As governor of Texas, George W. Bush espoused a national policy of avoiding “perilous conflicts.”

WASHINGTON – Three years ago, Texas Gov. George W. Bush got the foreign vision thing just right. Here’s how he was quoted in the 2000 Republican convention platform:

“Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire. Let us not dominate others with our power or betray them with our indifference.”

Bush’s platform document calls for “promoting U.S. interests and principles” but avoiding “perilous conflicts” with a “new strategy” reflecting “a distinctly American internationalism.”

Bush grandly disparaged former President Clinton’s interventions in Haiti and Kosovo as exploits in “nation-building.”

Bush’s one-time antipathy to nation-building is handsomely supported in a summary assembled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It lists American attempts since 1898 at establishing democracies through military intervention. The report is a cautionary tale for the American people, but not so for adventurous American presidents.

Of 16 American tries at nation-building since the Spanish-American War, the report says, the score is 12 for the thugs and warlords, and four for democracy.

The Carnegie charts did hedge a little bit. The Philippine Republic (1898-1950) is not mentioned. Neither is Serbia. Both are struggling to maintain viable representative systems.

The cited failures at establishing democracy range from Cuba in 1898, 1906 and 1917, to Vietnam from 1964 to 1973, to present-day Afghanistan.

The four successes were Germany and Japan after World War II, little Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.

Something the Carnegie Endowment didn’t calculate was the small political cost of war. All of the presidents who sponsored these wars routinely proffered complaisant Congresses ample justification, sometimes ruses.

Only one president paid with his job for entering these conflicts – Lyndon Baines Johnson, for plunging America ever more deeply into the quagmire in Vietnam. That’s a pretty encouraging score for warlike commanders in chief.

Three years after the GOP convention, Bush is poised to send U.S. troops into his third intervention. He was surely compelled to enter Afghanistan because it was host to al-Qaeda training centers. But where is the compulsion to go now after years of apocalyptic mayhem into Liberia?

Doubts are rising in more breasts about the Iraq war with every American soldier picked off, kidnapped, blown up or accidentally killed in that morass. It’s obvious now that Bush couldn’t have meant what he told his convention in Philadelphia three years ago.

Worse, it’s impossible to track what he and his top lieutenants mean by what they say at any point in time. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were ragged daily in Africa about their unsupported claims that Iraq was making a nuclear bomb.

No clear link has yet been established between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which Bush repeatedly claimed existed. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, although they might be some day. But none of the evidence the Bush administration collected and offered to Congress, the United Nations and the world after Sept. 11, 2001, matters anyway, according to testimony last week by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

We knew all we needed to know when the World Trade Center was hit to justify the Iraq war, he claimed. In addition to claiming an “imminent” threat from Iraq, the administration first insisted it sought regime change in Iraq, but when the Arab world cried foul, it backed off. Then after the failed flirtation with the United Nations, Bush returned to the regime-change theme.

Now we are going to establish democracy in a country that never knew it, among people who utterly detest us. Estimates of the cost to American taxpayers of fighting and rebuilding Iraq range from $103 billion to $593 billion. There are more serious costs, of course. One day last week, the Pentagon announced the deaths of four more soldiers in Iraq. The total, including those who died from “accidents,” nears 80 since May 1. Our civilian commanders, understandably stressed because of the decisions they made, are also paying a price in dignity.

“Bring them on,” said the president when asked about the attacks on our troops. Rumsfeld compared the deaths of our soldiers to the murder rate in the District of Columbia, where most killings are drug-related. Rumsfeld’s undersecretary, Douglas Jay Feith, took the prize in grossness last week when he compared the American military toll in Iraq to the number of people killed on Sept. 11.

These crass comments by commanders of military personnel do nothing to dignify the deaths of these young people or comfort their families, or advance the morale of regular troops, reservists and National Guard units dragooned into this swamp.

Douglas Turner is the Washington bureau chief of The Buffalo News, www.buffnews.com.