FRANK RICH


Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of December 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was their collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction - a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of a 513-page federal history of this nationbuilding fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a“new”Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just“kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces - the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’”Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation is half-catatonic.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is hardly shocking. The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so drunk at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be housed for the night by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation. But the scandals at Bush’s Interior - encompassing millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties - barely registered beyond Washington.

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the abridged inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found“125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.”That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us?

In an interview on January 11, Mr.Obama signaled that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects. But Mr.Obama also said on the ABC News program“This Week With George Stephanopoulos”that there should be prosecutions if“somebody has blatantly broken the law.”

Mr.Obama added that he also had“a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Though Henry Waxman, the California congressman , remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds:“I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.”He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record.“We need to depoliticize it,”he says.“If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who was recently chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered“where is the outrage, the public outcry”over a government that has acted lawlessly and that“does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.”She asked,“How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises , Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also“resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that“we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,”because the national honor cannot be restored“without full disclosure.”She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and“extraordinary rendition.”But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever- it-takes new policy.