The film includes interviews with military interrogators, victims and families of those tortured, and with members of the Bush administration who opposed the policy, such as former general counsel of the Navy Alberto Mora and Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” has won the prizes for best documentary at the Tribeca, Newport and Ojai film festivals, will be aired this month on major television channels throughout Europe, is being shown next week by special request at the European Union’s annual ministerial meeting, and will be distributed commercially by Think Films in theaters throughout the U.S. and Europe in January 2008, after which it will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel. The Times calls “Taxi” devastating.” The Guardian of London says its documentation is “irrefutable.”

One Defense Department official, believing the administration policy on detainees and torture to be illegal and counterproductive, told me that in his and others’ efforts to reverse it they approached you as a last hope. After all, you have virtually unrestricted access to the president. But he recounted that you rebuffed them, and described your attitude as dismissive.

Your complicity in the torture policy is one reason that I am writing you. Despite the futility of those inside the administration in bringing the problem to you, you still remain in place to redress it. As the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, responsible for defending America’s reputation in the world, you must engage the issue that has most seriously damaged our image. Your obligation will continue so long as you hold your post. Those who care about the good name of the United States will not cease viewing you as a last resort, even if you disdain or ignore them, because they cling to the desperate hope that a nagging conscience or its sudden awakening will compel you actually to do your job.

If you were to start performing your mission in earnest, you would have to persuade the president and his spokespeople to acknowledge the truth of their policy. On Oct. 4, the New York Times reported that in 2005 the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued a secret opinion justifying torture despite President Bush’s repeated claim, “We do not torture.” According to the Times, “The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” Then Deputy Attorney General James Comey opposed the policy and “told colleagues at the department that they would all be ‘ashamed’ when the world eventually learned of it.” When the Times’ story broke, White House press secretary Dana Perino responded with a familiar refrain: “We do not torture.”

Yet the revelations in the Times fit with those disclosed by the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, in his new book, “The Terror Presidency.” Goldsmith was appointed to this highly sensitive position because he was trusted politically as a conservative, a member in good standing of the Federalist Society and an ardent believer in President Bush’s policies. Upon assuming office in October 2003, Goldsmith began a review of existing opinions, including those on torture. As White House counsel, Gonzales had called the Geneva Convention against torture “quaint,” and the president had affirmed two opinions abrogating the convention. In a now notorious opinion, written on Aug. 1, 2002, deputy assistant OLC counsel John Yoo declared that torture consisted of pain “associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” In other words, torture was whatever the president said it was. Goldsmith writes that the message of the OLC opinion was clear: “The torture law doesn’t apply if you act under color of presidential authority.”

In his review, Goldsmith found that the legal analysis behind these opinions on torture displayed an “unusual lack of care and sobriety” and was “deeply flawed.” The stakes, moreover, put at risk the United States’ “decades-long global campaign to end torture, relations with the Muslim world and the nation’s moral reputation and honor.” Goldsmith decided that the opinions underpinning the administration’s interrogation regime could not be legally defended, and he withdrew them. While Comey supported him, “important people inside the administration had come to question my fortitude for the job, and my reliability.” Goldsmith resigned on principle after serving less than a year.

You are the last member of the so-called Iron Triangle of the president’s Texas political team still in government. The others have departed. In an article in the Washington Post on Oct. 7, former members of the administration gave interviews presenting themselves as increasingly embittered, disenchanted and alienated. The newspaper reports, “The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure.” You alone remain to alter the course of events that might somehow change the historical perception of the Bush presidency and those who served him, a legacy already deeply engraved.

The genius of your appointment is that the president and his advisors understood ahead of time that they would need your services to repair the nation’s reputation. After all, this position has never existed before; and it has never been so drastically needed. While it is true that there have been organizations within the government, such as U.S. Information Agency, under directors such as Edward R. Murrow and John Chancellor, that built libraries and conducted international educational exchanges, the idea of a public diplomacy czar is novel. Having someone to paper over the country’s mistakes by telling people what they should think despite the reality would in the past have been considered undemocratic. Form and content, it would have been said, needed to complement each other. But your position is one in which form and content (words and deeds) stand in opposition to each other. Ironically, therefore, your job has never been more important than now.

So far, to be honest, you have earned a reputation for being out of touch, for spouting platitudes without understanding the underlying issues. You are seen as oblivious to the concerns and sensibilities of groups of foreigners with whom you have met. However noble the abstractions of your rhetoric, your speeches are uniformly received as irrelevant propaganda. Even after objective observers have called attention to this pattern, you have done little to adjust. While it would be unfair to put the entire burden of transforming the image of the United States on you, it is a sad fact that your actions have deepened cynicism about American motives. And your inability to change has been consistent with the administration’s unwillingness to shift course in the face of demonstrable failure.

If you still wish to succeed, you must finally come to terms with how you and the administration are perceived. Self-awareness is the first step to recovery. Denial has been more than this administration’s pervasive state of mind; it has become its prevailing strategy. When other rationales have been shown to be false, hollow or self-undermining, denial has invariably become the last defense. Even when presented with irrefutable facts — there were no WMD, there were no links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and torture has indeed been the official policy — the administration resorts to transparent gestures of denial: “We do not torture.” But repeating a falsehood does not make it true. As one American president who was a keen student of public opinion put it: “You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” But this truism does not seem to have come to the attention of the White House or of your office. I hope it is not a shock to you that the strategy of denial is not working. It is your job, after all, not only to take into account the considered views of others but to assess objectively what works and what does not. Acknowledging that this persistent reaction is not achieving its goal is essential to learning from failure.

The issue of torture is a special case. Torture is state-sanctioned deviant behavior. It is degrading, arbitrary, cruel and illegal. As all responsible intelligence officers know, torture is the least productive technique of all, and torture yields inherently tainted information. Torture destroys the humanity of more than those tortured. It destroys the souls of those performing the torture. When Americans torture, Americans are shattered. Torture feeds secrecy. It undermines democracy. And it is shameful. Even the Gestapo and the KGB tried to hide their torture. Torture is considered uncivilized by most of the world’s nations. At the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, the U.S. tried, convicted and executed Nazi leaders for engaging in torture. Those that do not adhere to international treaties against torture are rightly branded rogue nations. Torture is the mark of tyrannies.

Moral authority is an impalpable but measurable quality in U.S. foreign policy. From our founding, the idea that the nation should be an example to the world has been central to our identity and leadership. When we have fallen short of our ideals, our willingness to engage in self-examination and self-reform has been critical to our reputation as a special nation. Our credentials for leadership have depended upon our capacity for change.

Nations may blunder and presidents may miscalculate. But nations that commit crimes against humanity and presidents who authorize torture have been deemed pariahs, subject to international quarantine and opprobrium. After World War II, the U.S. was widely admired for its leadership in establishing the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter for Universal Human Rights. The American conduct at the Nuremberg tribunals set the highest standards and respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law. When U.S. officials such as yourself ask foreign peoples to embrace the ideals and values that they clearly see being violated by the administration’s behavior, you succeed only in fostering cognitive dissonance at best and contempt for hypocrisy at worst.

Since the Revolutionary War, at the order of George Washington, Americans have consistently opposed torture as a policy. Only one president, George W. Bush, has adopted torture as a policy. This administration stands outside more than the international treaties we have signed and previous presidents have upheld. This administration stands beyond the American tradition and values.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were heinous and barbarous. But they and subsequent threats are no reason for abandoning our commitment to the rule of law. Other nations that have been subjected to terrorist attacks since Sept. 11 — Spain and Britain — have not succumbed to torture. Even in the dark hours after Pearl Harbor torture was not adopted as a policy. During the Cold War, when the U.S. faced the potential existential threat of nuclear annihilation, torture was never adopted as a policy. Goldsmith writes, “The Bush administration’s go-it-alone approach to many terrorism-related legal policy issues is the antithesis of Roosevelt’s approach in 1940-1941 … The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

Not a week goes by without President Bush citing Saddam Hussein’s cruelty and butchery as a justification. The tragic irony of pursuing his torture policy while denouncing Saddam’s appears to be lost on him and on you. But it is not lost on the rest of the world.

Of course, as someone who has spent years in politics, you must be aware of the polls. According to the most recent Pew poll of global public opinion, taken this June, the downward trend since 2002 of the image of the United States has continued “in most parts of the world. Favorable ratings of America are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which trends are available. The U.S. image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and continues to decline among the publics of many of America’s oldest allies. Favorable views of the U.S. are in single digits in Turkey (9 percent) and have declined to 15 percent in Pakistan. Currently, just 30 percent of Germans have a positive view of the U.S. — down from 42 percent as recently as two years ago — and favorable ratings inch ever lower in Great Britain and Canada.”

Perhaps if you look closely at the problem, the solution to your dilemma may appear. Your words are not forging a new reality. Lying about the war in Iraq, or torture, is not building the bridges of understanding you are so fond of talking about in your speeches. Instead, empty words only fritter away at your ability to influence. There is power in truth.

You might also use your acquired skills in diplomacy among your colleagues in the inner circle of the White House. Perhaps you could talk to them about the dangers of politicizing and militarizing fear. They are a group, as Goldsmith has pointed out, consumed with “fear bordering on obsession.” When he informed the White House that one of its counterterrorism programs was illegal, Vice President Cheney’s then counsel, David Addington, angrily lashed out, “If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who died in the next attack will be on your hands.” As Addington demonstrated, when legal artifice falls, bullying takes its place. Fear has become a license for quelling not only political criticism but also the rule of law.

As you know only too well, fear-mongering, though it has worked well politically at home, has backfired abroad, breeding hatred throughout Muslim and Arab lands. Public diplomacy should assuage fear, not fan its flames; enable understanding, not hostility. Perhaps, while you’re talking to your colleagues, you might explain that the opinion of the world matters, and that while it might be “soft power,” not “hard power” like a piece of military equipment, it directly impinges on global stability. You might tell them that persisting in a policy of torture has threatened our national security.

While you are rethinking how to calm fears and rebuild America’s image as a global leader perhaps you ought to begin to think of yourself not as a tool of the Bush administration but as a citizen of the world, not as a propagandist, constantly trying to formulate a hollow ideological phrase or distraction, but as someone who can admit mistakes and correct them.

If you receive this letter as simply a partisan broadside and can’t envision your transformation into a true diplomat at large, an envoy of healing, perhaps you should just resign. Nothing will be served by continuing on your current course. Nothing different will happen. You might as well return to Texas now. To date, your diplomacy has consisted of excuses for leaving the damage to the next president to remedy.

Soon you will be reminiscing about the Bush presidency. Will you be agitated and depressed like your former colleagues described in the recent Washington Post report? Will you persist in fantasies of denial? Or you will be, as Comey suggested you should be, “ashamed”?

If you can attend the screening of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” please let me know. Otherwise, I can send you a DVD and you can share it with the president.

The author of Order 17 was a CPA official named Lawrence Peter, who oversaw the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. As soon as the CPA was dissolved, the Private Security Company Association of Iraq hired Peter to act as its liaison and lobbyist there. The new Iraq included a revolving door.

Thus, in the process of granting Iraq sovereignty, the Bush administration eviscerated it. Order 17′s grant of immunity to contractors guaranteed that more than half of the foreign presence on the ground — for U.S.-paid contractors outnumber U.S. military personnel — would operate for all intents and purposes beyond the law. Order 17 also undercut the authority of the U.S. military, frustrating command and control of the battlefield and upsetting sensitive counterinsurgency strategies. Order 17 meant that the monopoly of violence was fractured and outsourced to those not subject to the law. By unilateral fiat Order 17 uniquely created a red zone of impunity covering the entire country.

A radical break with U.S. policy, such an order had never been promulgated before. Order 17 should not be confused with a Status of Force Agreement negotiated with sovereign nations such as South Korea. Those agreements are subject to complex bargaining and mutual assurance. Nor are contractors subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice because, after all, they are not in the U.S. military. Nor has the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 been brought to bear on contractors in Iraq. That act applies only to those working for the Department of Defense and is rarely used, if at all. The contracts for private military firms have been funneled through the State Department, thereby exempting them from the MEJA. (The only case brought under the MEJA against a contractor in Iraq was for one who had raped a U.S. reservist in her trailer.)

Of the mercenary companies, Blackwater has earned a special status as one of the least controllable and most aggressive, ferrying through the battle space without coordination with U.S. forces. Time and again, Blackwater has triggered incidents undermining U.S. strategies and endangering military forces. In 2004, four Blackwater men brazenly drove through the insecure city of Fallujah, were quickly cornered by a mob, were killed and burned, and their charred bodies hung from a bridge. In the ensuing outcry, U.S. forces were ordered to encircle the city, attack, withdraw and attack again, eventually leveling it. In 2006, a drunken Blackwater mercenary murdered a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, and was spirited out of the country with U.S. Embassy complicity, paid off and never prosecuted. Under Order 17, no law applied.

Last month, on Sept. 16, a Blackwater contingent gunned down at least 11 Iraqi civilians, prompting the Iraqi Interior Ministry to banish Blackwater, an act overturned by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who agreed under U.S. pressure to accept a grudging State Department investigation.

According to a memorandum issued by Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “There is no evidence in the documents that the Committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting incidents involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation.” The committee released a report this week documenting 196 incidents of “escalation of force” involving Blackwater since 2005, including unreported killings. In more than 80 percent of these cases Blackwater initiated the violence.

On Tuesday, the chairman of Blackwater, 38-year-old Erik Prince, heir to an auto-parts fortune and an evangelical right-wing former Navy SEAL, appeared before the House Oversight Committee. He presented himself as though he were a general of U.S. forces, deserving deference from lowly civilians. Indeed, he declared that Blackwater’s mercenaries were part of the “total force” in Iraq. If they were, of course, they would be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. When pressed, Prince retreated into his fortress of privatization. “We’re a private company, and there’s a key word there — private,” he said.

Asked about the Blackwater gunman who killed the Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard, he replied brusquely, “We can’t incarcerate him. That’s up to the Justice Department.” But Richard J. Griffin, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, testified, “The area of laws available for prosecution is very murky.” Clarifying the law was hardly helped by the absence of any witness from the Justice Department. About Blackwater’s bloody trail in Iraq, Prince simply dismissed any allegations of wrongdoing: “I believe we acted appropriately at all times.” His contempt for his congressional interlocutors was barely concealed. “If there’s two questions left,” he said, “I’ll take them and then let’s be done.”

The Democrats on the committee were careful to avoid appearing partisan, steering clear of mentioning Blackwater’s deep Republican ties. It is not incidental that Prince is a major GOP donor, as is his sister, Betsy DeVos, whose husband is a member of the family that owns Amway. Raising the Republican connection was left to the maladroit Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Trying to tar the Democrats, Issa stumbled. “Labeling some company as Republican-oriented because of family members is inappropriate, and I would hope that we not do it again,” Issa said. “Well, the only one who’s done it is you,” Waxman snapped back.

Then the foolish Issa trapped Prince into revealing his involvement in a partisan dirty trick. “I heard a rumor that your company or somebody in your company had given to the Green Party, do you know about that?” “Could have been,” Prince said. In fact, in 2006, Prince and his wife donated $10,000 to a Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, a scam organized by Republicans in an attempt to divide the vote for Democrat Bob Casey and help reelect far-right Republican Rick Santorum. Issa’s questioning had succeeded in casting Prince and Blackwater as beneficiaries of his Republican ties.

The use of mercenaries in Iraq is only partly the result of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on deploying a light military force there and compensating with private contractors. To be sure, using contractors has enabled the Bush administration to augment the American force without having its numbers included in government totals. The cost, moreover, has been hidden in supplemental budget requests. Congress has never voted specifically on the funds for contractors. But the urge to privatize is neither sheer happenstance nor mere convenience. The policy to outsource regular military functions to private contractors can be traced, as so much can be, to Dick Cheney. When Cheney was secretary of defense in the elder Bush administration, he initiated the program of privatization, which is partly what made him attractive as a CEO for Halliburton. While there was one contractor for every 50 military personnel in the Gulf War, however, the size of the army of contractors in Iraq exceeds that of the U.S. Army. Cheney’s policy has been put on steroids under Bush.

Order 17, granting contractors legal immunity, is of a piece with the infamous memos written by David Addington, Cheney’s former general counsel and current chief of staff, and John Yoo, former deputy assistant in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which set out an unaccountable executive in the name of war, justified torture and unilaterally abrogated U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions.

Within Iraq, Order 17 is the legal analogue to these policies, extending impunity on an international scale. So long as Order 17 remains in place, the U.S. occupation will lack legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqis. Until pressured by the House Committee on Oversight to conduct an investigation, the State Department was complicit with the mercenaries, undermining its own mandate to bring security to Iraq, as well as destroying any semblance of credibility for its stated goals of fostering civil society, democracy and the rule of law. Under cover of war the Bush administration defends lawlessness. In the name of fighting terrorism it protects outlaws.

If the court accepts his suit, however, launching the adjudication of legal issues such as breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with contract, it will set in motion an inexorable mechanism that will grind out answers to other questions as well. Then Rather’s suit will become an extraordinary commission of inquiry into a major news organization’s intimidation, complicity and corruption under the Bush administration. No congressional committee would be able to penetrate into the sanctum of any news organization to divulge its inner workings. But intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power of subpoena, Rather will charge his attorneys to interrogate news executives and perhaps administration officials under oath on a secret and sordid chapter of the Bush presidency.

In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.

Most cases of this sort are usually settled before discovery. But Rather has made plain that he is uninterested in a cash settlement. He has filed his suit precisely to be able to take depositions.

In his effort to demonstrate his mistreatment, Rather will detail how network executives curried favor with the administration, offering him up as a human sacrifice. The panel that CBS appointed and paid millions to in order to investigate Rather’s journalism will be exposed as a shoddy kangaroo court.

Rather’s complaint has already asserted a pattern of network submission to administration pressure, beginning with the Abu Ghraib story. In early 2004, Mary Mapes, a producer for “60 Minutes II” with more than two decades of experience, uncovered the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her sources were sound and the evidence incontrovertible, but according to Rather’s complaint, “CBS management attempted to bury” the story. In a highly unusual move, then CBS News president Andrew Heyward and then senior vice president Betsy West personally intervened to demand editing changes and ever more “substantiation.”

Rather’s suit states that “for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story” and “continued to ‘raise the goalposts,’ insisting on additional substantiation.” Even after Mapes gained possession of some of the now-infamous photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (a full set of which was later obtained and posted by Salon), the news executives suppressed the story, “in part,” according to Rather’s suit, “occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials.”

Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Rather at his home, sources close to the case told me, telling him that broadcasting the story would endanger “national security.” Myers explained to Rather that U.S. soldiers, just then poised for an assault on Fallujah, would be demoralized and suggested that Rather and CBS might threaten the outcome of the battle and the soldiers’ safety.

Only when Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for the New Yorker, relying on different sources from Mapes’, unearthed the Abu Ghraib story and CBS executives learned that the magazine was about to scoop the network did they grudgingly permit it to be aired. “Even then,” Rather’s suit states, “CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News.” Feeling forced against their will to broadcast a story they knew was accurate, CBS’s executives did everything within their power to ensure the public would pay as little attention to it as possible by prohibiting any mention of it. CBS’s self-censorship set the stage for its reaction to the Bush National Guard story.

The widely accepted account that Mapes and Rather’s original piece on Bush and the Guard was unproved and discredited has been based on the notion that the documents revealed were false. But three years after the heated controversy exploded, these premises appear very uncertain in the cold light of day.

Upon graduation from Yale in 1968, George W. Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard, known as the “Champagne Unit” for serving as a haven for the privileged sons of the Texas elite seeking to escape duty in Vietnam. Through carefully placed calls made by Bush family friends, Bush was edged ahead of a 500-man waiting list. Then, after failing to complete his required hours of flight, he requested transfer to a unit in Montgomery, Ala. But there is no proof that he ever performed any of his service there; he refused to take a physical and was grounded. Ordered to return to his Houston base, he simply disappeared. Yet he was honorably discharged in 1973, though there is no proof that he had fulfilled his obligation.

During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe reported a number of discrepancies in Bush’s National Guard record. However, the rest of the national press corps virtually ignored the Globe’s stories, instead preferring to swarm around fictions about Al Gore helpfully stoked by the Bush campaign. Bush refused to make public his military records, in contrast to his principal primary opponent, Sen. John McCain, who had released his. But the press collectively let the matter pass. Nonetheless, the gaps in Bush’s service as reported by the Globe had not been answered and hung in the air, if anyone cared to pursue them.

After breaking the Abu Ghraib story, Mapes, who lived in Texas and had reported on Bush when he was governor, began looking into the National Guard episode. By then, Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War hero who was awarded the Silver and Bronze stars, had emerged as the Democratic candidate. The Bush operation arranged for funding a front group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to mount a smear campaign that Kerry had been dissembling all these years about his medals. Kerry’s campaign, like Gore’s, chose not to dignify obvious lies by responding, and the press lagged behind the story as it gained traction. Discrediting Kerry’s greatest biographical asset was calculated to compensate for Bush’s hidden liability. In February 2004, the Washington Post followed on the Boston Globe articles of 2000, and its reporters were unable to find anyone that could corroborate Bush’s claim that he had served at an Alabama air base in 1972. To an aggressive journalist like Mapes it seemed logical to examine Bush’s National Guard story, which remained a mystery.

The opaque story was partly illuminated by a piece in Salon, written by Mary Jacoby, on Sept. 2, 2004. Offering extensive documentation, including photographs and letters, Linda Allison, who had housed Bush during his missing year, explained that his drunken misbehavior was creating havoc for his father’s political aspirations and that the elder Bush asked his old friend Jimmy Allison, a political consultant from Midland, Texas, now living in Alabama, to handle the wastrel son. “The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing,” Linda Allison told Salon. During the time the younger Bush was under the watchful eye of the Allisons, he never went to a National Guard base or wore a uniform. “Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way,” said Allison. She did, however, remember him drinking, urinating on a car, screaming at police and trashing the apartment he had rented.

On Sept. 8, “60 Minutes II” broadcast its story. It featured former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, a Democrat, who disclosed that just before George W. Bush would be eligible for the draft, a mutual friend of then Rep. George H.W. Bush asked him to help procure the younger Bush a spot in the “Champagne Unit.” Barnes appeared on camera, saying: “It’s been a long time ago, but he said basically would I help young George Bush get in the Air National Guard. I was a young, ambitious politician doing what I thought was acceptable. It was important to make friends. And I recommended a lot of people for the National Guard during the Vietnam era — as speaker of the House and as lieutenant governor. I would describe it as preferential treatment.”

Then Rather, acting as correspondent, introduced new material drawn from the files of Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s squadron commander: “’60 Minutes’ has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian’s personal file. Among them, a never-before-seen memorandum from May 1972, where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about ‘how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.’ Lt. Bush tells his commander ‘he is working on a campaign in Alabama … and may not have time to take his physical.’ Killian adds that he thinks Lt. Bush has gone over his head, and is ‘talking to someone upstairs.’”

Another Killian memo contained the coup de grâce: “I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended not just for failing to take a physical … but for failing to perform to U.S. Air Force/Texas Air National Guard standards. The officer [then Lt. Bush] has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical.”

Within minutes of the conclusion of the broadcast, conservative bloggers launched a counterattack. The chief of these critics was a Republican Party activist in Georgia. Almost certainly, these bloggers, who had been part of meetings or conference calls organized by Karl Rove’s political operation, coordinated their actions with Rove’s office.

Questioned for the “60 Minutes” story, White House communications director Dan Bartlett had not denied the story but simply characterized it as “dirty.” The right-wing bloggers raised questions about the authenticity of the Killian documents, arguing that typewriters of the time lacked the specific superscript in the documents, that the proportional spacing was wrong and the font anachronistic, and that therefore they were likely fabricated on a computer. Various handwriting and typewriter experts weighed in, some challenging the documents’ authenticity. The press almost uniformly took the absence of a universal opinion of experts as proof of the documents’ falsity. Because they could not be proved with complete certainty to be authentic, they must be counterfeit.

While the battle over the authenticity experts and assorted inconclusive sources continued, CBS interviewed Marian Carr Knox, who had been Col. Killian’s assistant when the memos were allegedly produced. She didn’t recall typing them and didn’t believe Killian had written them (though various handwriting experts had verified his signature), but she also asserted, “The information in here is correct.”

Under fire, CBS executives reeled backward. On Sept. 20, Heyward issued an apology: “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.” And Rather chimed in: “If I knew then what I know now — I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.” With these self-abasing mea culpas (Rather claims in his complaint that his statement was “coerced”), the veracity of the story about Bush’s past seemed to be settled in his favor. But the underlying facts of the story were not discredited; nor was the authenticity of the documents resolved.

The day after these apologies CBS announced the creation of a review panel to determine “what errors occurred.” Two Bush family loyalists, Richard Thornburgh, former attorney general in the elder Bush’s administration, and Louis Boccardi, former executive editor and CEO of the Associated Press, were chosen to head the internal investigation. Thornburgh had been the subject of critical Rather reports, while Boccardi felt close and indebted to the elder Bush for being helpful as vice president in gaining the release of AP reporter Terry Anderson, held hostage for six years in Lebanon. Lawyers in Thornburgh’s firm with no background in journalism and media performed the real work of the panel and wrote its final report.

As the panel called witnesses, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (CBS’s owner), declared his interest in the 2004 election. “I look at the election from what’s good for Viacom. I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom,” he said. In fact, Viacom had a number of crucial issues before the Federal Communications Commission, including loosening media ownership rules. “I don’t want to denigrate Kerry,” said Redstone, “but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people … But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.”

Rather believed that the panel would conduct a fair-minded inquiry. But he learned that neither he nor Mapes would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses. They heard from some researchers on the “60 Minutes II” staff that before they had been questioned, a CBS executive had told them that they should feel free to pin all blame on Rather and Mapes. CBS had told Rather to cease investigating the story and had even hired a private investigator of its own, Erik Rigler. Rather and Mapes discovered that Rigler’s investigation had uncovered corroboration for their story. Rather’s complaint states that “after following all the leads given to him by Ms. Mapes, he [Rigler] was of the opinion that the Killian Documents were most likely authentic, and that the underlying story was certainly accurate.” But rather than probing Rigler on his findings, the panel, to the extent its lawyers questioned him in a single telephone call, “appeared more interested whether Mr. Rigler had uncovered derogatory information concerning Mr. Rather or Ms. Mapes, as to which he had no information,” according to the Rather complaint. Rigler’s report was suppressed, never presented to the panel, and remains suppressed by CBS. Nor did the panel fully question James Pierce, the handwriting expert consulted by “60 Minutes” who insisted that the signature on the documents was surely Killian’s.

When Mapes appeared before the panel, she was harshly questioned at length about her use of the word “horseshit.” On the issue of the special privileges granted to those sons of wealth in the “Champagne Unit,” Thornburgh asked her, “Mary, don’t you think it’s possible that all these fine young men got in on their own merits?”

When it came to the merits of the facts the panel elided them. It never addressed the facts at all. Instead it criticized the “60 Minutes” team for failing to “obtain clear authentication” of the Killian documents, among other “errors,” though it admitted it could not prove one way or another whether they were inauthentic. Mapes and three other producers were dismissed. “60 Minutes II” was abolished. And on the day after Bush’s reelection, Rather was unceremoniously fired. His contract had called for him to continue as anchor for an additional year and then to serve as a correspondent for “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II,” but that promise was not honored. CBS believed that by severing its link with Rather it could put the whole incident behind it and begin a new happy relationship with the ascendant Republicans.

An article by James Goodale, former vice chairman and general counsel of the New York Times, in the New York Review of Books on April 7, 2005, and his subsequent exchange with Thornburgh and Boccardi, went little noticed. Goodale found the panel’s report filled with flaws, lacking a factual basis, revealing an absence of due diligence and due process, and substituting empty legal concepts and language for any understanding of the actual gritty practice of journalism. Goodale determined that the “underlying facts of Rather’s ’60 Minutes’ report are substantially true.” He observed, “Since the broadcast, no one has come forward to say the program was untruthful.”

Goodale’s summation rejected the report and left its credibility in tatters: “The rest of the report, which is directed to the newsgathering process of CBS, is flawed. The panel was unable to decide whether the documents were authentic or not. It didn’t hire its own experts. It didn’t interview the principal expert for CBS. It all but ignored an important argument for authenticating the documents — ‘meshing.’ It did not allow cross-examination. It introduced a standard for document authentication very difficult for news organizations to meet — ‘chain of custody’ — and, lastly, it characterized parts of the broadcast as false, misleading, or both, in a way that is close to nonsensical. One is tempted to say that the report has as many flaws as the flaws it believes it has found in Dan Rather’s CBS broadcast.”

But Goodale’s magisterial and experienced voice seemed to be a faint cry in the wilderness. Who, after all, cared anymore?

In November 2005, Mapes published a memoir, “Truth and Duty,” containing her memo to Thornburgh and Boccardi that they had failed to include in the appendix of the panel’s report, although they reproduced many other memos and documents. Mapes’ argument was that the Killian documents “meshed” with the facts in precise and nuanced ways. “The Killian memos, when married to the official documents, fit like a glove,” she wrote. “There is not a date, or a name, or an action out of place. Nor does the content of the Killian memos differ in any way from the information that has come out after our story … In order to conclude that the documents are forged or utterly unreliable, two questions must be answered: 1) how could anyone have forged such pristinely accurate information; and 2) why would anyone have taken such great pains to forge the truth?” But Mapes’ book, like Goodale’s article, was all but ignored.

Rather has always been an uncomfortable figure, sometimes abrasive, sometimes strangely inappropriate or baffling, given to rustic rhetoric at odd moments, and sometimes and suddenly lapsing into teary sentimentality or bursts of patriotic doggerel. Since his confrontations as the correspondent covering the Nixon White House, conservatives have targeted him as a symbol of the despised “liberal media.” However idiosyncratic, Rather stood for the remnants of CBS’s tradition of speaking truth to power, as Edward R. Murrow did finally about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Walter Cronkite did finally about the Vietnam War and Watergate. The corporate unease with Murrow’s outspokenness, leading to the cancellation of his weekly program, “See It Now” (depicted in the recent film “Good Night, and Good Luck”), was little different from the unease with Rather a half-century later. At last, the corporation’s necessity for demonizing Rather coincided with the long-standing conservative demonizing.

When CBS replaced the edgy Rather with the sugary Katie Couric as anchor of the “Evening News,” it imagined it had solved its problem, its “errors.” The news would get softer, the Republicans in control of the White House and Congress would be nicer, Viacom would grab more media, and ratings would climb. Thus, dismissing Rather would yield untold dividends. Unfortunately for CBS’s visionaries, none of that has worked out as planned. Couric simply lacks basic journalistic instincts and skills, and the “CBS Evening News” is at rock bottom in ratings and sinking farther.

Rather could have simply allowed the statute of limitations to run out, lived off his millions, and faded away. But the incident ate at him. On one level, the Bush National Guard story is about Bush and the National Guard. On another, of course, it is about Rather’s reputation. But on yet another it is about CBS’s overwhelming desire to please the Bush White House and censor itself. The White House campaign against Rather has been so successful that many in the national press corps behave as though in mouthing its talking points they are demonstrating their own independent thought.

On Sept. 20, the day after he filed his suit, Rather said, “The story was true.” Rather’s suit may turn into one of the most sustained and informative acts of investigative journalism in his long career. He is not going gentle into that good night.

After Bush pretended to deliberate over whether he would agree to his own policy as presented by his general in well-rehearsed performances before Congress — “President Bush Accepts Recommendations” read a headline on the White House Web site — he established an ideal division of responsibility. Bush could claim credit for the “Return on Success,” whenever that might be, while Petraeus would be charged with whatever might go wrong.

One week after Petraeus flashed his metrics, a whole new set of facts on the ground suddenly emerged: an admission (previously denied) by Petraeus that the United States was arming the Sunnis, who might use those weapons in the next phase of Iraq’s civil war; the release of a Pentagon report that there is “an increase in intra-Shi’a violence throughout the South” (a report conveniently withheld as Petraeus was testifying); the Iraqi government’s expulsion of Blackwater, a private security firm with close ties to the administration, after a band of its guards gunned down Iraqi civilians; the restriction of all nonmilitary U.S. personnel in Iraq to the Green Zone; a report by the Iraqi Red Crescent that about 1 million people are internal refugees as a result of ethnic cleansing (apart from the more than 2 million refugees who have fled the country); and the announcement by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of an investigation into the State Department’s inspector general for quashing scrutiny and embarrassing studies of fraud in the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, among other projects.

As these events played out, Petraeus was detailed as Bush’s Willy Loman to preside over the cooling of the special relationship with America’s most important ally in the coalition of the willing. The general traveled to London to meet with Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the policy from which he is rapidly disengaging, already having withdrawn British forces in Basra to its airport before final evacuation. Such is the face of victory 10 days after Petraeus’ march through Capitol Hill.

In his semiretirement, Bush engaged in appeals to history, which he now says on nearly every occasion will absolve him. Early on and riding high, he expressed contempt for history. “History, we’ll all be dead,” he sneered to Bob Woodward in an interview for “Bush at War,” a panegyric to Bush the triumphant after the Afghanistan invasion and before Iraq. Now Bush cites history as justification for everything he does. “You can’t possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency — until I’m dead,” he told Robert Draper, his authorized biographer, in an interview for “Dead Certain.” The use of the words “history” and “dead” between the Woodward and Draper interviews makes for a world of difference — the difference between a president who couldn’t care less and one who cares desperately but can’t admit it.

Bush incessantly invokes a host of presidents past — Truman, Lincoln and Washington — as appropriate comparisons, and also talks of Winston Churchill. Frederick Kagan, the neoconservative instigator of “the surge,” refers to it as “Gettysburg,” a leap of historical imagination that transforms Bush into the Great Emancipator. In his unstoppable commentary about himself, Bush has become as certain of his exalted place in history as he is of his policy’s rightness. He projects his image into the future, willing his enshrinement as a great president. History has become a magical incantation for him, a kind of prayerful refuge where he is safe from having to think in the present. For Bush, history is supernatural, a deus ex machina, nothing less than a kind of divine intervention enabling him to enter presidential Valhalla. Through his fantasy about history as afterlife — the stairway to paradise — he rationalizes his current course.

Draper’s biography has the feel of a lengthy feature magazine article wrapped in a dust jacket. It lacks any serious discussion of the influence of Dick Cheney, the rise of the neoconservatives, Karl Rove‘s attempt to create a one-party state, the government’s torture policy, splits within the senior military, the scapegoating of the CIA, or the evisceration of federal departments and agencies. Nonetheless, Draper’s unusual access enabled him to collect valuable anecdotes as well as to put a microphone in front of a president who, when interrupted by an aide, told him not to worry because the interview was “worthless.” Letting down his guard, Bush does not understand what he reveals.

In his interviews with Draper, he is constantly worried about weakness and passivity. “If you’re weak internally? This job will run you all over town.” He fears being controlled and talks about it relentlessly, feeling he’s being watched. “And part of being a leader is: people watch you.” He casts his anxiety as a matter of self-discipline. “I don’t think I’d be sitting here if not for the discipline … And they look at me — they want to know whether I’ve got the resolution necessary to see this through. And I do. I believe — I know we’ll succeed.” He is sensitive about asserting his supremacy over others, but especially his father. “He knows as an ex-president, he doesn’t have nearly the amount of knowledge I’ve got on current things,” he told Draper.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor’s mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, “Karl, hang up my jacket.” In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush’s attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him “Pigpen,” for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family — certainly not people like them.)

Bush’s deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, “You looked mad,” he shot back, “I wasn’t mad! Tell them that!”

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: “KARL!” Rove, according to Draper, was Bush’s “favorite punching bag,” and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. “Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president’s support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a ‘Big New Thing.’” Other aides played on Bush’s self-conception as “the Decider.” “To sell him on an idea,” writes Draper, “aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision.” But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.”

Draper reports a telling exchange between Bush and James Baker, one of his father’s closest associates, the elder Bush’s former secretary of state and the one the family called on to take command of the campaign for the 2000 Florida contest when everything hung in the balance. Baker’s ruthless field marshaling safely brought the younger Bush into the White House. Counseling him in the aftermath, Baker warned him about Rumsfeld. “All I’m going to say to you is, you know what he did to your daddy,” he said.

Indeed, Rumsfeld and the elder Bush were bitter rivals. Rumsfeld had scorn for him, and tried to sideline and eliminate him during the Ford administration because he wanted to become president himself. If George W. Bush didn’t know about it before, he knew about it then from Baker, and soon thereafter he appointed Rumsfeld secretary of defense. Draper does not reflect on this revelation, but it is highly suggestive.

Quoted in an Aug. 9 article in the New York Times on the lachrymose father, Andrew Card, aide to both men, lately as White House chief of staff, and a family loyalist, spoke out of school. “It was relatively easy for me to read the sitting president’s body language after he had talked to his mother or father,” Card said. “Sometimes he’d ask me a probing question. And I’d think, Hmm, I don’t think that question came from him.”

The elder Bush assumed that the Bush family trust and its trustees — James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar — would take the erstwhile wastrel and guide him on the path of wisdom. In this conception, the country was not entrusted to the younger Bush’s care so much as Bush was entrusted to the care of the trustees. He was the beneficiary of the trust. But to the surprise of those trustees, he slipped the bonds of the trust and cut off the family trustees. They knew he was ill-prepared and ignorant, but they never expected him to be assertive. They wrongly assumed that Cheney would act for them as a trustee.

Cheney had worked with and for them for decades and seemed to agree with them, if not on every detail then on the more important matter of attitude, particularly the question of who should govern. The elder Bush had helped arrange for Cheney to become the CEO of Halliburton, making him a very rich man at last. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft et al. didn’t realize that Cheney’s apparent concurrence was to advance himself and his views, which were not theirs. When absolute power was conferred on him, the habits of deference lapsed, no longer necessary. (“Thank you for the privilege of serving today.”) Cheney was always more Rumsfeld oriented than Bush oriented. The elder Bush knew that Rumsfeld despised him and that Cheney was close to Rumsfeld, just as he knew his son’s grievous limitations. But the obvious didn’t occur to him — that Cheney would seize control of the lax son for his own purposes. The elder Bush committed a monumental error, empowering a regent to the prince who would betray the father. The myopia of the old WASP aristocracy allowed him to see Cheney as a member of his club. Cheney, for his part, was extremely convincing in playing possum. The elder Bush has many reasons for self-reproach, but perhaps none greater than being outsmarted by a courtier he thought was his trustee.

Through his interposition of Petraeus, Bush has bound his party to his fate. Of the Republicans, only Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, leader of the 1994 self-styled radical “revolution” that captured Congress, is willing to speak publicly about the danger Bush poses to the future of the party. “I believe for any Republican to win in 2008, they have to have a clean break and offer a dramatic, bold change,” he told a group of reporters on Sept. 14. “If we nominate somebody who has not done that … they’re very, very unlikely to win it.”

But repudiating Bush would also mean repudiating Gingrich’s legacy, too. Draper reports that Bush loves claiming Ronald Reagan, not his father, as his role model. But Gingrich, more than Reagan, is Bush’s forerunner. It was Gingrich who heightened the politics of polarization to a level of personal attack and unscrupulousness unlike any seen since the underside of Richard Nixon’s operations was exposed in the Watergate scandal. Reagan was free of such dishonest and vicious politics. Bush, Cheney and Rove (“Pigpen”) picked up where Gingrich left off. Republicans can no more return to the halcyon days of Reagan than magic carpets can be used in Iraq. For the Republicans to recover, they would have to extirpate their entire recent history, root and branch.

“History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well,” writes Draper. “Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.”

Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As the sands of time run down, he has decided that no matter what he does, history will finally judge him as heroic.

The greater the chaos, the more he reinforces and rigidifies his views. The more havoc he wreaks, the more he insists he is succeeding. His intensified struggle for self-control is matched by his increased denial of responsibility. Hence Petraeus.

Bush’s unyielding personality would have been best suited to the endless trench warfare of World War I, as a true compatriot of the disastrous British Gen. Douglas Haig. His mind is geared toward a static battlefield. For low-intensity warfare, such as in Iraq, “an authoritarian cast of mind would be a crippling disability,” wrote British expert Norman F. Dixon in his classic work, “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.” “For such ‘warfare,’ tact, flexibility, imagination and ‘open minds,’ the very antithesis of authoritarian traits, would seem to be necessary if not sufficient.”

Bush’s ever-inflating self-confidence hides his gaping fear of failure. His obsession with deference demands exercises of humiliation that never satisfy him. His unwavering resolve is maintained by his adamant refusal to wade into the waters of ambiguity. “You can’t talk me out of thinking freedom’s a good thing!” he protests to his biographer. For Bush, even when he is long out of office, presiding at his planned library’s Freedom Institute — “I would like to build a Hoover Institute” — victory will always be just around the corner.

Now, Thursday night, in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush will announce the withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Iraq by July 2008, leaving the U.S. force at the level it was before the “surge,” through the presidential election year. He will claim that he is able to withdraw these troops because of the success of his plan, as proved by the result of the turning of Sunni tribes in Anbar province against al-Qaida in Iraq.

As Gen. David Petraeus did in his congressional testimony, Bush will point to events in Anbar as the key evidence of the surge’s triumph. What he will not be discussing is how he discarded the earlier Sunni offer to negotiate and dismissed the advice of the British government as he pursued the chimera of “victory.” He will also carefully neglect to observe that the Sunni action against al-Qaida in Iraq began independently before the surge, that it was never foreseen as part of the surge, that the Sunnis politically are more estranged than ever from the Shiite-run government of Nouri al-Maliki, or that the U.S. arming of the Sunnis may be a perverse preparation for the next phase of the Iraqi sectarian civil war in the likely absence of political power sharing. Nor will Bush explain the contradiction between his withdrawal of these 30,000 troops and his doomsday scenarios that withdrawing U.S. forces will presage genocide on the scale of Cambodia.

The appearance of Gen. Petraeus was staged to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Yet the emotional impact of the memorials has been overshadowed by the fresh casualty lists from Iraq. The day before this Sept. 11, two U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, who had joined five others in writing an Op-Ed article for the New York Times saying that the surge was not working, were killed in action. Yet Bush still sought to wring political gain out of the tragic memories of 9/11 as though his paradise lost — the national unity after 9/11 — could be regained.

Artillery barrages of TV commercials seeking to soften public opinion preceded Petraeus’ report. A new front group, Freedom’s Watch, founded at the instigation of the White House, funded by Bush’s political financiers (including prominent members of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund) and directed by Dan Senor (former press secretary for the catastrophic Coalition Provisional Authority), launched a series of ads that were a pastiche of past Republican themes. Children in small-town America were depicted raising a flag, a scene plagiarized from Ronald Reagan‘s 1984 “Morning Again in America” commercial. Then fragments of Bush’s 2004 campaign washed up like messages in bottles. Soldiers who had lost limbs in Iraq segued into pictures of the burning World Trade Center as words appeared on the screen: “They attacked us.” A soldier said, “We’re winning on the ground in Iraq. It’s no time to quit.” A bereaved woman whose uncle died as a fireman in the twin towers and whose husband was killed in Iraq spoke as words flashed on the screen: “More attacks.” “Surrender is not an option.” In another ad, a Marine in a wheelchair said, “To hear Congress talk about surrendering really makes me angry.” After these poisons were injected into the atmosphere, Petraeus emerged from behind the curtain as the sober voice of reason.

Seated side by side, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker presented less a united front than the antipodes of Bush’s strategy. Both men were great stone faces, droning and dull, their lack of affect serving as masks for their onerous tasks. Instead of complementing each other, the men’s testimonies made plain the surge’s strategic incoherence. Deploying the classic euphemisms and misdirections of diplomacy, Crocker demolished, intentionally or not, whatever Petraeus sought to achieve with his dazzling display of dubious statistics. Then, in response to a single pointed question, Petraeus conceded the emptiness of his performance. He aimed friendly fire at himself.

“War is the extension of politics by other means,” wrote the great military strategist Karl von Clausewitz. As a military operation the surge was intended to produce political power sharing and reconciliation. But Crocker disclosed that the military had not achieved these ends. Not only are the political benchmarks that the Iraqi government and the Bush administration established unmet, but they may never be realized. Crocker could attach no period of time to these goals. He could only suggest that there should be no benchmarks. “Some of the more promising political developments at the national level,” Crocker said, “are neither measured in benchmarks nor visible to those far from Baghdad.” In other words, the evidence is anecdotal, scattered and uncertain. Asked when political reconciliation might occur, he replied, “I could not put a timeline on it or a target date … How long that is going to take and, frankly, even ultimately whether it will succeed, I can’t predict.” Crocker’s version of Bush’s policy was “Waiting for Godot.”

Petraeus, meanwhile, meticulously unveiled an array of metrics attempting to demonstrate that the surge had succeeded in lowering the level of sectarian violence and civilian casualties. But his effort to gain empirical ground was greeted with widespread skepticism because his statistics were in dispute. The National Intelligence Estimate released on Aug. 23 stated: “The level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high.” The Government Accountability Office report of Sept. 4 (PDF) stated that the aim of “reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security” was “not met,” and that “there was no clear and reliable evidence that the level of sectarian violence was reduced and that militia control of local security was eliminated.” GAO comptroller general David Walker testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree” and that “part of the problem that we had in reaching a conclusion about sectarian violence is there are multiple sources showing different levels of violence with different trends.” And the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, chaired by retired Gen. James L. Jones and created by Congress, reported: “The Iraqi Police Service is incapable today of providing security at a level sufficient to protect Iraqi neighborhoods from insurgents and sectarian violence.”

Petraeus’ presentation relied on the power of PowerPoint, but it was less than overwhelming. He had to plead that his statistics were valid even as he refused to reveal his full methodology. As it was, the strangeness of his categories — a bullet to the back of the head entitled the victim to be registered as a civilian casualty, but a bullet to the front of the head did not, putting the victim into an insurgent casualty category — suggested arbitrary classification, political willfulness and subjectivity.

In any case, Crocker’s description of the Iraqi political void made Petraeus’ claim of progress appear absurd. Petraeus was left dangling, flourishing numbers about tactics unrelated to the strategy. The ambassador consigned the general to a Clausewitzian twilight zone.

The highly credentialed and qualified Petraeus has a doctorate from Princeton and has written a recent report on the history of counterinsurgency. But he has apparently not studied the case of Colin Powell, whose sterling reputation and military expertise were appropriated by Bush for political purposes and who, after his utility was exhausted, was abandoned on the side of the road. The real front line where Petraeus found himself was more political than military.

If the surge has no connection to political goals in Iraq, it still has strategic political goals, just not in Iraq. The surge is the military means to Bush’s political ends at home. “So now I’m an October–November man,” Bush told his authorized biographer, Robert Draper, in “Dead Certain.” “I’m playing for October–November.” The rollout of the Petraeus report is the last major political offensive of the Bush administration. Petraeus’ reputation is the token for buying precious time for an unpopular president. The Democratic Congress lacks sufficient majorities to alter Bush’s policy. Petraeus’ show is staged to keep Republicans, on the edge of sheer panic, from defecting en masse. Through Petraeus, Bush is locking in the congressional leaders and the Republican presidential candidates behind his policy. The general has been wound up as a mechanism for Bush’s endgame — perpetuating the president’s Iraq policy until the conclusion of his term and assigning responsibility for “victory” or “defeat” to his successor. In his analogizing to the Vietnam War, Bush has begun to lay the basis for a stab-in-the-back, who-lost-Iraq debate, a poisonous legacy.

Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who announced his retirement last week and who has called for disengaging from Iraq, asked Petraeus a simple and obvious question about Bush’s policy, one that Bush likes to answer: “Do you feel that that [strategy] is making America safer?” Unexpectedly, Petraeus paused. “I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq,” he finally replied, carefully sidestepping a direct response. So Warner repeated his question: “Does the [Iraq war] make America safer?” Again Petraeus paused before answering, “I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted it out in my own mind.”

In the end, Petraeus could not convince even himself. Petraeus has lost his battle. Crocker has revealed the strategy as hollow. But the policy goes on.