to the United States in March from his second five-month mission in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams. He spoke with Salon by phone from his farm in Indiana on Wednesday.

Once the war started, the role of Christian Peacemakers changed. How did your organization get into interviewing Iraqi detainees?

Right after the war, we were trying to find our way. It was in that period we were looking at unexploded ordnance, the danger of that for children and communities. We were also a presence with some of the nonviolent demonstrations.

But then this whole detainee issue started to open up. Neighbors and acquaintances started to come to us and say, “We don’t know whether our detainee is alive, what the charges are, where they’re being held. Can you help us?” Because we spoke English like the soldiers, sometimes we could facilitate answers. That developed through the fall, and we began hearing more and more stories. That led to a report that we wrote toward the end of December last year that carries some of the details of our findings working with about 70 detainee cases. And that continued as we worked our way up the civilian and military ladders of the occupation [with our findings] at the request of a couple of U.S. army officers.

U.S. Army officers asked you to inform their superior officers that abuses were taking place?

We shared our report with a staff sergeant at the Iraq Assistance Center. He passed it on to a couple of other people — a Maj. Simmie Clincy and a Col. Fisher — and they came to one of the meetings. At that meeting, on Dec. 22 last year, they said they didn’t agree with everything, but they acknowledged to us, “We’re giving orders out in the field to our soldiers that are putting them at long-term risk in order to have short-term security. We need to have policies developed to change that.”

So the Army officers had told you that they were receiving orders on how to deal with Iraqis that they considered improper or inhumane?

Right. But they said that in the chain of command they couldn’t reach the people who make the policies. They set out the steps we’d have to take to work our way up to the top in the U.S. occupation authority. Eventually we met with Ambassador Richard Jones in Civilian Administrator Paul Bremer’s office. Jones, who was former ambassador to Kuwait and Lebanon, had been brought in in early December to fix the problems with the detainees. We also met in Gen. Ricardo Sanchez’s office with Col. Mark Warren, the highest-ranking legal officer for the U.S. military in Iraq.

Col. Mark Warren has been in the news recently denying that torture was part of the military’s interrogation policy. What went on in your meeting with him?

It was Feb. 14, a Saturday. Warren had been in Baghdad since April 2003. I remember him saying, “We try to comply with the laws of war and human rights law,” and that “we try to have our soldiers be culturally aware. We’re putting out a new [order] to be precise about how much force needs to be used, and to be restrained in that.” Warren also said there would “be dramatic improvements in the next few weeks.”

He also mentioned the movie “The Battle of Algiers.” He said, “[Brutal tactics] worked in the short term, but they blew up in the face of the French. If they had worked, Algeria would be French now.” He said that was something “we need to learn from.”

He seemed to be trying to say that the U.S. wouldn’t use these kind of extreme interrogation tactics — that they wouldn’t work. The Abu Ghraib story hadn’t blown at that point. “We’re bringing a new group of MP’s to Abu Ghraib,” Warren said, “that are oriented to do family visits.” I don’t know if they’re the ones who also did the interrogations.

You also had some personal interactions with Lt. Col. Sassaman, who, according to the Washington Post on April 5, was “disciplined for impeding [a] probe” into an incident where American soldiers allegedly forced two Iraqis to jump off of a bridge. What was it like working with him?

Sassaman is an interesting character. He was the one, because of an attack on one of his convoys near Abu Hishma village [in November of 2003], who encircled the village with five miles of razor wire and instituted a nightly curfew. We also heard reports where, in raids on Abu Hishma, Sassaman’s unit took relatives hostage in order to get other people.

It was collective punishment. Even if people from the village did attack that convoy — and that wasn’t clear — you can’t justify punishing the thousands of people that lived in that village for the actions of a few people.

I think part of his response was out of his frustration at having soldiers injured or killed. It was also at those times that we’d hear about some of the more serious allegations going on under his command. He said that when they’re not clear where an attack comes from, they just let loose with everything. I remember him saying, “If our base gets attacked, we open up in every direction.”

What was CPT’s reaction when the images from Abu Ghraib started appearing in the media in late April?

Well, it kind of blew us away — not because we hadn’t been aware things like that were occurring, but because from the testimonies we had taken, detainees were saying that the worst times were in the intake stages. The assumption was that when they were in temporary facilities or U.S. military bases scattered across Iraq they were more likely to be tortured, they were more likely not to be protected from the weather, that they were more likely not to have sufficient water or food. We thought that once they got to the permanent facilites, like Buca camp down in the south or in Abu Ghraib prison, that things improved because there was a routine in place. When this story broke, we realized it was much bigger.

We’d been hearing some stuff from Abu Ghraib, but it wasn’t as significant as those early intake stages. We’d heard reports from Abu Ghraib village outside of the prison, saying that the women inside were asking that the prison be bombed, destroyed, because what was happening inside was too terrible to live with. We were hearing some reports of torture inside the prison, fingernails, thumbnails being pulled off, but not the kinds of [sexual] abuses we’ve heard about in the last few weeks.

CPT is one of the few human rights organizations that publishes first-person testimonials. Why do you use that approach?

A lot of that is for our constituency, so they can write and bring pressure to bear on government officials. It’s a way to make the story more personal for them; it grabs their interest more quickly; that’s one of the reasons we use it. Also, we’re hoping that emphasizes less of our own perspective in the story.

But doesn’t that make you less of an objective fact-finder than someone who’s there to air Iraqi grievances?

What we say when we take testimony is not that we have necessarily verified the accuracy of it. What we are saying is, “This is what a detainee or a family came and told us about their situation and experience.”

We aren’t lawyers. We don’t pretend to have a fully balanced story. But we have had experiences in lots of different communities that seemed to be consistent.

And we don’t put everything we hear in our longer reports. We try to be critical about what we put in; if we weren’t sure about a story, we’d leave it out. If it sounded like exaggeration and we weren’t getting any confirmation of it from other places, we’d usually let it go.

At one point we were led to understand that probably the Sunni Triangle would be worse, because that was where resistance was happening. Well, we got outside the Sunni Triangle frequently and the stories were coming down in Kerbala and Najaf, as well, and up in Dialah. It seemed clear that the abuses weren’t just a “geographical problem” with the occupation.

It’s not that there’s a handful of people upset with the occupation. Most Iraqis are upset with the occupation. They don’t need anybody to tell them what’s wrong with the occupation because they can see it, they’ve experienced it, their family members have experienced it.

Several testimonials published by CPT contain some extreme allegations. Do you think that some of the stories you heard were embellished?

There were a few of those kinds of stories, yes. But for the most part, I think the stories included in our cumulative report follow a familiar pattern. Humiliation, lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of U.S. soldiers, lack of accountability. Soldiers were not held accountable for actions.

Do you think other human rights organizations working in Iraq have been more conservative in reporting suspected instances of abuse?

Maybe in the sense that they don’t have a very clear picture of what’s happening across Iraq. I’d expect that a group like Care, or the American Friends Service Committee would be more cautions about what they said about this issue because they haven’t been so much involved in it. The kind of experiences we’ve had, the things we’ve seen and taken testimony about, give us a little more of a base to speak with boldness and credibility.

Did you ever personally witness abuse of Iraqis while you were there?

We weren’t present when serious abuse was happening against Iraqis. I’d see people being humiliated at a checkpoint, that kind of stuff. But nothing like dogs or electrical prods used on them. Most of the time, I think “the grandma factor” is at work: People don’t like others to see them doing bad things. It’s one of the strengths of the Christian Peacemaker Team presence.

How did the American media respond to the CPT’s reports of abuse before the Abu Ghraib story broke?

We were always trying to get U.S. press. It was like we were invisible. We decided we needed to make a concerted effort to build relationships with these press people. So we started visiting them, and we talked about Abu Siffa [a village on the Tigris where CPT had extensively documented the use of harsh tactics by U.S. forces]. And Jeff Gettleman, a reporter for the New York Times, called us at one point, so two of our group went up to Abu Siffa with him. They talked with Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, the commanding officer for troops in the area, and talked with people in the village, and wrote the story for the front page of the New York Times. I think it was a miracle that we got that to happen.

Can you describe the relationship between CPT and the U.S. military?

Our meetings with higher officials and officers are fairly congenial. We usually start with trust, we assume that people we meet are going to be friends, and I think in general that’s what we’ve found in those meetings.

But it’s mixed. I’d pass out our human-rights leaflet to a couple of soldiers on the street, and one guy’s ready to ball it up and throw it back in my face, while another one says, “Oh, give me some more information, do you have any Web sites on this, do you have a G.I. rights hotline I can get in touch with?”

In general I think that U.S. soldiers are happy to meet somebody who speaks English — reminds them of home, someone who’s willing to listen to them.

Religious faith is a prominent aspect of CPT’s outlook. How does that affect your work?

Every time I go into a conflict zone I am emotionally impacted by the experience, sometimes traumatized, and if this work is going to be sustainable, we need to find the tools that enable us to return somewhat healed. It helps me focus, see the bigger picture and issues like forgiveness, justice, love, nonviolence. Those for me come out of my Christian perspective, although they’re not unique to a Christian perspective. We’ve worked very closely with Muslims, with Jews, and we’ve learned and been strengthened from those experiences. For us, though, this is what brings us to this work.

We’ve had very close connections with some leading Sh’ia and Sunni clerics in Baghdad. And maybe it’s because they see us as people of faith as well. I think that common commitment to faith has opened doors we wouldn’t have open if we were secular peacemakers. I think that’s key.

Which clerics did you have a relationship with?

We’ve worked with Sheik Moayyad [Ibrahim al-Aadhami] at the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Adamya district, and Sayyid Ali [Mussawi al Waahd], the overseer at the Kadim shrine. We met regularly with them, especially with Sheik Moayyad, because we were working with detainees and we would often take delegations to his mosque.

With Sayyid Ali we were there for Ashura [a Shiite religious festival banned under Saddam Hussein; 180 people were reported killed by suicide bombers during the festival on March 2, 2004]. Half our team was there with Sayyid Ali when the big explosions happened in the mall in front of the shrine. It was pretty horrendous.

How did you work with these religious leaders on human rights issues under the occupation?

Let me talk about Sheik Moayyad. Sheik Moayyad spent eight years in prison under Saddam. When he was released, he came back to lead the Abu Hanifa mosque.

He said that one day an Apache helicopter opened up on a minaret, there was an attack in the area of the mosque, and about 45 people were killed. He talked about going outside the front to see dozens of tanks and Humvees right outside his mosque. He asked me, “When will we learn to talk with people about our differences? When will we learn to resolve our differences as human beings even though we are on different sides of an issue, rather than shooting at each other?” He’s one of the people that gives me hope that things can change over there.

We’ve regularly gone to Sheik Moayyad for help documenting detainee abuse. He’s given us names, we’ve worked with those detainees, heard the stories from the prisons, from the intake detention facilities used by the military. He knows many of the people personally, and he tells us, “This person I can’t vouch for, but these people I can vouch for. The charges against them are false.” He’d make suggestions, who we should talk to, and somebody from the mosque would usually take us to the house, or they’d bring the person to the mosque and we’d interview them there. Because of Sheik Moayyad, we had those connections, and built personal relationships with people.

Sayyid Ali, I don’t think we had any detainee cases from his community. But because he’s in charge of the biggest Shia mosque in Baghdad, and is close to Ayatollah al-Sistani, he’d probably say it’s time for the occupation to end. He’s been patient so far with the occupation, but the United States needs to let Iraqi political leadership make the decisions to shape the future. Whether the U.S. military presence can continue, when the elections should take place — he believes those should be decisions made by Iraqis, not by U.S. appointees. He would be considered a moderate Shiite, but even the moderates are losing their patience at this point.

What do you hope CPT’s work will accomplish?

Accountability. And I hope it opens up a new way for us to understand those categorized as our “enemy.” We try to tell the story of people on the other side of barriers, that can easily become dehumanized if we don’t know them.

Also, I think our presence helps make it safer for U.S. soldiers. Because more Iraqis need to meet Americans who aren’t carrying guns and don’t ride in tanks.

Near the beginning of his address, the president claimed: “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror.” The United States must prevail in Iraq to deny “the terrorists” a “base of operation” — a reference to al-Qaida, presumably, with its need for bases for worldwide operations. As if to underline the implication that Iraq, like Afghanistan, had been a “base” for al-Qaida, Bush said: “This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power.”

Bush repeated this lie at the end of his address. He accurately described al-Qaida as totalitarian and seeking to impose Taliban-like regimes throughout the Middle East. But then, with breathtaking cynicism, he linked the U.S. war in Iraq to al-Qaida once again, following a recitation of al-Qaida attacks in Tunis and Bali with a recitation of places in Iraq where American soldiers now are fighting and dying.

Karen Kwiatkowski, lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force (ret.), served in the Pentagon’s Near East South Asia directorate headed by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Bill Luti, who also led the Pentagon’s secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans. Salon published her insider account, “The New Pentagon Papers,” in March; she currently teaches at James Madison University.

President Bush has a five-step strategy toward Iraqi deoccupation. The soldier-scholars in the Army War College audience must have been wondering, “Wheres the rest of it?” No mention of deoccupation, only the mush of “We went to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power.” And more troops will go to Iraq, more violence will be committed, and we will build a brand-new, American-style maximum security prison for the Iraqis. Afterward, we’ll have a photo op as we bulldoze the cursed Abu Ghraib and build a city park in its place.

The other American audience watched from the nation’s living rooms. They’ve been recently occupied with high gas prices, a slow economy, bankrupt state legislatures, a skyrocketing federal debt eating away at their financial security and the lack of mission clarity that threatens daily the lives and sanity of our men and women deployed in Iraq. Bush told these Americans that he wants “freedom, independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people.” I don’t know if that resonated. I do know that he has come a long way from his campaign promise that America would no longer nation-build around the world, or seek gratuitous feel-good interventions.

The president tonight sounded strangely Brezhnevian, circa 1978 — 138,000 American troops are staying in Iraq indefinitely, but Iraq is promised imminent “sovereignty” and “democracy.” Pay no attention to the men with guns. Bush mentioned our work to eliminate any residual reluctance of Iraqi security forces to fire upon their fellow citizens, er, terrorists. Ah, the exquisite challenge of bringing freedom and self-rule to an ungrateful people.

The Soviet invasion and subsequent puppetry in Afghanistan lasted 10 years, and four changes of leadership. Monday night, President Bush again asked the American people to be patient. After listening to his vacant, unrealistic and uninspired presentation to a controlled military audience, I think I understand why.

Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

I think the first thing Bush has done, interestingly enough, is what the Army War College has complained about: He’s conflated all terrorists together. On Monday night he talked about Iraq a lot and somehow linked that again to what happened on Sept. 11. Secondly, he never admitted, as again the Army War College study said, that he was ill-prepared when he went into Iraq, did not have enough troops on the ground when Saddam fell, did not provide the troops with any guidance. That’s how we got into this mess.

He again brought up with the whole domino theory for the Middle East, that if you make Iraq into a democracy, then you’ll have democracy all throughout the Middle East. I mean, what about Saudi Arabia? We’re not going to make it a democracy. We’re trying to get oil from the country. Or Egypt, Pakistan.

Bush also said that [the occupation will end June 30], but we’re still going to have the same number of troops there, and they’re going to be under American command. How is that complete sovereignty? I mean, if you’re completely sovereign you can’t have foreign troops in your country unless you can give them orders and command them.

Who can be opposed to handing over power, providing security, rebuilding the infrastructure, getting more international help and having national elections? Nobody can be opposed to that. The problem is, “OK, who are you handing over power to?” Can you imagine — you know, in our country, we have an election in November, we wait two months to hand over power, we used to wait four. Here we’re going to be handing over power in less than five weeks — and we don’t know to whom, how much support they’ll have or what power they’ll have.

My central concern is that the president has not yet recognized the mistakes he has made and therefore does not have a basis on which to improve the situation. He played fast and loose with the number of troops. (I think we’re going to have to put more troops in Iraq to provide the security necessary to rebuild the infrastructure.) Then he talked about how he’s going to go to NATO and thank the 15 countries that provided support and, as he said, almost 20,000 troops. Well, 10,000 of them are British. That means you have to divide up 14 other countries to account for the other 10,000. The president is trying to give the impression that we have a lot of international support when we don’t.

Arianna Huffington, nationally syndicated columnist and the author of “Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America.”

It’s appropriate that President Bush was at the War College; it’s just too bad that he chose to spend his time there speaking and not listening. If he had listened to the experts there over a year ago, he wouldn’t have needed to give this desperate speech.

He came up with a “five-point plan,” but he should have made it six. The missing element being the firing of all those responsible for the incredibly incompetent planning for this war and occupation.

The real problem with the Bush administration, shown especially in the Iraq war, isn’t that it makes mistakes — all administrations make mistakes — but that it refuses to learn from them.

Like Bush said, wars are “chaotic,” but how can you trust someone who refuses to admit reality? The first step to fixing a problem is seeing it accurately, and Bush’s speech hardly gives one confidence that he does.

He still talks about “victory” over the “terrorists” and “foreign fighters” and “Saddam loyalists.” But he doesn’t seem to realize that we’ve lost the Iraqi people, that many of them, who don’t fall into any of the above designations, now consider us the enemy. How can he solve this when he won’t acknowledge it? He still seems to think that the U.S. public needs assurance that we’ll win every military engagement. Of course we will. The question is whether or not there will be an unending number of military engagements, and his speech failed to give a solution for stopping — and not just winning — them.

What needs to be demolished is not just Abu Ghraib, but the policy apparatus that led us into this position. And that’s not “looking backward” or “playing the blame game.” Doing this is the only way to move forward and regain international credibility. Which is badly damaged, despite Bush’s ludicrous contention last night that “our coalition is strong.” It’s not, and neither are our chances for success in this war until he truly acknowledges what’s gone wrong.

Until he does this, any attempt to “make a diplomatic push for international support” is simply writing a check with nothing in the bank.

Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow, the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress.

President Bush’s speech, whose purpose was to rally public opinion in favor of his Iraq policy, proposed no change of course and no timeline for concluding U.S. involvement. Indeed, with the exception of bulldozing the Abu Ghraib prison, Bush offered absolutely no new ideas on how to deal with the huge difficulties the U.S. currently confronts in Iraq. Instead, he appeared to be relying on a strategy of looking stern and determined, saying that “the terrorists cannot be allowed to win” and comparing the American vision of “liberty and life” with the terrorists’ vision of “tyranny and murder.” If that all sounds familiar, it’s because Bush has been striking the same poses and saying the same things — to decreasing effect — ever since the U.S. invaded Iraq, and, in fact, considerably before it.

This is not likely to be an effective strategy. The public has turned increasingly negative on the war in Iraq and, more broadly, on Bush’s conduct of the war on terrorism. Simply asserting that we’re doing the right thing and we must continue to do it is not going to turn those negative views around. Instead, since the public believes that the current course in Iraq is not containing, much less resolving, the very serious problems, proposing a change from that course was the only plausible way to turn public opinion in his direction.

That is exactly what Bush failed to do and why we may reasonably expect that public opinion will not turn in his favor. And public opinion now is remarkably negative.

Is Bush doing a good job on the war on terrorism? The Annenberg Election Survey has now measured it in net negative territory: 46 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval. That’s a first and a very significant first. It means Bush’s area of greatest strength is rapidly turning into a political liability.

Is Bush doing a good job in Iraq? The Annenberg poll has Bush’s approval rating on Iraq at 39 percent approval, 57 percent disapproval, including just 33-61 among independents and 30-66 among Hispanics. The new CBS News poll has Bush’s Iraq rating even lower, at 34-61.

Has the war in Iraq been worth fighting? On whether “the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, or not,” the Annenberg poll finds just 40 percent saying it was worth it, compared with 54 percent who say it wasn’t. The split is slightly more negative among independents (39-55), much more negative among moderates (30-64) and stunningly more negative among Hispanics (22-75).

Is the U.S. making progress in Iraq? In a new Democracy Corps poll, by a 55-41 margin, voters believe the U.S. is losing control in Iraq, rather than making progress. And the new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 65 percent of the public thinks the U.S. “has gotten bogged down in Iraq,” compared with just 33 percent who think we’re making good progress.

Finally, is the war in Iraq helping fight terrorism and making the U.S. safer? In the Democracy Corps poll, by identical 50-45 margins, voters believe that the war on Iraq has made the war on terrorism harder, rather than helped it, and that the Iraq war has made us less, not more, secure.

Turning these very negative views around is going to be very difficult. Based on Bush’s performance tonight, I’d say he’s still in the denial stage.

Rachel Bronson, director of Middle East studies and the CFR-Baker Institute report on post-conflict Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations.

With his speech, the president will likely win back some support from his base. He will assuage the fears of some that he does not comprehend the current difficulties or understand its ramifications. In fact, he took great pains to prepare Americans for an increasingly violent spring and summer. The president laid to rest any notion that the June 30 date would slip and outlined a political structure for the interim Iraqi government. The president’s five points made him appear clear-headed and determined.

Unfortunately, Bush did not directly address the top questions of the day. What will sovereignty mean with 135,000 American troops, and possibly more, still in the country? Will the president hold those responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal accountable, regardless of where the ongoing investigations lead? How exactly will the president get more international support? It’s hard to believe that discussing “NATO’s role” at the upcoming NATO summit will seal the deal. How should Americans define success and failure?

The most disheartening aspect of the speech was the president’s determination to continue to link the 9/11 terrorism with the Iraq war. He backed off a little, by saying that “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror,” but insisted upon defining “our terrorist enemies” in Iraq as those determined to impose Taliban-like rule country by country. Until the president makes clear that we have lost much support in Iraq — not because of religious extremists, but because of a basic lack of law and order — it will be difficult to fashion a truly workable strategy for success.

Sandra MacKey, author of “The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein.”

The gap between rhetoric and reality in President Bush’s speech to the nation on Monday night was like a walk with Alice through Wonderland. As he has done time and again, the president stood before the American people and lied about the reasons the United States invaded Iraq and the causes of the ongoing loss of life and treasure in a quagmire largely of the administration’s own making.

He placed the blame for the violence that is likely to accompany the June 30 “transfer of power” solely on terrorists and Saddam loyalists. At no time did he admit to the American people that the bloody turmoil will largely be the result of a broad range of Iraqis engaged in the struggle for the right to define their own state, and to distribute political and economic power among themselves. It’s a problem inherent to Iraq’s own deep internal fissures, far less than it is a problem of foreigners attempting to import the ideology of al-Qaida, or of leftover die-hard loyalists from the Saddam regime.

The president outlined five steps Monday night to salvage the American misadventure in Iraq: Transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis; establishment of security by the joint efforts of American and Iraqi military forces; reconstruction of the infrastructure; recruitment of international help in policing and rebuilding Iraq; and administration of national elections. These are all valid goals. However, the president again failed to warn the American people of the real — and daunting — obstacles to those goals.

Either he was unwilling to share the truth with the American people or, frighteningly, he does not understand the real forces at work in Iraq.

Michael Rubin, former political advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

President Bush successfully contextualized Iraq as an essential component of the war against terror. His reminder that the U.S. cannot afford to fail is important, especially in an election year where Democrats and Republicans alike seek to make Bush’s management of the Iraq war a campaign issue. Bush was wise to let Iraqis know that the Coalition Provisional Authority would not simply transfer itself into an embassy on June 30; it will be a mistake if any American continues to occupy CPA headquarters in Saddam’s Republican Palace on July 1.

There were significant omissions in the Bush speech, however. Before the war both the State and the Defense Departments underestimated the trauma of President George H.W. Bush’s abandonment of Iraqis in 1991. Iraqis remain unconvinced that the U.S. will stick to its rhetoric and will not once again cut and run. While Bush rightly says that “whenever people are given a choice … they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear,” he ignores the fact that Iraqis will not again put their necks on the line if they doubt U.S. commitment to their future. Comments by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and CPA Administrator L. Paul Bremer in the past week suggesting that the U.S. might withdraw its troops shook Iraqi confidence in the United States. Iraqis — who fear the worst — will notice that Bush did not roll back Powell’s statements.

Iraqis will also be disappointed by the trust Bush places in the United Nations. The U.N. may be respected in the United States and Europe, but Iraqis have a very different experience. Many Iraqis believe that the raid on Ahmad Chalabi’s compound was meant to squash the Governing Council’s investigation into the U.N. oil-for-food program. U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi’s credibility took a hit in the past month when Iraqis learned that his daughter was engaged to Prince Ali of Jordan, the half-brother of King Abdullah. We may respect Brahimi’s role in Afghanistan, but Iraqis are prickly nationalists and distrust any mediators’ ties to neighboring countries.

By focusing on the role of Saddam’s elite guards in the insurgency, Bush downplayed the role of regional states like Iran and Syria in the current conflict. Ignoring their complicity may be politically expedient, but it can cost American lives. Over the eight months I worked for the CPA, I would sometimes visit the black market for documents. The price of Iraqi passports and identity cards increased as the cost of Iranian passports decreased. That’s basic supply and demand. When I drove along the Syrian border in January, it was still unguarded. Tire tracks breached the single coil of barbed wire that delineated the frontier in the vicinity of Jebel Sinjar.

Bush also glossed over what elections for Iraq will mean. He laid out a multistep process, but the results of elections will be far different if they are party-slate (enabling tyranny of the majority) or single-constituency (making individuals accountable to specific districts). The devil is in the details, but with stakes so high, details cannot be ignored. All in all, a good start. But both Americans and Iraqis wait to hear more.

As’ad AbuKhalil, Arab media expert; professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus.

George W. Bush is certainly concerned about his reelection. His plummeting popularity in the polls explains his need for a “major” speech on Iraq. He may have sounded convincing to those in the U.S. who know little about Iraq and who do not follow foreign affairs closely. But for Iraqis (and Arabs in general) Monday’s speech will go down as yet another desperate effort in the series of U.S. propaganda campaigns that followed Sept. 11 and the two subsequent U.S.-led wars.

The major problem with how Bush’s rhetoric plays in the Middle East is that it assumes that Arabs and Muslims can easily be manipulated by empty words about “freedom.” Will Iraqis really care that Bush has now decided to demolish the Abu Ghraib prison? Will that erase the horrific crimes of Saddam — and those of the U.S. occupation that followed — behind the prison’s walls? The pictures of U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib will stay in the Iraqi and Arab collective memory for a long time to come.

Bush insulted the intelligence of the Iraqi people with his latest speech in more ways than one: He talks about free elections, freedom and democracy, when all Iraqis, including children, know full well that an ayatollah who has not left his house in six years (Ali Sistani) insisted on free elections, while the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority fiercely opposed them. He tells Iraqis that they will have full sovereignty, and yet assures the military audience before him that he will send additional troops if they are needed, and that all troops in Iraq will serve under U.S. command. What kind of sovereignty is that? Bush says that American “technical advisors” will stay in key ministries; Arabs will surely recall the thousands of American “advisors” who were in Vietnam.

Bush and neoconservatives still foolishly refer to a “free Iraq” as a model for the region. They may be right — if other Arab populations are eager to incorporate into their lives daily car bombs, shootings by soldiers at checkpoints, torture of prisoners by liberating armies, the rise of fundamentalist groups and violent militias, clerical control of political affairs and many empty promises of democracy. Colonization does not work in the 21st century, and the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam will settle for nothing less than full independence.

Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.

The White House is still in the deepest denial — and still determined to evade responsibility for what Gen. Anthony Zinni has called the obvious screw-ups in the planning and prosecution of this war. I was particularly struck by Bush’s attempt, early in the speech, to blame our current troubles on our “swift removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime last spring.” This, he said, “had an unintended effect” of allowing the Baathists to regroup. So, let me get this straight: If the war had only gone worse last year, it would be going better now? If only we hadn’t accomplished our mission then so easily, we’d be accomplishing it more easily now?

As ever, this White House can’t even bring itself to utter the perennial mealy-mouthed evasion, “Mistakes were made.” This White House never makes any mistakes, active or passive; it simply suffers from the unintended consequences of its triumphs. If Abraham Lincoln had thought that way, he never would have fired Gen. George McClellan, and the Confederacy would have won the Civil War.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

It’s not yet clear whether the torture problem traces all the way up to policymakers inside the administration. But Khalidi believes that many Arab observers will see Bush’s apology as nothing more than a Band-Aid placed over a much larger wound. “The torture is only the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “This reaction has been building internationally for a long time, and to things that the president’s apology didn’t begin to address, such as America’s refusal to abide by the laws of war under the Geneva Convention and its refusal to recognize the War Crimes Tribunal.”

In Khalidi’s view, President Bush must take a much more serious step now to begin to reverse the damage done by Abu Ghraib: “If the president were to signal a broad change in course, a return to a humbler foreign policy, by firing Rumsfeld or removing Cheney from the ticket, that would be a good thing in terms of world opinion.”

“What Al Jazeera is covering right now is the car bombs in Baghdad, the fighting in Najaf, and events in Palestine. It’s not about Bush’s apology,” he told Salon in a phone interview. AbuKhalil says he thinks one reason stations like Al Jazeera may not be blaring the images 24/7 right now is due to intense pressure from the U.S. and its allied Arab governments to refrain from flaunting the incendiary material. Whether or not Al Jazeera and others have been temporarily reined in, Bush’s apology, he adds, comes up short anyway: “It’s a passive apology — like the [infamous Nixonian] line that ‘mistakes were made’.”

AbuKhalil believes that the administration’s lastest move to calm world opinion will fail, because ultimately it will come off in the Arab world as little more than empty rhetoric. “Bush saying ‘I’m sorry’ plays very well in Arizona and Oklahoma; it just doesn’t do it for Arab public opinion. This is the arrogance of empire. They think that ‘if only we can refine our message,’ if only we can put Bush on TV, then our problems will be solved.

“The main thing is that Arabs are deeply offended when the United States government tries to improve its image by better communication, and not by dropping less bombs and missiles on their heads. It’s a common misassumption that Arabs need Al Jazeera to be anti-American. Arabs are already more anti-American than Al Jazeera.”

AbuKhalil points to the growing circulation on the Web of doctored photos depicting shocking acts of abuse by U.S. soldiers, as another measure of the gravity of the torture scandal. “People are sending me pictures that are faked. The real pictures are so shocking already that any outrageous pornographic pictures are now believed to be real,” he says. “Some militant groups are creating images to further inflame the situation. These pictures are circulating wildly in the Middle East. I put up a notice on my Web site saying that I don’t want them. But they are being believed.”