Bush’s tough-guy rhetoric may instead be leading the nation into a maze of dark alleys from which many Americans, especially young soldiers dispatched to a string of conflicts, will never emerge. There is a growing sense that Bush’s life experience of underachieving privilege might make him entirely the wrong man for addressing the complex challenges the nation now faces.

The U.S. administration has abruptly revised its explanation for invading Iraq, as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asserted that a changed perspective after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — not fresh evidence of banned weapons — provoked the war.

If you blinked--or were busy buying hot-dogs and beer for a Fourth of July cookout--you might have missed the latest evidence that George W. Bush misrepresented the threat from Iraq as he guided the country into invasion and occupation in the Middle East.

The day before Independence Day, Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.

In other words, Bush lied.