No matter when America’s brave troops leave Iraq, President George Bush should be the president that history holds accountable. Republicans are doing their best to ensure that does not happen, with the administration resisting a number of measures normally a matter of course in service to the archives of American history.

Currently, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office is refusing to archive entire categories of documents. Why would an administration seek to cloak itself from history? It isn’t a question for hindsight when Bush is finally out of office. It is important now because the answer may provide clues to current administration decision making.

Leaving aside those who feel that there is still something to salvage six years after Bush misled America about Iraq, the facts of the war demonstrate what can happen when right-wing politics that are more inward-looking than outwardly astute are given enormous power.

Some critical of Bush’s vaunted “surge” of troops in Iraq at this late date question whether it is less about winning and more about ensuring that a full withdrawal before Bush leaves office is impossible. If that is true, which seems quite plausible, than that would make our current president and the Republican Party culpable in the continued loss and injury of American troops for purely political reasons.

Bush misled America into its biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. No amount of document shredding or feet-dragging to leave the withdrawal for the next president will hide that.

Mark Tardif, Waterville