George W. Bush is not a conservative, but a right-wing ideologue who steers by abstractions in both foreign and domestic policy. Inevitably a perilous gap opens between his abstractions and concrete realities.

		Jeffrey Hart is professor of English emeritus at Dartmouth College and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. He is the author of "The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times," forthcoming from ISI Books.

As a conservative, I am seething with outrage at his performance.

Mr. Bush's abstract ideology could be shown by starting anywhere among his major policies -- Iraq, Social Security, stem-cell research, tax policy, you name it. Inevitably, he is in deep trouble today on several fronts, 55 percent now judging him to be a failed president. That does not mean that 45 percent consider him satisfactory. They would split various ways. His approval rating among black Americans, at 2 percent, lower probably than Jefferson Davis. And Republican candidates are justifiably worried about the off-year elections in 2006.

A conservative steers by prudence, uses history as evidence for the behavior of nations and individuals. A conservative is aware of the complexity and resistance of cultures, and of course considers abstractions and utopian schemes to be dangerous. A conservative matches means to ends as a practical necessity.

But George W. Bush doesn't have a conservative bone in his body. He stole the word "conservative."

The claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was the original rationale for our invasion of Iraq. After there proved to be no WMD, that was forgotten, and the public rationale became democratizing Iraq and making it a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, with the accompanying assumption, dubious at best, that democracies are inherently peaceful. Was democratization the rationale from the beginning, with WMD, let us put it gently, opportunistic?

Needless to say, Congress never would have authorized the use of force to democratize Iraq. Indeed, Paul Wolfowitz, in a May 2003 interview with Sam Tanenhaus in Vanity Fair, said that the emphasis on WMD had been a "bureaucratic decision." Was Mr. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of Defense, saying that if you wanted to invade Iraq, the best way to sell the idea was to claim danger from WMD, "mushroom clouds"?

And we know that the Bush administration had come to office with the intention of attacking Iraq. In "The Right Man," David Frum, an ardent Bush admirer, describes his interview for a speechwriter post with chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, who told him that President Bush would topple Saddam. This was soon after Mr. Bush's inauguration in 2001, 11 months before 9/11.

The claim of WMD very likely was a mask for the real rationale for the invasion. In a very important but widely overlooked speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 26, 2003, Mr. Bush makes it clear that he has a Wilsonian view of human behavior:

"Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on Earth [italics added]. ... Freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than slogans of hatred and tactics of terror."

But that happy thought is flatly untrue. Do human beings really desire the same good things everywhere on earth? Don't human beings desire power, conquest, empire, do not adherents of rival religions and secular dogmas slaughter one another? Did the 9/11 suicide bombers desire, in their hearts or otherwise, the same good things as the people who went to work that morning in the World Trade Center? Mr. Bush was talking idealistic nonsense, deadly nonsense, while believing it to be reality.

Now, to Woodrow Wilson's goal of "making the world safe for democracy," President Bush, and his theoreticians, added two improvements. In his syndicated column of Feb. 23, 2004, National Review Editor Rich Lowry offered this analysis:

"The reinvigorated Wilsonian foreign policy championed by Mr. Bush -- and motivated less by Woodrow Wilson's secular values (international law, etc.) and more by religious beliefs (the God-given rights of all people) -- is a reflection of President Bush's Christian base."

But, now, wait a minute. Since when has Woodrow Wilson been a conservative hero? He has always been a liberal icon. And Mr. Bush's theory that "the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth," derives from John Locke's optimistic assumption that human interests converge (they often do not, even "in their hearts"), and from Rousseau's belief in the natural goodness of human beings. With history in mind, if you believe that human beings are naturally good, then you will believe anything. Locke, Rousseau -- these are not conservative guides.

Mr. Bush added another element to old Woodrow, who hoped optimistically that persuasion and example would suffice to spread democracy. Mr. Bush added Blitzkrieg. Overthrow Saddam's repression by force, and democracy would emerge spontaneously. As Professor Andrew Bacevich, a military expert and foreign policy strategist at Boston University, put it in 2002, Mr. Bush effected a "fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober conservative Republicans [Eisenhower, Reagan] but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshall von Moltke."

So confident were the Bushites of rapid military success in Iraq and the emergence of democracy in that they recklessly sold the war on the basis of Iraq's WMD, even though, for example, expert assessments were available to them that the infamous aluminum rods were not suitable for the centrifuges used in nuclear processing. This month, Senate Democrats finally forced an investigation of the Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify the war. It had been delayed for a year.

In early 2004, William F. Buckley Jr. said in a syndicated column that if the war in Iraq went well the issue of WMD would not matter. Maybe, if the war had gone well the fabrications would have been forgotten for a time. But historians eventually would dig out the truth.

But based on the Wilsonian assumption that "the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth," the Bush administration expected that once the Iraqi army had been routed with shock and awe, and Saddam toppled, we would be welcomed as liberators and democracy would emerge. The CIA even had thousands of little American flags manufactured for Iraqis to wave as our troops marched in; but this was cancelled as too nationalistic. And, expecting a celebration, we of course had too few troops to establish order if trouble arose. What trouble?

William Buckley has seen that President Bush's Wilsonian ideology is not conservative.

Interviewed in the Oct. 24 New Yorker, he was asked how he felt about conservatism's current course and replied, "I'm not happy about it. It's probably true that there" -- in the support of the war in Iraq -- "you have a rediscovery of idealism. But if one acknowledged the second [spread-democracy-in-the-world] inaugural address as marching orders, that would keep us busy with something to do for all eternity. It's not in my judgment conservatism. Because conservatism is, to a considerable extent, the acknowledgement of realities. And this is surreal."

Correct. But to me Buckley sounds a bit muffled. As a conservative, I am much angrier than he seems to be.

In Iraq, we have over 2,000 killed and 25,000 wounded, often disastrously wounded, and have spent $200 billion, with no end in sight. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. Some 10,000 insurgents have fought a modern army of 140,000 to a draw. It has been some time since I have heard the term "superpower."

To be sure, Iraqis have voted twice. But what can emerge from any vote but an electoral diagram of the Iraq we already know: a large Shiite majority, a rebellious Sunni minority and a Kurdish minority that wants as little as possible to do with the Arab majority: Iraqis obviously do not all desire the same good things in their hearts.

George W. Bush is not a conservative, but a right-wing ideologue whose abstractions are contrary to reality. He lied us into this war, betting that Iraq would be easy and that the lies would be forgotten. Now a majority of Americans consider him a failed president.

Nor is he a conservative domestically. A Gallup Poll recently showed that 65 percent of Americans oppose repeal of Roe v. Wade, only 29 favoring its overthrow; against President Bush, 2 to 1 support stem-cell research, as both common sense and morality support the research; Mr. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security and turn the social safety net over to the stock market dropped like a stone; and 89 percent opposed the intervention of President Bush and the Bush Congress in the Schiavo case.

Tom DeLay, the most powerful Republican in the House, and now, among many others, under indictment, provided this diagnosis of Terri Schiavo, whose cerebral cortex had been destroyed and so was entirely oblivious: "Terri Schiavo is not dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support." Wheeeee! Did Tom DeLay have a hand in Iraq planning?

Mr. Bush used 9/11 to win re-election in 2004. Three more years.

But there is hope, first in the 2006 congressional elections. The American people really aren't crazy. We have just gone through a crazy period. As Adam Smith said, there is "a lot of ruin in a nation."

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were successful presidents. All were re-elected by landslides. All were conservative in the context of their times. All, somewhere, are glaring angrily at the messes that President Bush's folly has made.