The Administration response to the report will be to point to the removal of Saddam Hussein with renewed vigor and claim that accomplishment excuses what it will call “mistakes”. It will accuse those who criticize the process by which Mr. Bush took us to war of preferring that Saddam was still in power. The fact is that the war in Iraq did far more than move Saddam Hussein from his palaces to a prison cell. We destroyed a pernicious despot but in the process we destroyed the respect and credibility with ally and foe alike that the United States had enjoyed throughout the Twentieth Century. For most of the world the character of the United States is etched in the images from Abu Ghraib. That is the only lasting accomplishment growing out of the Second Iraqi War to which the Bush Administration can legitimately lay claim.

While the Bush Administration peers backwards, trying to find a scrap of justification for its policy of oil imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia the task of America lies in the future. That central task is to restore America to its position of international respect and leadership in the cause of human dignity. It is to restore America’s homeland to the principles of individual liberty that we have permitted to erode in the name of Homeland Security. Just yesterday the Administration sent its Secretary of Homeland Security out with the message that we need to be filled with the fear of a shapeless, nameless threat that it sees lurking in the shadows. America must again become a nation of bright hopes emerging from this Administration’s appeal to our most fearsome nightmares. America must step out of the icy grip of the darkness and into the warm embrace of the light.