No storybook ending

By MICHAEL GOODWIN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Watching George Bush and Tony Blair cover each other's backs last week, you could almost see them as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When their news conference was over and they walked down the long White House hallway, backs to the camera, you had a feeling that they, like the Hollywood duo, were headed for an unhappy ending.
Iraq is an odd backdrop for a buddy movie, but it is the two leaders' shared legacy and the burden of history is showing. They were stout in their defense of the cause, but their otherwise subdued, confessional manner told the larger story. Bush's acknowledgement that he'd been wrong to challenge the insurgents with "bring it on" and to say Osama Bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive" was a startling admission.
Blair cited less personal but more strategically important mistakes. He said the clean-sweep of Baath Party members from the Iraqi government should have been selective and lamented the failure to realize earlier how serious the opposition to democracy would be.
Given the gravity of the topic, the admissions were poignant. And it is refreshing that the rhetoric of the men who led the charge now more accurately recognizes the bloody facts on the ground.
Too little, too late
But the damage the mistakes did were huge, and so conceding them now is probably too little, too late to help either man or to rally support.
So much has gone wrong in Iraq that public disenchantment in both countries is virtually irreversible. And the coming report from the Pentagon that some American Marines killed Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked massacre will likely dwarf the outrage and shame over the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal.
All of which is to say that, as bad as things are, they could very well get worse.
Yes, we will air our dirty laundry and punish our own soldiers, as we did after Abu Ghraib, and it will matter not a whit in Iraq. To many Muslims there and elsewhere, we were long ago guilty of carrying out Satan's work; the massacre report will be just more evidence and cause for revenge
The given reason for Blair's visit to Washington was to brief Bush on his meeting in Baghdad with Iraq's new prime minister. The duo opened by taking turns hailing the new government as a major development, but, like the war itself, their bodies and tone sagged as the questions and answers stretched on.
Staying the quagmire
Knowing there is no real option other than staying the quagmire, Blair especially seemed to be trying to buy time by reframing the debate. He said public opinion in the West was driven too much by what was going wrong. Every scene of carnage or a lost soldier is viewed as a "setback," he said, suggesting that was the wrong way to see it.
Michael Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.