If you didn’t catch this in the NY Times over the weekend, author Robert Draper recently received unprecedented access to Bush, six full hours of private interviews. In the Times’ preview of Dead Certain, Draper’s resulting book, Bush displays the depth of his genuine desire to improve the lot of humanity.
Will Bush work to improve global conditions of hunger, homelessness, and military tension, like certain other ex-presidents you could name? Um… no:
Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”
Small enough? There’s more. Asked about the disbanding of the Iraqi army, one of the key mistakes of 2003, Bush took no responsibility for even knowing what had happened:
But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.
Yeah, well, that catastrophic decision that helped create the lasting insurgency… I dunno, one of my guys has some files…
The rest will be in Draper’s book Dead Certain, released today.