E Pluribus Unum

Watergate veteran Carl Bernstein calls for bipartisan hearings investigating the Bush presidency:

We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence -- stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale.

There will be no shortage of witnesses to question about the subject, among them the retired three-star Marine Corps general who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war's planning, Gregory Newbold.

Last week he wrote, "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- Al Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy."

The decision to invade Iraq, he said, "was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results." Despite the military's determination that, after Vietnam, "[W]e must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it... We have been fooled again."