Non, je ne regrette rien!

"No! No regrets
No! I will have no regrets
For the grief doesn't last
It is gone
I've forgotten the past."
--Dummont/Vaucaire for Edith Piaf

We're in worse trouble in this country than we thought.

As the Bush administration strives mightily to shore up the badly crumbling image of its vanity war in Iraq, we expected the lies, excuses, contorted logic, and selective attention to factual detail, but the recent Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld appearances--ranging from the VFW convention in Salt Lake City to the Sunday morning TV circuit--have brought us something worse: the contention that as far as this war goes there are no regrets.

Typical of this unapologetic face-off with history was the Vice President's assertion yesterday on Meet the Press that the administration would have done "exactly the same thing" even if it knew before the war what he acknowledged knowing now--that Iraq did not have the arsenal of WMD that formed the foundation of the Bush sales pitch for preemptive war.

Equally irrelevant, we must suppose, is the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of September 11, 2001, and the confirmed appraisal that Saddam Hussein despised and distrusted Osama bin Laden, refused to truck with al-Qaeda, and would have arrested Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had he attempted to operate in Iraq while Saddam was in power.

None of that matters, we are told now. Toppling Saddam--conceivably our only authentic accomplishment of this whole enterprise--in and of itself justifies the loss of untold thousands of Iraqi civilians, a still mounting total of dead and seriously wounded American soldiers, and a drain on the U.S. Treasury of over $300 billion and rising. Saddam was a bad man and the world is better off without him. That's their line of reasoning and they're sticking with it.

Now it seems to me that it certainly DOES matter. Imagine if between the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003 the administration's argument for going to war went something like this: Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who provides a generally peaceful society and rich rewards for his friends, but oppresses his enemies and once even lost his temper and killed many, many Kurds up in the northern region of his country. We fear that he intends to develop and stockpile very dangerous weapons, but we are unsure what progress he's making in that direction, though hundreds of expert UN weapons inspectors haven't uncovered a thing so far. We do know for certain that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were carried out mainly by people from Saudi Arabia who had no connection whatsoever to Iraq--the one country in the region that is intolerant of al-Qaeda operations within its borders.

That's the case for invading Iraq. Would you go for it? Would a majority of the American public and their congressional representatives have bought in and done "exactly the same thing" if that were the case being made?

Those are the questions Bush and his "no regrets" crowd should be addressing. It doesn't really matter that a few neocons in the Pentagon or the White House would have gone to war on those pretexts because you can be damn sure the rest of the country wouldn't. No sale on that one.

And for the rest of us there are major regrets: that we didn't insist on recounting ALL the votes in Florida, that we didn't hit the streets harder and louder before the Iraq-bound train left the station, that once in Iraq we immediately disbanded all remnants of a functioning civil government, pushed out anyone with experience in military affairs or police work, and turned the shop over to the repatriated hot-heads. We regret Abu Ghraib; we regret Fallujah; we regret "Bring 'em on" and "Mission Accomplished." And after all that, regrettably, we still gave this crowd four more years.

Bush says he's been reading Camus and Shakespeare. Reading, perhaps, but understanding...I doubt it. It seems more likely that he's in the thrall of something more accessible--perhaps the 2004 self-help classic No Regrets: A Ten Step Program for Living in the Present and Leaving the Past Behind by Hamilton Beazley, Ph.d. This is a "resource for people who want to let go of burdensome regrets and live richly in the present with all its promise and potentiality." Certainly this is a thread of existential philosophy that the President is more attracted to.

Dr. Beazley ("Hamilton" to his readers) tells us, "Regrets are always optional. Coming to terms with our regrets and releasing their power to harm us in the present is a learned process. This book will teach you how to do it."

What have we got to lose?