The Exodus

Of this picture, all but Diana Perino have left the White House in what is quickly coming to seem like an exodus.

There is so much turnover that on one recent Friday there were four farewell parties or last-day exits. Bush poses for so many Oval Office photos with departing aides it feels like an assembly line.

There is an article in today's Washington Post which examines the fact that many of those leaving are starting to wonder what their legacy will be; and claiming that the reason there are so many exits is not because the administration is falling apart but, rather, that staff under Bush have stayed on for much longer than in most White House's.

"When you look at the people who are leaving, these are people who have been here since the beginning," said Liza Wright, who herself left last month as White House personnel director. "And it's a killer of a job."

All the more so in a White House beset by an intractable war, a hostile Congress, a shipwrecked domestic agenda and near-historic-low approval ratings. The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure.

"There's this overriding awareness that we're living and acting for the judgment of history," said William Inboden, who resigned last month as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council.

And as history judges, Iraq is always there. "It constantly looms," he said. "It is the inescapable presence, the inescapable reality.

And, indeed, Iraq will always loom. It is the defining moment of a failed Presidency, a Presidency that so many staffers are scrambling out the door to get away from.

For, however much departing staffers might wish to put a gloss on what is happening, even the Washington Post article reveals that friendships have been shattered under the sheer weight of drinking the Kool Aid.

"I know the intentions were noble and the arguments to go to war -- we believed there were weapons of mass destruction and he was a malevolent figure," said Wehner, who was White House director of strategic initiatives until August. "The fact that it didn't go so well is something you struggle with."

Wehner, who recalled losing sleep in 2006 when the war seemed to be further slipping away, blames former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "It was mishandled in a lot of ways," he said. "The administration went in with a plausible approach and a plausible strategy, but it was wrong. The secretary of defense didn't make the adjustments that he ought to have and there's a cost to that and that's something you live with."

Meghan O'Sullivan served as an adviser to initial U.S. occupation Administrator L. Paul Bremer in Baghdad before Bush brought her to the White House, where she became deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan.

She admits that friends counselled her for years to get out because she was so closely associated with the failed policy of Iraq and that, "it was going to ruin my career". In a statement that speaks volumes about what she really thinks of the Iraqi situation O'Sullivan says, "I didn't do any of this for personal advancement." It's just as well.

It's an interesting article dealing with how these people suddenly go from receiving 500 emails a day to none, how they adjust from being at the very centre of things to nowhere. It reminds me of a story about Margaret Thatcher shortly after she had left office, watching the news and reaching for the phone when something appalled her. Seconds later she put the phone back down, realising that no-one would any longer take her calls.

There is one thing which all of these former aides appear to have in common. They talk of the euphoria of being able to enjoy, at long last, a good night's sleep.

After contributing to one of the worst Presidency's in the history of the United States, and leading their country into it's worst foreign policy intervention since Vietnam, I genuinely don't know how any of them are able to do that.

For all their talk about "honourable intentions", I don't believe their intentions ever were. Unless they feel that honour is automatically conferred upon their actions based solely on the fact that Saddam was a bad egg.

For the truth is that these people were part of an administration that took their country into a war of choice, and lied and cherrypicked information to make sure that this war took place. Worse, it was a war which the administration then went on to bungle and lose.

So, history will one day judge all of these people. I thank God I am not in their shoes.

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Tags: The Bush administration, the exodus, Rove, Perino, Bush, Iraq war, Meghan O'Sullivan, Wehner, Rumsfeld