George W. Bush has been busy spending our tax dollars on a trip to the APEC conference in Peru. Between this and the the recent G-20 conference in Washington, he’s taking the opportunity to say “Goodbye” to other world leaders. Most of whom are responding with something like “So go, already”. In their own languages, of course - not that George understands English all that well either.

Before he left for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, Bush prerecorded an interview that was recently broadcast on television in Japan. And some of his comments and responses give cause to doubt whether George has both feet firmly planted on the same planet as we do. I mean, spinning the facts is one thing, but Bush sometimes has the facts spinning so hard the centrifugal force distorts them into truths from an alternate universe. He’s some of what he’s saying:

“I think the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was right. Saddam was an enemy of the United States…”. Maybe so, but he was no direct threat to the U.S. And now we have lots of additional enemies of the United States since Bush cowboyed up, got on his horse, and solved a problem that existed only in his mind.

“People have been able to take their troops out of Iraq because Iraq is becoming successful.” People (meaning other governments) have had to take troops out because their citizens were smarter than ours and insisted on it. And also because we kept killing the friendlies by accident. I think half of all Canada’s deaths in Iraq were cause by “friendly fire” - meaning us.

“We are bringing troops home because of the success in Iraq.” Well, we must all be living in Afghanistan now because that’s where any troop withdrawals from Iraq are likely to end up.  And those withdrawals - er, make that redeployments - have more to do with failure in Afghanistan than with success in Iraq. Also, notice how our objective in Iraq changed from “Victory” to “Success” somewhere along the way.

“…there will be a US presence for a while (in Iraq) at the request of the Iraqi government…”. OK, now I’m wondering how many different governments there are in Iraq. Because the puppet regime we installed with Al-Maliki in charge has spent the last few months asking us when we are going to get the hell out, and even demanding a timetable for U.S. troops to leave.

“Most countries there within a very broad coalition have come home but we want to help this government.” The coalition may have been broad, but it wasn’t very deep. Many countries sent token forces to Iraq, like the 46 troops Armenia sent and the 2 soldiers from Iceland. And of the 23 countries that have already pulled out, many did so 3 or 4 years ago when it became obvious that we had no idea what we were doing over there. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help the Iraqi government, George, it was that they didn’t want to help yours.

With Bush revising the past to this extent before he even leaves office, I can’t wait to see what kind of historical fairy tale he conjures up next. The legacy he spins for himself may end up as even more of a farce than his presidency.