T he evidence of the wreckage of the Bush years can be found everywhere. Under this conservative president, federal spending rose from 18.5 percent of GDP in 2001 to 21 percent in 2008, while a $125.3 billion surplus became a $364.4 billion deficit. Median family income, which had grown from $42,429 in 1980 to $46,049 in 1990, and which grew again during the Clinton Administration to $50,557 by 2000, shrank under George W. Bush, standing at $50,223 in 2007 before the start of the recession. During the Bush presidency, three million jobs were created. That compares to 23.1 million during Bill Clinton’s two terms, and 16 million during Ronald Reagan’s. The rate of job creation under Bush was the lowest under any post-World War II president.

Courage and Consequence, Karl Rove’s new memoir, "Bush’s Brain" rejects these facts out of hand, arguing that Bush successfully "alter[ed] the conservative movement that he came to lead. And the direction he steered it in was productive, principled, and healthy for the country." To reach this conclusion, Rove ignores a staggering record of arrogance, recklessness, and negligence–a record awesome in its consequences. It is not as if this record was unavailable to Rove. Time may have diminished his recall of some of the details, but the magnitude of the damage inflicted by the Administration is indelible.

Voters seek three crucial areas of expertise in a president: risk management; national defense and the conduct of war; and fiscal responsibility. Bush fell short on each. Most famously, Bush failed to respond proactively to his August 6, 2001 daily CIA briefing, headlined "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," which warned of "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

In addition to the loss of 2,985 lives, the costs of 9/11 defy measurement. The Congressional Research Service sought to tally early losses and expenditures, citing $40 billion in payouts by the insurance industry; $15 billion in direct subsidies and loans to the airline industry; the dislocation, disruption, and destruction of 18,000 businesses in New York; layoffs of 130,000 New York metro area employees; and the loss to New York City of more than $3 billion in taxes. The Federal Reserve took several steps to inject money into the economy–for example, bringing down the federal funds rate to half of what it had been just prior to 9/11. These steps were widely credited with preventing further collapse of the economy in 2001, but this kind of monetary and fiscal policy arguably contributed to the credit bubble and ultimately to the implosion of that bubble in 2008.

Second, in response to 9/11, Bush invaded Iraq without the backing of the U.N. or of key allies. The invasion was opposed by nations such as China, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, among others. Bush invaded Iraq without preparation for reconstruction, and adopted policies there that weakened the civilian infrastructure and strengthened the terrorist insurgency. The invasion forced the transfer of manpower and other resources away from Afghanistan, which the United States had attacked with much broader international and domestic support. Neglect of the Afghan effort resulted in a revival, in that region, of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and has led to the prolongation of that war, now in its ninth year. The Congressional Research Service reported last September that funding for these wars could total between $1.3 and $1.8 trillion from 2001 to 2019.

Third, Bush, and the people he appointed, oversaw–and <i>overlooked</i>–a period of breathtaking financial speculation, and failed to regulate the explosive growth of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other exotic financial instruments. Banks and companies profiting over the course of the bubble had all been major contributors to Bush’s 2004 campaign: real estate, $10.5 million; securities, investment, and various financial services firms, $14.3 million; contractors and construction services, $5.2 million; insurance, $3.2 million; commercial banks, $3.1 million. Campaign contributions do not in themselves tell the whole story, but are rather a signal of the corporate and commercial interests that wielded power over the action–or inaction–of the government regulatory apparatus during the Bush years.

The price of Bush’s dereliction was immense. The Bush presidency terminated with the nation caught in the worst economic meltdown in 75 years. In the United States alone, more than 8.4 million jobs were lost and nearly three million homes were foreclosed on, with more to come. The number of personal and commercial bankruptcies reached unprecedented levels. In 2008–a single year–American households lost $11 trillion, 18 percent of their wealth. Bush left office with the same stunned and uncomprehending look he revealed on September 11, when aides whispered in his ear, during a reading to Florida schoolchildren, that two hijacked planes had rammed into and brought down the two World Trade Center towers, destroying the financial heart of Manhattan.

Writing Courage and Consequence posed a major challenge for Rove: as a loyal aide, how could he write 520 pages that maintained a semblance of intellectual integrity without doing violence to the memory of this failed presidency? He couldn’t, so he didn’t. His solution: Whenever possible, omit information casting a negative light on his leader; when omission becomes impossible, blame others.

Rove’s book is more notable for what it leaves out than for what it includes. Paul Bremer, the administrator charged with overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq, and Jim O’Beirne, the politically appointed Pentagon official responsible for hiring staff to work under Bremer, are left out of the narrative. The record of these two men and their $18 billion budget has been documented in detail by Thomas Ricks (<i>Fiasco</i>) and Rajiv Chandrasekaran (<i>Imperial Life in the Emerald City</i>). Any serious attempt to deal with the Bush Administration’s handling of Iraq would have to address Ricks’s exhaustively backed up charge that "Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 may ultimately come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.

And then there is Richard A. Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, who contended that Bush was determined to set the stage for an invasion of Iraq

The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, "I want you to find whether Iraq did this." Now he never said, "Make it up." But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, "Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection." He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection."

Asking Rove to address the issues raised by Ricks, Chandrasekaran, and Clarke may be too much. They are, after all, the enemy. But how can a figure as prominent as Paul Bremer disappear in a 100,000-plus word memoir of the Bush years?

On a larger scale, there is no discussion of the unanticipated emergence of the Iraqi insurgency, the chaos that took over the country immediately following the U.S. invasion, and the role of U.S. policies in fostering that chaos. Instead, Rove blames Iraqis for setbacks: "The Iraqi army and police were all too often not well-enough prepared, too corrupt, or not sufficiently loyal to the central government to maintain order against these fanatics. American forces would secure and area and turn it over to Iraqi forces only to see terrorist thugs move in and destabilize the area again.

Rove makes no reference at all to the detrimental consequences of Bremer’s "de-Ba’athification" of the Iraqi civil service, nor to Bremer’s decision to disband 400,000 Iraqi troops, handing terrorist forces a recruitment pool of thousands of armed, out-of-work, enraged former soldiers. Rove does not address the consequences of diverting troops and resources to Iraq from Afghanistan, undermining the new Afghani government, weakening the effort to track down hostile forces, and ultimately leaving unfulfilled Bush’s promise to get bin Laden "dead or alive.

The equally memorable "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS <i>Abraham Lincoln</i> also goes unnoted by Rove. He ignores not only Bush’s misjudgments, but those of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He makes no mention of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan: 5,341 American dead, 34,569 seriously wounded; 884,494 non-American lives lost, and 1,657,367 non-Americans wounded, according to estimates based, in part, on data compiled by researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Rove defends the invasion of Iraq, even in the absence of alleged weapons of mass destruction.