[IWE] What Bush Meant

[Ashton Brown]

Ron Suskind at Esquire seems to have assembled a competent 
non-hyperbolic history of what we've been through.
Anyone know of a better [<12 Volume] summing up?

Style sample -

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I also learned from another source, Bush's first treasury secretary, 
Paul O'Neill, that at President Bush's very first National Security 
Council meeting, in January 2001, finding a rationale for overthrowing 
the regime of Saddam Hussein topped the agenda.

I learned that the president's message-makers derided the rest of us who 
live in the "reality-based community," as opposed to the alternate 
reality that they saw it in their power to create.

And most recently I learned that the White House was apprised by the 
Iraqi intelligence chief in January 2003--well in advance of the 
war--that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no weapons of mass 
destruction and had no such active weapons programs. The intelligence 
chief, in his secret back-channel meetings, also described the mind of 
Saddam--his fear of the Iranians finding out he was weaponless--which 
explained his odd prewar behavior. When this fact was borne out after 
the invasion, the White House directed that a fraudulent document be 
created to establish a connection between the Iraqi regime and the 
leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta. (This document miraculously 
materialized in Baghdad in December 2003.)

A common thread running through all of these discoveries is a basic 
misunderstanding of--or disregard for--the limits of presidential power. 
Indeed, this ahistoric president seems to have never appreciated just 
how hard-won are the institutions of American liberty. Article II of the 
United States Constitution grants stunning power to the president, power 
almost beyond imagining to be entrusted to one man. But for George Bush 
and Dick Cheney, it wasn't enough. And so, with a level of secrecy that 
betrayed a basic mistrust of the American people, they proceeded to 
expand the awesome power of the presidency and in the process upset the 
balance of powers designed by the founders. And in this, the president 
and vice-president found their greatest success. In fact, this 
presidency has succeeded spectacularly in the project that most mattered 
to Bush and Cheney, and that is putting the United States on a more 
authoritarian footing.

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http://www.esquire.com/features/what-bush-meant-1008