The consensus out there in opinion-land is that Bush’s farewell address was the usual stuff of his speeches—little substance, watery clichéd appeals to sentiment and so forth. Michael Crowley of The New Republic’s “The Plank” called it “pretty weak tea” and suggested that Bush’s body language conveyed shame and contrition. Eve Fairbanks, also of The New Republic, complained about the disconnect between the ideals Bush expressed and what his administration actually accomplished, citing his “cuddly relationship” with Putin and his failure to do much of anything for the people of Georgia.

Does anyone else think that Bush’s last address was anything but anemic? That he defended what has become known variously as “The Freedom Agenda” and “The Bush Doctrine” with quiet intensity, making a case for nation-building and pre-emptive war? The most successful moments of Bush’s speech last night weren’t the ones looking backwards, but the ones where he outlined his hopes for the future. Bush really does want to go down in history as the man who boldly invaded Iraq without an exit strategy: “In the long run, advancing [democracy] is the only practical way to protect our citizens. When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror. When people have hope in the future, they will not cede their lives to violence and extremism.”

This disturbs me on two levels. One, that the man will never, ever have to admit that he was wrong, because he’s now placed the Iraq war, almost uniformly seen as the United States’ worst foreign policy misstep since the Bay of Pigs, in the context of a larger struggle to “lead the cause of freedom.” He’s always maintained that history would vindicate him, and now he’s shown us specifically how. He seems to think that historians will link any support the United States lends to troubled revolutions in the future to Iraq, his project, the first bold attempt, and that, when it is seen in the context of all these struggles, less emphasis will be placed on the fact that it was an unforgivable waste of money and lives.

Also, I think he’s become convinced that his decision to invade Iraq, which seemed to many of us at the time to be prompted by greed, hubris, the Oedipus complex, anything but “leading the cause of freedom,” is part of a larger, coherent philosophy, that “The Bush Doctrine” is something Bush invented consciously, instead of a name applied in hindsight to his disastrous mistakes. Forgive my cynicism, but I just don’t believe that Bush had anything so concrete in mind when he made the decision to compromise our country’s alliances and integrity and send our young people off to die: I think he was pretty much making it up as he went along.

What we need now is our own David Frost—someone to wring a verbal capitulation out of Bush, since the president-elect is, at most, agnostic on the subject of whether or not he will pursue legal action against the administration. At the moment, it seems most likely that Bush will disappear back into the anonymity of Crawford, Texas; doubtful for him the Clinton “retirement” of stumping, speechmaking, and fundraising. And most people will be content, I think, to let him go.

The main argument of the movie Frost/Nixon is that at the end of the Nixon presidency, the people badly needed the Frost interviews—they were really, really angry and they needed some kind of restitution.But most people seem to feel sorry for Bush, whose bloody crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo qualify him for the Nixon section in my personal wax museum of nasty, nasty buggers. Every time I start feeling sorry for Bush, I just think of the way he rode out the last nine months of his presidency—content to let the wars continue, determined to leave wrapping up Iraq and Afghanistan to his successor. So he wanted “The Freedom Agenda” to be his legacy—so why didn’t he do something about it? It’s at this point that Bush apologists inevitably cry surge. Sorry, but we’ve been at war since I was a junior in high school. I wanted normalcy, I wanted an uncorrupt Iraqi administration, I wanted clean running water, like yesterday, like a couple thousand American bodies ago. While we were risking our lives, what did Bush risk? Who will call Bush to account? Who will send him to his reckoning?