Former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president's effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain," he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.

Sean Wilentz, Princeton Professor, recently wrote, "Many historians are wondering whether Bush will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history." Some 81 percent of 415 historians surveyed by the nonpartisan History News Network concluded that the Bush presidency is a failure. After all, more than 50 percent of the public finds Bush both dishonest and untrustworthy. He is a war president who squandered the worlds' good will after 9/11, reinvented the doctrine of preventive war, discarded multinationalism, international law and the Geneva Convention, and brought us Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and out country renditions. Said William Buckley, considered by many the founder of modern conservatism, "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."