Bush, you may remember, raised eyebrows last January by telling a Saudi Arabian audience that the “U.S. media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims, and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could be influenced [by] a sustained lobbying and PR effort.” Long before that, in the late 1980s, Neil Bush made bigger news for his controversial role as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, which collapsed and cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion. (Federal regulators accused Bush of various conflicts of interests, but he was never charged. A civil suit against Bush and other Silverado officers was later settled for $26.5 million.)

Bush spent most of the Clinton years as a venture capitalist. But in 1999, just as his brother geared up to run for president, he founded Ignite! Software — a company that creates interactive educational software programs. (Ignite did not return calls requesting comment.) Ignite’s product is not well-known in the education industry field, but it does get some respectful reviews. “They’re new entrants in the market,” says Keith Kruger of the Consortium for School Networking, “but from what I know, it’s a serious product based on some good research.” Whatever the merits of the company, though, it’s getting a lot of attention from a series of international investors named by the Associated Press who you might not normally expect to take an interest in a small Texas-based start-up.

One investor is Winston Wong, a second-generation Taiwanese semiconductor tycoon who recently founded Shanghai Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation with the son of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Last December Neil Bush visited Beijing to share dinner with Jiang Zemin and meet with political heavyweights like Wu Jichuan, China’s minister of the information industry.

According to the New York Times, Bush negotiated with the education minister of the United Arab Emirates to introduce Ignite’s software to the emirate’s schools.

Hamza El Khouli, an associate of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and chairman of First Arabian Development and Investment Company, not only invested with Ignite, he also hosted Bush, his family and Ingite’s CEO Kenneth Leonard on the Red Sea last March.

Of course, some of Ignite’s investors are closer to home. There’s Tim Bridgewater, a top Bush fundraiser, who co-founded Interlink Management with Neil Bush in 1994. Les and Anne Csorba are also Bush contributors and worked in the first Bush White House in the White House Personnel Office and the Office of Personnel Management, respectively. And former President Bush and Barbara Bush have even chipped in, too.

Why would so many foreign oil and computer industry magnates be investing their money in Bush’s education software start-up? Good question. “This is a fairly common practice,” says Bill Allison of the nonpartisan watchdog group the Center for Public Integrity. “It’s one way for special interests to sidle up to the president by giving business to his family members. It’s a way to get around the campaign finance laws.”

Actually, it’s one the Bush clan has a fair degree of experience with. Back in 1990, when Bush Sr. was still president, oil industry watchers were stunned to learn that the island nation of Bahrain — located just off the coast of Saudi Arabia — had selected a tiny and untested oil company named Harken Energy to develop offshore drilling rights for 35 years — even though the company had no experience drilling in water or overseas. George W. Bush had recently joined the Harken board. Richard Lawless, a former CIA agent with close connections to former President Bush and extensive business dealings in Asia, has reportedly arranged numerous highly lucrative business deals for Bush brother Jeb, now governor of Florida. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Jeb’s commission for a single Lawless-arranged deal helping find American property for Japanese investors netted Bush a tidy $213,000.

There’s no way to prove, of course, that Winston Wong or Mohammed Al Saddah ponied up their money just to get access to the Bush family. But it does make you wonder.

There’s also no way for the president to stop his brother from participating in such questionable dealings, just as the first President Bush couldn’t stop George W. from bidding on and receiving contracts for drilling projects in Bahrain. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) It’s exactly the sort of situation where you’d hope the president could exercise a bit of moral authority. “Maybe this is as good an argument as any for beefing up family values,” quips Allison.

But as Gore’s former campaign strategist Robert Shrum told another high-level Democrat recently, “Everybody is against Gore — except the voters.” Suddenly, Gore’s strength now lies with the Democratic Party’s electoral base. And he continues to poll much higher than any potential competitor for the 2004 nomination: In a March 27 Zogby poll, Gore won the support of 27 percent (followed by Sen. Hillary Clinton at 20 percent and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle with 6 percent) — very similar to a CNN poll a week before, which Gore led with 26 percent, followed by Sens. Clinton and Daschle at 19 and 8 percent, respectively. And his closest competitor, Hillary Clinton, has unequivocally ruled out a presidential run (at least in 2004).

This Saturday, Gore will make his most direct appeal to potential voters when he is expected to level his toughest and most outspoken critique of the way President Bush has managed the country since moving into the White House. And while Gore’s spokesman Jano Cabrera remains perfunctorily noncommittal when asked whether his boss is gearing up to run in 2004, even Democrats who had been skeptical that Gore would make a fifth run for national office now appear increasingly confident that he will.

But not with the same top circle of advisors who surrounded him the last time — most of whom are unwilling to answer any questions about Gore.

Shrum and his colleague Tad Devine were central players in 2000: Shrum as message-guru, Devine as a head of day-to-day operations. Though neither would comment for this story, both are now rumored to be angling to land spots on the campaign team now being assembled by North Carolina’s fresh-faced freshman Democratic senator, John Edwards. “Shrum’s dying to get into Edwards’ campaign,” says one high-profile Democrat, who, like everyone else interviewed for this story, asked to be anonymous. (Presidential politics is often too small a clubhouse for people to tell tales in the open.) “But he’s conflicted because Gore made him millions [in 2000].” Shrum is trying to keep his wooing of Edwards out of Gore’s line of sight, says this source — though apparently not too hard, since it’s a largely open secret in Washington.

Shrum and Devine aren’t the only former members of the Gore high command who are giving him the slip this time around. Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager through most of the 2000 race, says she is “staying neutral” because she’s now heading the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute. Mike Whoulley, Gore’s ground-level organizer in 2000, is a Massachusetts native who already had longstanding ties to his fellow Bay Stater, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. With Kerry certain to run in 2004, most assume that Whoulley will be in his camp. Whoulley, who helped run the Florida recount battle for Gore, was part of a kick-ass faction that made no secret of its dismay with the vice president’s cautious, legalistic and ultimately losing strategy in the Sunshine State.

Jill Alper and Nick Baldick — two other high-profile members of Whoulley’s political consulting firm, the Dewey Square Group, who also worked for Gore in 2000 — are already working with Kerry and Edwards, respectively. And former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, Gore’s sometime campaign chairman in 2000, also seems unlikely be part of another Gore run, according to campaign veterans who worked with him closely.

Where loyalty to Gore remains considerably more pronounced is among the middle-echelon staffers who made up the heart of his 2000 campaign. And in these ranks, Devine is a favorite whipping boy, with Shrum a close second. Gore staffers’ main grievance against Shrum and Devine is that the highly paid political managers demonstrated insufficient loyalty to the candidate, combined with a string of complaints about how Devine in particular helped run the campaign.

“I firmly believe that we owe 90 percent [of what went wrong with the campaign] to Tad Devine and [Gore pollster] Harrison Hickman,” says one senior member of the campaign’s political operation. “They didn’t coordinate with anyone and you had to put a gun to their heads to get them to know what was happening in the battleground states.”

Devine gets criticized for a cheerful obliviousness; he was notorious for kicking off staff meetings on a reflexively upbeat note, even when the campaign was clearly going in the opposite direction. According to several high-level sources in the campaign, in mid-October 2000, as Gore’s iffy performances on the stump were finally beginning to worry senior staffers, Devine told a bewildered meeting of top-level campaign hands, “I feel really good about where we are right now.” To which pollster Stan Greenberg, who joined the campaign in August 2000, shot back, “Well, then you’re stupid, because we’re losing.”

According to bitter Gore 2000 staffers, Shrum and Devine were disengaged down the stretch and started dumping on the candidate almost before the ink on the Supreme Court’s Bush vs. Gore decision was dry. At least that’s what loyalists say in private — none of them will go on the record with their complaints. They charge that both Shrum and Devine fed negative information about Gore to reporters on background. “You can’t prove it, but that’s what all of us think,” says one.

But even many of the loyal junior officers who served in the Gore campaign have now fanned out across the country to work on other Democratic campaigns, or have left politics altogether, and they may be less than willing to come back for a rerun of the rocky 2000 race.

Some former Gore campaigners have taken jobs on Capitol Hill, and others are hawking their services in the private sector or simply moving on with their lives. A cluster of them are now working to reelect Daschle protégé Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., who has been targeted by the Bush team. Gore’s former national field director, Donnie Fowler, now runs TechNet, an association of Silicon Valley bigwigs. Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, two of Gore’s principal 2000 spin doctors, have spent the last year careering around California politics, making fat paychecks for helping California Gov. Gray Davis spin the California energy crisis, among other projects. Not a few will trash Gore at the first opportunity, but many remain surprisingly loyal. Their commitment to him either transcends or ignores the plodding and uninspired qualities of Gore’s last run.

“I feel grateful and loyal to him for giving me the opportunity that he did,” says a senior member of the 2000 campaign’s political operation. “He deserves my loyalty until he directly does something not to deserve it.”

Another senior member of the campaign’s press operation seconds the sentiment. “The campaign was a grueling experience,” he says. “There’s a very fierce loyalty to the Gores and if push came to shove, a lot of us would feel like, hey, let’s go one more round. A rematch with Bush would be a kind of holy war.”

Still, loyalty isn’t the same as enthusiasm, and Gore clearly doesn’t inspire widespread excitement among the Democratic troops. Some may not defect to another candidate, but simply sit out 2004 altogether. “There are a lot of former staffers out there who won’t work for Gore but have enough attachment to him that they probably won’t work for anyone else either,” says a veteran of the Clinton White House who worked for Gore in 2000. “For a lot of them that will probably just mean staying in the jobs they are in now.”

The question ex-staffers have a tough time answering is: Why would another Gore campaign be any different the second time around? The standard complaint from loyalists is that the 2000 effort was too top-heavy with mercenaries who endlessly squabbled among themselves and were disloyal or self-serving to boot. Gore was not able to break through with a message that electrified his campaign, much less the electorate. Perhaps without the benefits of incumbency and the burden of Clinton, they reason, Gore could loosen up and fight a more feisty campaign.

But as even these staffers concede, the core reason why the campaign became top-heavy and disorganized was Gore himself. Every presidential campaign will have a mix of mercenaries who are with the candidate as long as he is winning, and others who are loyalists who will be with him to the end. A really good candidate — a Clinton, for instance — can even convert many from the first category into the second. Gore’s problem was that he had very few people in the second category. And it showed.

“I think it was mainly about him,” says one high-level Clintonite who didn’t work on the Gore campaign, and remains ambivalent about Gore. “It was about his personality. He is a guy who doesn’t open up particularly easily to people, or trust people and therefore doesn’t build trust easily. He has a pretty small circle. And that has consequences.”

There is no evidence of any lawbreaking, but the scandal does threaten to expose the type of political influence-peddling that Washington is both renowned — and reviled — for.

On March 20, two Taiwanese media outlets, Taiwan Next magazine and the China Times, published articles based on secret documents leaked from Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB), one of the main arms of Taiwanese intelligence. The leaked documents appear to show the existence of a massive secret slush fund with assets of more than $100 million, which former President Lee Teng-hui used for covert diplomatic and espionage activities abroad. Those efforts included spying in the People’s Republic of China, cash donations to developing countries willing to extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, and cash payoffs to politicians and foreign policy hands in Japan and the United States.

Taiwanese authorities responded with an ill-advised police raid on the offices of Next, and launched an investigation of the editor of the China Times for endangering national security. But it only added fuel to the fire. In an article published Friday in the Washington Post, Taiwanese officials confirmed the authenticity of the documents. Outside the country, however, the scandal is providing the first tangible proof of what foreign policy experts and China watchers have long suspected: that Taiwan has for decades used covert cash payments to political figures and institutions in Japan and the United States to try and improve its diplomatic standing.

The most serious allegations concern Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James A. Kelly, America’s chief diplomat for Asia and the Pacific Rim. One of the projects described in the secret NSB documents was an effort by Taiwanese officials to provide cash payments to officials of the Japanese government in exchange for their help in bringing Taiwan under a proposed American missile defense shield. In at least one instance Kelly helped NSB officials secretly transfer funds to a vice minister of the Japanese Defense Agency, Masahiro Akiyama, after Akiyama was forced to resign from the government because of a defense procurement scandal.

But, according to Japan policy experts, Kelly’s apparent help in facilitating a Taiwanese payoff of a prominent Japanese politician may create an embarrassing situation for American diplomats in their dealings with Japan. Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan administration Defense Department official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Salon he didn’t think Kelly’s actions were “business as usual” but nonetheless defended Kelly’s intentions. “Jim Kelly is as honest as the day is long,” said Korb. “I’m sure that he was trying to help someone who got in an awkward situation and was trying to get the money where it needed to go.”

Others, however, find the revelation more troubling and possibly more damaging to U.S.-Japan relations. According to Steven Clemons, co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, it is understood in Japan that various sorts of gift-giving and influence-peddling routinely occur. And such practices are tacitly accepted — as long as they don’t become public. “But if it comes to the light of day,” says Clemons, “then the rules are different. If Kelly did this and it comes to light then it’s a huge deal. It would mean he’s made himself an agent, a pawn, a fixer for Taiwan in Japan. It would be extremely embarrassing to the Japanese.”

According to the documents published in the China Times and Sing Tao Daily, Taiwanese officials gave small cash gifts to senior members of the Japanese government to gain their assistance in Taiwan’s bid to be included under America’s missile defense shield to protect U.S. allies in East and Northeast Asia. The officials named in the documents are then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto (who reportedly received $10,000) and Vice Defense Minister Masahiro Akiyama ($2,000). Later, after Akiyama was forced to resign in November 1998, the NSB rewarded him for past assistance with $100,000 to support a two-year fellowship for him to study missile defense issues at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

But funneling the money from the National Security Bureau’s secret slush funds to Harvard, and concealing its source, was a complicated matter. To do so, according to reports of the documents, the NSB enlisted the assistance of Peng Run-tzu, the president of the Taiwan Transport Machinery Corporation. Peng is a close friend of President Lee, often acting as Lee’s personal representative in informal diplomatic contacts in Japan and the United States. On Dec. 15, 1999, the NSB transferred $100,000 to Peng. Five days later Peng transferred the money to the bank account of the Pacific Forum, an adjunct of the Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At the time, the Pacific Forum was run by James Kelly. The arrangement to transfer the funds to Harvard to support Akiyama was confirmed when Peng and Kelly met at a Los Angeles restaurant on Jan. 15, 2000.

Kelly declined repeated requests by Salon to comment on this story. Akiyama, meanwhile, in a March 27 interview with the China Times, denied any contact with Taiwanese officials and said his funding came from Harvard. Yet an investigation into the funds transfer between Taiwan, Kelly’s Pacific Forum, and Harvard raises further questions about Kelly’s role and just what happened to the $100,000 he was reportedly given for Akiyama’s support.

On Monday, CSIS spokesman Jay Farrar told Salon that CSIS has no record of any such transaction ever taking place. According to Farrar, CSIS’s Pacific Forum has substantial autonomy and is able to earmark for its own purposes funds that it raises. But the two organizations have a single set of books and a single budget. In other words, says Farrar, any transfer should show up on CSIS’s books. But apparently they didn’t. CSIS did receive roughly $50,000 in general funding support from Taiwan in 1999 but the think tank’s account books, Farrar told Salon, “do not show any payments that would correspond” to the transfers of funds described in the Taiwanese and Hong Kong press — either of money coming in from Taiwan or going out to Harvard.

On Thursday morning, however, Farrar revised his earlier statement. Ralph Cossa, Kelly’s deputy in 1999 and the current director of the Pacific Forum, told Farrar that Peng had asked Kelly to assist Akiyama in roughly the manner the NSB documents describe. CSIS records show that Peng gave Pacific Forum $50,000 and that Kelly passed approximately $40,000 to Harvard, keeping $10,000 for the Pacific Forum. Farrar told Salon that the December 1999 payment to Pacific Forum was actually one of four similar payments Peng made to Kelly’s organization during the period in question: $25,000 in July 1998, $25,000 in August 1999, and $50,000 in June 2000.

Farrar’s revised story is supported in part with an account provided to Salon by officials at Harvard’s Fairbank Center on Tuesday. According to Asia expert and onetime Clinton administration appointee Ezra Vogel, who was the head of the Fairbank Center at the time, Akiyama applied and was accepted for a fellowship at the center through the established selection process. Akiyama was then told, however, that the center could not provide funds to support his stay. At this point, Kelly entered the picture. “Other people who knew [Akiyama] gave him some funds” Vogel initially told Salon. “And I believe that Jim Kelly played a role getting those funds.” Later, Vogel said that Kelly had “arranged to get the money” for Akiyama’s stay at the center but that he was not aware of the ultimate source of the funds Kelly provided.

Vogel then asked Susan McHone, the center’s administrator, to review the center’s records and McHone confirmed to Salon that Kelly had arranged for a payment of $39,600 from the CSIS Pacific Forum, which Harvard used to pay for Akiyama’s apartment and other miscellaneous expenses during the first year of his stay at the center. During his second year at the center, says McHone, Akiyama’s expenses were paid by the Arlington, Va., office of the Yamada Corporation, a Japanese defense and aerospace holding company. (A Yamada representative, who declined to provide her name, did not return a call requesting comment on Yamada’s funding of Akiyama’s fellowship.)

The available evidence raises a number of questions. Did Kelly funnel the funds to support Akiyama through CSIS’s Pacific Forum, contrary to the denials of Akiyama? And if the NSB gave Kelly $100,000, but passed only $39,600 along to Harvard, what happened to the remaining $60,400?

There’s no clear evidence that Kelly’s role in the affair would have violated any American laws. He was not in government at the time. So the transaction would not be covered by any of the panoply of rules and regulations covering campaign finance or government ethics. But such an arrangement might have required Kelly to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), something records show he did not do. Marshall Williams, administrator of the FARA office, declined to “comment on any particulars or hypotheticals” regarding the FARA law. Williams did draw attention to the portion of the law that covers any individual who “disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of [a] foreign principal.” But he was also at pains to make clear that such a transaction might be exempted under various other provisions of the statute.

But the issue may be less a matter of lawbreaking than of Kelly’s fitness for his job with the Bush administration. In his role as assistant secretary of state, Kelly is now responsible for America’s diplomatic relations with both those countries — as well as relations with Taiwan’s arch-rival, the People’s Republic of China.

“What’s most disturbing,” says Clemons, “is that it’s a lesson to the Japanese that our rhetoric about transparency is a lot of hot air, that our system is just as embedded in mutual obligation, greasing the wheel, and international nepotism. It lowers our moral edge and raises questions about Jim Kelly’s judgment.”

The other documents raise intriguing — if less clear — questions about the roles played by other U.S. political figures. In documents published in the China Times and Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily, Carl W. Ford, who is now assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, is described as a recipient of payments from the NSB in 1999 and 2000. It was already known that when Ford was a consultant to the Washington firm Cassidy & Associates he had worked as a lobbyist for the Taiwan Research Institute, a Taiwanese think tank closely associated with President Lee. At the time, Ford did register as a foreign agent as required under American law. Ford declined comment for this story.

But NSB documents show that the money Ford received actually came from the secret accounts controlled by the NSB. Ford was entertained during visits to Taiwan with money from the NSB secret accounts, and actually visited NSB headquarters on March 20, 2000, to discuss Taiwan’s relations with China and his efforts to secure arms sales to Taiwan. According to Hong Kong IMail — the English-language sister publication of Sing Tao — a Taiwanese liaison assigned to work with Ford’s firm told President Lee at a briefing in December 1999 that “Cassidy & Associates regarded George W. Bush, Texas governor at the time, as the best candidate in the presidential race and that his lobbying outfit intended to recruit some of Bush’s friends.”

Another set of documents describe how, in 1994, Lee organized a “task force” charged with cultivating foreign elected officials and deepening defense contacts with Japan and the United States. Members of the task force included Lee, Peng, various members of the Taiwanese government and several high-ranking Japanese politicians and military leaders. But the names of Wolfowitz, then a dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, also appear on the list as members of the task force.

When the NSB documents first surfaced more than two weeks ago it was widely assumed that they had been leaked by a rogue Taiwanese intelligence agent. Since then, however, many have come to believe that the leaks may be tied to infighting between the country’s two main political factions and their disagreements over the country’s relationship with the United States and China. In particular, observers say, the release of the documents may be an effort to send a warning to the government, which supports independence from China, and its supporters in the Bush administration who have pressed in recent months for closer military ties to the island.

The leaks, says Asia policy expert Chalmers Johnson, appear to be a way of “reining in the Bush administration. This is a way — without crossing them or in any way damaging future ties — of causing them to pull back. This is a way of saying to the Americans, ‘Back off. Your policies are far too extreme for what’s going on in the world today. And we are not particularly worried about a Chinese military assault against the island.’”

Whatever the reasons for document leaks, the Bush administration has not felt the need to address them, and they have received little attention except small rumbles in the left-wing U.S. media.

“The Bush White House,” wrote Dowd, “is giving the Clinton White House a run for its polling money. Karl Rove … devours polls as rapaciously as Dick Morris.”

That didn’t go over well with Jim Dyke of the RNC, who promptly called Green to give him a piece of his mind. Dyke was pissed, Green later told Salon, and questioned where Green came up with such a figure. Green said the estimate came from conversations with GOP sources who were unwilling to provide a precise figure. If Dyke disputed Green’s numbers, Green asked Dyke to provide the actual figure.

“It’s $731,000,” Green recalls Dyke telling him over the phone. “I was like, ‘Uh-huh, and isn’t that a lot closer to $1 million than $346,000?’” That ended the conversation.

But when Salon contacted Dyke two hours later, the $731,000 figure was apparently, as Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler used to say, “no longer operative.”

In recent presidencies it has become customary for the White House to run its polling operation through its party committee, the RNC or the DNC. Bill Clinton’s main pollster in the late 1990s was Mark Penn, though Penn actually got paid by the DNC. But Dyke refused to concede that any of the RNC-funded polling was done for the White House. All Dyke would say was that there was a certain portion of the RNC’s polling that “the White House might or might not have been interested in” and that that category of polling billed out at a mere $336,000. When I asked Dyke what that meant, he said these were polls “which may or may not have included a question that the White House may have been interested in.”

Under persistent and sometimes comical questioning, it eventually emerged that Dyke’s “might or might not” category referred to national polls as opposed to ones that focused on one region or state. Non-nationwide polls didn’t count as polls that the White House “might or might not have been interested in.” In other words, reasoned Dyke, when President Bush’s pollster Jan van Lohuizen does a poll of Michigan or Pennsylvania, that’s not a White House poll.

When I asked Dyke why he had told Green that the total cost of White House polling amounted to $731,000, he insisted that Green must have misunderstood (Green later said that was “nonsense”). That was the price of all the polling conducted by the RNC in 2001. Only not quite … A few minutes later Dyke said that total RNC polling was slightly more than $731,000. When I asked whether it was still less than $800,000, Dyke refused to say.

Less than $1 million? No dice.

Less than $1.5 million? Dyke still wouldn’t say.

By late Thursday afternoon, Dyke told Salon, the RNC still had not completed a tabulation of how much money it had spent on all polling in 2001. Nor could it stop hedging on whether non-national polls counted as White House polls. After a drawn-out conversation late Thursday afternoon, I asked Dyke if it was true that the White House “had no role in shaping or structuring or consulting on the [RNC's] non-national polls.” Dyke said, “That’s my understanding.” But when I repeated the statement back to him, Dyke began to have second thoughts. “When you say ‘consulting,’ that’s pretty broad,” he said. When I offered to drop the word “consulting,” he said, “Let me just make a phone call and I’ll call you back.” Dyke called back an hour later and said the White House was “not involved with [the RNC's] state polling” — even the polls done by Bush’s pollster van Lohuizen. Whether or not that’s true, one thing seems certain. If the Clintonian addiction to polling is already gripping the Bush White House, that telltale symptom — the inability to know what the definition of “is” is — doesn’t seem far behind.

Conservative foreign policy hands have long believed that American failures in the Middle East were due in large part to the inconstancy, weakness and equivocation of American leaders. Quick successes in Afghanistan seemed to bear that theory out. Despite naysaying from around the globe (and claims that an attack on Afghanistan would only inflame the Muslim anger that spurred the 9/11 attacks), the actual result was quite different. Equivocating allies and some former foes ended up supporting American resolve, and the hated Taliban regime quickly gave way to a far more tractable and even pro-Western government in Kabul.

That success convinced administration policy planners that a host of items on the conservative foreign policy wish list might also be achieved with a similar demonstration of force.

Going back to Iraq topped the list.

Removing Saddam Hussein from power — or, as conservative think-tank denizens like to call it, “regime change” — has been a conservative hobbyhorse since the mid-1990s. But buoyed by their Afghan successes, hawkish administration policy planners decided that overthrowing Saddam might not only be desirable but necessary and, frankly, not all that hard to do.

If the United States would only make clear its unshakable determination to overthrow the Iraqi regime by whatever means necessary, said columnists like Charles Krauthammer and foreign policy hands like Don Rumsfeld’s close advisor Richard Perle, Arab states would quickly fall into line and support an American attack. Not only that, it would trigger unrest and insurrections in Iraq as well, as disenchanted Iraqis acted on the certainty of American determination. “The idea that [attacking Iraq] is going to damage us in the Arab world is nonsense,” Perle told Chris Matthews late last November. “We will be seen not as invaders, but as liberators.”

Even as the successes in Afghanistan remained tenuous and the crisis in Israel spun out of control, laying the groundwork for the Iraq adventure occupied most of the administration’s attention in the first months of 2002. True, there was some internal disagreement. Hawks centering on the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President pressed for a frontal military assault against Iraq to topple the Saddam Hussein regime once and for all. More moderate voices at the State Department favored, at least as a first step, forcing Iraq to readmit the weapons inspectors, who had been expelled in 1998. But both administration camps had the same basic idea in mind: The United States should use the military and diplomatic clout earned with rapid victory over the Taliban to push for a solution to the Iraq problem.

That was the thinking behind Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent trip to the Middle East. With the wind in his sails and backed by a president who had shown himself willing to flex America’s muscle, Cheney was supposed to line up moderate Arab support for a renewed attack on Iraq.

Only it didn’t quite turn out that way. The administration had apparently misgauged the depth of feeling about the Palestinian issue — or at least underestimated its explosive political salience within the Arab world. At capital after capital, the idea of whacking Iraq was given a chilly reception. Cheney was told in no uncertain terms by Arab leaders that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — the issue the administration had been pointedly ignoring — was far higher on their list of priorities than any new coming-to-blows with Iraq. And the post-Afghanistan mojo didn’t work nearly as well as predicted. Rather than persuading the Arabs to stop worrying about the Palestinians and start focusing on Iraq, Cheney ended up doing his own turnabout and getting bogged down in an embarrassing on-again off-again negotiation over whether he would meet with Arafat. Cheney didn’t turn the Arab leaders; the Arab leaders turned him.

The administration didn’t expect moderate Arab leaders to jump on the bomb-Iraq bandwagon, but they did expect that the lesson of Afghanistan would convince Arab leaders to at least acquiesce to an American attack. They had to — without such acquiescence from the Arabs, a full-throttle attack on Iraq would be difficult at best. And without the cooperation of the Saudis, who allowed the United States to use their bases during the Gulf War, a ground invasion would be all but impossible. By the time Dick Cheney left on his recent trip to the region, those problems had become apparent. But the administration was locked into the strategy.

Cheney’s embarrassment set the stage for an even bigger humiliation yesterday at the Arab League Summit in Beirut. The Arab states, which the Bush administration had been trying to line up for another attack on Iraq, ended up brokering a reconciliation with Saddam after almost a decade of isolation — something that apparently came as a total surprise to the Bush administration. In a showy demonstration of goodwill, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (the kingdom’s de facto ruler) warmly embraced Izzat Ibrahim, the head of Iraq’s delegation to the summit. Even the representative from Kuwait (and also its de facto leader) Sheik Sabah al-Ahmed shook Ibrahim’s hand.

It’s not that American success in Afghanistan should not have been put to use to advance U.S. priorities in the region. But the Bush administration fell for its own spin and became entranced by its own Iraq-hawk tendencies at the expense of more pressing priorities. Since last December, administration policy planners have been dreaming of rolling up the world’s various rogue states like pins in a bowling alley and imagining that a mere show of seriousness and resolve would get Arab states to line up for an attack on Iraq, just as they had during Bush’s father’s administration. That indiscipline now seems to have made matters worse. The Bush administration’s effort to marshal the Arab states behind us to put the screws to Iraq has given Saddam Hussein an opening to line the Arab states up behind him to do the same to us.