Gonzales was only a symbol of the sleaze

As this is written we don’t know whether to rejoice over the departure of Alberto Gonzales, he of the vacant memory and elastic conscience, or to regret that he will no longer be a convenient whipping boy for the Democrats in Congress. What we do know is that the attorney general has been a symbol of the sleaze in the Bush administration rather than the ultimate cause of it.  He did the bidding of President George W. Bush.

Mr. Gonzales will leave office on Sep. 17 as the architect of record for the thesis that the president is the sole judge of what laws he will or will not enforce, that he may authorize limitless warrantless wiretapping and that the United States is immune from the restrictions of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. It is not Gonzales though, but Mr. Bush himself who is ultimately responsible for that shameful record.

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And then, as the summer winds down before the fever of a new school year, President Bush instructs us with a history lesson. Do not, he says, repeat the error of Vietnam, which was to abandon thousands of Vietnamese who had worked with us to the mercies of the Communists. Isn’t he the same George W. Bush who a year ago was warning about false comparisons with Vietnam? And didn’t “Sixty Minutes� this past Sunday night run a touching segment about the pathetic plight of Iraqis who worked with U.S. forces as translators and now apparently are being abandoned to their fate?

Of course analogies can be misleading, but there is a lot of similarity in the fervor by which a mistaken commitment was undertaken. The involvement of the United States in Vietnam resulted from an obsessive misreading of history. We inherited a French colonial war aimed at repressing Vietnamese nationalism and converted it into a perceived war against world communism we could not win.  In Iraq Mr. Bush converted a justified effort to get back at the instigators of the September 11 attack on New York, shielded by the Taliban in Afghanistan into a demonization of Saddam Hussein.

In the process all sorts of other issues were drawn in: Israel vs. the Palestinians, the protection of oil sources, the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush’s perversion of the Wilsonian effort to make the Middle East safe for democracy.  If there is any overriding lesson, it is to avoid false analogies and oversimplifcation.

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The time is upon us for General Petraeus’ report about the results of the troop surge in Iraq. It is a good bet that more time will be needed. I suspect that members of both parties in Congress will still lack the backbone to force a scheduled troop withdrawal.

Our Norfolk neighbor Anne Garrels, the veteran PBS correspondent who reports so often from Baghdad, is quoted by George Krimsky as remarking astutely: “There is no good solution. There will be troops there when the next president takes over, because no one will dare pull the plug. . . . It will not end in my lifetime.�

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Did you hear about Hillary’s visit to Iraq accompanied by Chelsea, her daughter? Chelsea broke away from the crowd to talk to a grizzled and supposedly fearless Marine. “There are only three things that I’m afraid of,â€� the Marine commented.  “Osama, Obama and your mama.â€�

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One of the interesting spots my bride and I visited during a few days off in northern New Hampshire and Vermont was the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center in Holderness, N.H. It features extensive displays of live New England wildlife in natural habitat, including bobcats, bears, otters, foxes, eagles and even a couple of mountain lions imported from Montana. No moose, though — they’re too big.

We also explored the small village of Cabot, Vt., where a familiar cheese is made. Three score and 10 years ago during a summer vacation I accompanied my mother on a visit to a college friend there. We rode a steam train with open platform wood coaches from St. Johnsbury to Walden, where we were met.  The railroad is of course long since gone except for bits of the embankment, but Cabot still has a sweet simplicity to it

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Then we had an adventure or near-misadventure in what is described as the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont north of St. Johnsbury. We made our way along the old Grand Trunk railroad — now the St. Lawrence & Atlantic — to Island Pond, which used to be a rail division point and now is a summer resort of sorts. Some modest dairy farms still survive along with varied timber operations.

Eventually we reached Newport, a small city at the south end of the binational Lake Memphremagog, the vicinity of which was settled by loyalist refugees from the United States in 1776. We drove north to a small town along the border between Vermont and Quebec. Customs and immigration facilities are located where Interstate 93 meets its Canadian counterpart.

But we wanted to explore Derby Line. So we took a side residential street that led out from the village. Well-kept wooden houses lined the street.  Soon I noticed that the street signs were in French along with an “Arretâ€� sign at an intersection. The actual border was unmarked and we had blundered unknowingly into Stanstead or Rock Island, Canada.  As I remember, Jill and Neil Scott of Lakeville used to teach there. Anyhow, apparently no one noticed us and we skedaddled quickly back into the good old U.S. of A.

I thought to myself that if I could do it, any terrorist could also.  But then I thought how much nicer it is this way without some hideous wall separating two good friends.