Security was tight at the Perthshire resort on 6 July, amid fears that anti-globalisation protesters would try to storm the hotel where the leaders of the world\'s richest countries had gathered. Mr Bush was cycling in the grounds when he waved and shouted to a group of Strathclyde police officers: \"Thanks, you guys, for coming.\" This triggered a serious case of wobbles and he ended up injuring a constable.

The police report, obtained by Scotland on Sunday, gives a blow by blow account of the lead-up to the accident. It reads: \"[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through.

\"At about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting \'thanks, you guys, for coming\'.

\"As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head.\"

The report goes on to divulge how the President skidded five metres along the road, after knocking down the constable, who was off duty for 14 weeks after the accident.

It reads: \"The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers ... then assisted both injured parties.\" The injured officer received a phone call of apology from President Bush while he was on his way to Perth Royal Infirmary, where he was treated for damage to his ankle ligaments and issued with a pair of crutches. The cause was officially recorded as: \"Hit by moving/falling object.\"

The White House initially claimed that the policeman had recovered within hours of the prang.

The President\'s injuries - including scrapes to his hands - were by comparison, far less severe although his dignity may have suffered a dent. Afterwards, he shrugged off the incident, joking that he should start \"acting my age\".

The collision could have led to President Bush receiving a police fine and Strathclyde Police last year issued three fixed penalty notices as part of a crackdown on rogue cyclists.

While cycling may be one of Mr Bush\'s regular pastimes, this was not the first time he lost control on a bike. In 2004, he fell off his mountain bike on his ranch in Texas, suffering grazes on his face, knees and right hand. This latest incident follows in a series of embarrassing pratfalls by the President. In January 2002, he grazed his cheek after falling when he choked on a pretzel. Then in June 2003, he fell off his hi-tech Segway scooter.

In a separate poll, two out of three Americans said they do not think President Bush has responded adequately to the needs of Katrina victims. Only 32 percent approve of the way President Bush is responding to those needs, a drop of 12 points from last September's poll, taken just two weeks after the storm made landfall.

Mr. Bush's overall job rating has fallen to 34 percent, down from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is doing.

For the first time in this poll, most Americans say the president does not care much about people like themselves. Fifty-one percent now think he doesn't care, compared to 47 percent last fall.

Just 30 percent approve of how Mr. Bush is handling the Iraq war, another all-time low.

By two to one, the poll finds Americans think U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going badly – the worst assessment yet of progress in Iraq.

Even on fighting terrorism, which has long been a strong suit for Mr. Bush, his ratings dropped lower than ever. Half of Americans say they disapprove of how he's handling the war on terror, while 43 percent approve.

In a bright spot for the administration, most Americans appeared to have heard enough about Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident.

More then three in four said it was understandable that the accident had occurred and two-thirds said the media had spent too much time covering the story.

Still, the incident appears to have made the public's already negative view of Cheney a more so. Just 18 percent said they had a favorable view of the vice president, down from 23 percent in January.

Americans were evenly split on whether or not Cheney's explanation of why there was a delay in reporting the accident was satisfactory.

The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein's regime was launched in March 2003. At least 2,286 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 16,800 troops have been injured.

On Jan. 31 during his State of the Union address, U.S. president George W. Bush said a "sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison." There are currently 132,000 American soldiers in the country.

On Feb. 22, suspected insurgents placed two bombs inside Samarra's Shiite Golden Mosque. The event has led to two days of sectarian violence. More than 130 people have died, and more than 180 Sunni mosques have been destroyed.

Yesterday, Bush appealed for calm, declaring, "The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife. (...) I do want to assure the Iraqi people that the U.S. government is serious in our commitment in helping to rebuild that holy site. We understand its importance to Iraqi society and we want to stand side-by-side with the government in making sure that beautiful dome is restored."

Then Bill O\'Reilly advocated for withdrawal from Iraq on his radio show due to Crazy People Underestimation -- the idea that we couldn\'t have known just how crazy \"these people\" really were.

Strike two.

Now, National Review editor at large William F. Buckley believes that \"One can\'t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed... and the administration has, now, to cope with failure.\"

Strike three.

Each has, of course, found a way to remain at the president\'s side and to actually, with a presumably straight face, blame the very outcome predicted by progressives well before the fighting started as the result of one or two unforseeable hitches in an otherwise noble and practical plan. But the war? On that the con, the former neo-con and the con-man agree... it\'s over.

But what will the reaction be? Well, Glenn Greenwald has the \"tar and feather him\" catalogue of Right Wing reactions to Howard Dean\'s relatively tame statement from two months ago that the war was a failure. Will Michelle Malkin, Ben Shapiro, the Jawa Report (\"Howard Dean Traitor and Ally to Zaqueery\") and the, uh, National Review be so unkind to these three \"traitors\"?

The personnel would be part of a three-ring security cordon around the U.S. president and First Lady
Laura Bush who are due to arrive in New Delhi for their maiden visit to the subcontinent on Wednesday, they said.

\"He is a much-threatened VVIP. We are fully geared,\" Manish Agarwal, a top Delhi police officer involved in security operations, told Reuters.

His comments came as Delhi police arrested two suspected militants belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group fighting Indian rule in disputed
Kashmir, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

Two pistols and 3 kg (6.6 lb) of the explosive material RDX were seized from them, it said.

Islamist militants are frequently arrested or killed in gun battles with police in the Indian capital and it was not immediately known if the men arrested on Monday had anything to do with Bush\'s visit.

Besides the inner-ring of security forces, an outer cordon would be deployed \"as deep as possible\" to thwart any attack by a rocket launcher, Agarwal said.

\"A rocket launcher normally has a 1,000-meter (3,300 ft) range so we would be deployed in forests around venues,\" he said. \"We will have 360-degree rooftop surveillance around all the venues.\"

Agarwal said precautions were also being taken to quell \"snap protests\" by Muslim groups and communist parties who have announced plans to demonstrate against Bush.

Bush is also due to briefly visit India\'s southern IT hub of Hyderabad, where some Muslim groups have launched a signature campaign against his policies.

Hyderabad, which has a sizeable Muslim population, has witnessed big protests against the publication of cartoons lampooning Prophet Mohammad.

Bush would hop around the city in helicopters to take part in events scheduled for him, police said.

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush\'s audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of \"eminent persons.\" They\'re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

So what\'s going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn\'t traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?

Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi\'s memorial in Rajghat. He\'s by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

We really would prefer that he didn\'t.

It is not in our power to stop Bush\'s visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of \'The God of Small Things\' and \'The Ordinary Person\'s Guide to Empire\', lives in New Delhi, India.

© 2006 The Nation

Lucrative opportunities taken away on a political whim; the danger of being locked up by an over-mighty government agency; the brick wall of protectionism - the business community expects to do battle with all these things in an emerging market.

Yet this suddenly seems to be a description of doing business in that most developed of all markets, the United States of America.

In the UK, in the cash-rich Gulf states and in fast-growing India, different incidents in the past week have made people ask the same question: is it worth doing business with the US?

Critics say the outcry over the £3.9bn acquisition of P&O by Dubai Ports World, which will transfer the running of five US ports to a state-controlled Middle Eastern company, has exposed the US Congress at its xenophobic worst. But it has also revealed more starkly than ever the protectionist tide that is waxing in America under the guise of national security.

The acquisition was due to close this Thursday, but DP World has had to delay completing the deal as it faces a protracted Congressional and legal fight to keep hold of the US contracts, which account for 6 per cent of the business it is buying.

The refrain is, why can\'t an American company run our ports? Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton is among the senators proposing legislation to guarantee precisely that.

Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, says it has been a profoundly depressing episode, and one that could have lasting repercussions if it derails a planned free-trade deal between the United Arab Emirates and the US. \"These are not societies given to a lot of rhetoric - they are not going to hold a press conference and call off negotiations,\" he explains. \"But what would happen is that things would slow down - forms of co-operation would not happen any more.\"

When a firestorm of protest threatens to drive a Middle Eastern company out of the US, it is only business sense to look for opportunities elsewhere. The Dubai government has begun to build up a modest aerospace industry, launching a components business that might, one day, mean it is less reliant on the US for aircraft. Its new airport management business is targeting contracts in India.

Arab businessmen have expressed their concern. The Egyptian billionaire investor Naguib Sawiris says Arabs would be tempted to look away from the US for asset acquisitions, for investment opportunities and for business contracts.

And a country that had a trade deficit of $726bn (£415bn) last year can ill afford the \"paranoia\" about inward investment and foreign trade exposed by the DP World furore, adds Mr Reinsch.

But even supposedly enlightened business media such as The Wall Street Journal and CNBC television are setting up the debate as \"globalisation versus security\" - eliminating the possibility that these might be compatible, perhaps even mutually reinforcing.

Protectionism has already won some significant victories. Last year, the Hong Kong-based oil company Cnooc blamed \"unprecedented political opposition\" in the US for its decision to abandon a $18.5bn bid for the Californian oil firm Unocal - what would have been the biggest Chinese takeover of a US company.

Law makers are now pushing a number of Bills that would impose economic sanctions unless greater efforts are made to narrow a trade deficit with China that hit $202bn last year, the largest bilateral imbalance ever. The US government has promised tougher enforcement of trade laws and created a China enforcement taskforce to try to placate Congress.

Stephen King, managing director of economics at HSBC, says no one should be surprised that US politicians are reacting to the emergence of China and the threat it poses to US manufacturing jobs. \"The employment risk is immediate and it is the workers that vote.\" There have been periods in the past, he adds, where the US has become more protectionist in order to get through a period of economic upheaval - notably against Japan in the late 1980s.

And it is not just Far East and Middle East companies that might be tempted to disengage with the US.

\"Any businessman with any connection with the US, however tenuous, should think very carefully about the potential peril they face. Right here, right now, I would not advise even to engage in a business relationship with the US.\"

These were the warning words of a British man, David Bermingham - one of the \"NatWest Three\" bankers who lost their appeal last week against extradition to the US to face trial for Enron-related fraud.

An Anglo-American treaty agreed in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks means prosecutors are no longer required to prove there is a case to answer in order to secure an extradition. It has been used as many times to pursue white-collar suspects as it has terrorists - and only the UK has ratified it. The treaty has been used not only against the three bankers but also the 62-year-old former chief executive of taxi maker Morgan Crucible. Ian Norris faces extradition to answer charges over alleged price fixing.

Douglas McNabb, the Texan lawyer who appeared as an expert witness for the defence at the NatWest hearing, says that law-abiding businessmen have much to lose if they are wrongly accused. \"Maybe the US is wrong and you have to go through the whole process to prove it. My view is that in order to have a chance of winning an international extradition case, you have to have counsel from both countries, and you have to have a lot of money.\"

It is not just law enforcement agencies in the US that are reaching across the seas, but US financial regulators too. Foreign businesses with American shareholders have become subject to the provisions of the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley legislation pushed through after the collapse of Enron. This demands that executives take legal responsibility for the accuracy of their financial results, and insists on upgraded audit procedures that are estimated to cost a minimum $1m per year. Bigger companies with significant operations in the US just have to grin and bear it - BP said it was spending $100m a year on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance - but others have decided to ditch their US shareholders.

In the UK, ITV has engineered a complex financial restructuring to that effect and O2 and Rank have delisted their shares from Wall Street. French media giant Vivendi Universal is doing the same and Mexican and Israeli companies are among dozens to have retrenched to their home stock markets.

This is a trickle that is likely to turn into a deluge. Delisted companies currently remain subject to the reporting rules of Sarbanes-Oxley if they have over 300 US shareholders, so the saving might seem negligible. But US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission is proposing to ease that rule. BT is among the UK companies to have signalled it would like to delist from the US if it can also escape the clutches of Sarbanes-Oxley.

As significant are the companies that are not now coming to Wall Street at all. Clara Furse, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, says it has benefited as international companies choose to list in London instead - both on the main market and on AIM, which is attracting growth companies that might once have been Nasdaq bound.

In the insurance industry, the US is demanding that foreign-owned reinsurers deposit big sums in a trust fund to compensate US partners should they fail. This was slammed last week by Lloyd\'s of London chairman Lord Levene as discriminatory and totally unacceptable.

Perceived discrimination in other areas might also damage America\'s economic future. The head of chip maker Intel, Craig Barrett, has complained repeatedly that the US is losing out on international talent because of the tightening of immigration laws after 9/11, which led to lots of hi-tech engineers losing their work permits. Intel, Microsoft and others are channelling investment into India that might otherwise have stayed in the US.

The issue flared up again last week when a prominent Indian scientist was refused a visa for the US because of concern that his work had chemical weapons applications. The case of Goverdhan Mehta, who is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based group of national scientific academies, has caused a storm in India.

Mr Reinsch says the Mehta case is another blow to the US\'s attempts to attract the world\'s best scientists. Meanwhile, Tony Blair has been moved to warn US politicians not to use the war on terror as \"a back door route to protectionism\". And the NatWest Three ruling prompted Sir Digby Jones, director-general of the CBI, to call the US \"an ignorant bully\".

Across the world, friends and free traders are concerned about the course set by the US. They say that while its motives are diverse - national security, energy supply concerns, the protection of investors - there is a single conclusion: it has become riskier, costlier and harder to do business with the US and, unless that changes, fewer people will want to.

The commission, chaired by the QC and Labour peer Helena Kennedy, calls for an end to the first-past-the post voting system - the goal of The Independent\'s Campaign for Democracy launched last May after Labour won a majority of 67 with only 35 per cent of the votes cast and the support of just 22 per cent of the electorate. The campaign has won the support of almost 40,000 people.

Power to the People, the commission\'s 311-page report, demands a new electoral system \"to ensure that all votes count by having some influence on the final outcome of an election.\" Although it does not propose a specific method, it suggests its goals could be met by the single transferable vote system in which voters mark candidates in order of preference.

However, the inquiry concludes that electoral reform is only \"one part of a wider \'jigsaw\' of change required to re-engage the British people with their political system\".

Other proposals include lowering the voting age to 16; a £10,000 limit on individual donations to parties; decentralising power from central to local government; curbs on the powers of party whips; more powers for select committees to hold ministers to account and tighter rules on media ownership.

It bluntly warns politicians they must learn from the success of single-issue pressure groups which shows that people have disengaged from parties rather than political issues.

Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws said: \"Politics and government are increasingly in the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam. Too often citizens are being evicted from decision-making - rarely asked to get involved and rarely listened to. As a result, they see no point in voting, joining a party or engaging with formal politics.

\"Parliament has had many of its teeth removed and government is conducted from Downing Street.\"

Mr Brown, who will speak at the report\'s launch today and at a follow-up London conference on 25 March, believes it is a \"vital contribution\" to the debate on how to empower the British people and intends to drive forward the agenda within government in the run-up to the next election.

The Chancellor believes problems such as low voter turnout, youth disengagement, falling party membership and the long-term decline of trust in politicians owe more to the political system than civic culture.

Mr Brown wants Labour\'s reforms to be based on devolving power from the centre - greater local autonomy over spending, granting people more power over local services and encouraging new forms of involvement such as neighbourhood agreements on service delivery.

He believes that constitutional reform must be a central issue for Labour\'s manifesto - including Lords reform, restricting the power of the executive, and doing more to promote trust in politics and the public realm.

On the eve of the report, the Government moved to head off one of its 30 recommendations - that 70 per cent of the members of the House of Lords should be elected. Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the Lord Chancellor, announced that talks would be held with other parties in the hope of reaching a consensus on the powers and composition of the second chamber. \"Lords reform is unfinished business,\" he said. The move is a U-turn for Mr Blair, who has previously opposed a \"hybrid\" second chamber which is partly elected and partly appointed.

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."

Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press-nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right.

The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking?

In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad.

Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

"To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

"I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news."

Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635-not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses-government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign-the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War," the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.

* * *

That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to "kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."

By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."

The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; "even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts..." A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing "the intelligence and the facts...around the policy." The American enthusiasm for regime change, "undimmed" in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.

Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs "legal justification" for the maneuver-something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification "currently exists." Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the "wrong-footing" of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]

Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to "wrong-foot" Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]

By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase "mushroom cloud" and prepares a White Paper describing the "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold-to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]

* * *

The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years-misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as "enemy combatants," etc.-but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Notes

1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a matter of public record-newspaper accounts, television broadcasts (Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph Wilson. As the congressman had said, "Everything in plain sight; it isn't as if we don't know." [Back]

2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" with a strong-minded "willingness to undertake military action." Together with Rumsfeld, six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first administration-Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document noting that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification" for the presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]

3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it." [Back]

4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]

5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as "The Downing Street Minutes," were published in the Sunday Times (London) in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. [Back]

6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, "The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical classified information." [Back]

7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. [Back]

8. Card later told the New York Times that "from a marketing point of view...you don't introduce new products in August." [Back]