America/Conor O'Clery: Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, got a rough reception when he went to Capitol Hill this week to explain the debacle in Iraq.
In one exchange the Deputy Defence Secretary hotly denied the invasion of Iraq had been on his agenda since 1991. Critics were quick to point out, however, that Wolfowitz was a hawk on Iraq throughout the 1990s and co-authored a famous Weekly Standard article in December 1997, entitled "Overthrow Him", which laid out plans for toppling Saddam Hussein and changing Iraq in America's interest. The article concluded prophetically that "there is no guarantee of success".
The lack of success in Iraq has opened up deep rifts in conservative ranks over America's role in the world, and has put the neo-conservative movement led by Wolfowitz and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol on the defensive. The neo-conservatives and the Bush administration are accused in this week's mainstream conservative National Review of "Wilsonian" errors in underestimating the difficulties of implanting democracy on alien soil. President Woodrow Wilson advocated using American power to build a new world order and took the US into the first World War to make the world "safe for democracy".
President Bush has been sounding very Wilsonian in recent pronouncements. "I believe freedom in the heart of the Middle East is an historic opportunity to change the world," he told newspaper editors in Washington this week.
There is a long history of opposition on the right to the use of US military power for nation-building, and its proponents among Mr Bush's political base are gaining strength. Commentator Pat Buchanan, who argued from the start that invading Iraq was not in America's vital interests, takes a swipe at the neo-conservatives in his syndicated column this week. The former Nixon aide asks who it was that told President Bush that Iraq would be a "cakewalk", that Americans would be welcomed with flowers, and that democracy would blossom there and across the Middle East. The dilemma now, he says, is that Americans agree a defeat in Iraq would be a disaster, but are not convinced that democracy in Iraq is so vital that Americans should bleed and die indefinitely to attain it. Conservatives like Buchanan fear that the "great Wilsonian fallacy" may yet destroy the Bush presidency, just as President Johnson was broken by his failure to "win or get out" of Vietnam.
The neo-conservatives are looking for scapegoats and have found one in their own ranks. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have foreseen that a greater military force was necessary, write Kristol and Robert Kagan in this week's Standard. If he shows he hasn't learned from his bad calculations, then President Bush should fire him.
The embattled neo-conservatives are also venting some of their fury on Mr Bush for turning to the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi to get him out of the mess. The champion of the neo-conservative causes, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of abdicating decisions to Mr Brahimi, whom it dismisses as "a Sunni who ran the Arab League when it was cosy with Saddam Hussein", and said the fastest way for Mr Bush to lose support at home would be if Americans were restrained by a UN envoy from "doing what it takes to win", such as clearing out Falluja "as a terrorist sanctuary".
Karen Jurgensen (55) retired abruptly on Tuesday as editor of USA Today, the second editor of a major US newspaper to be forced out over fabricated stories by a journalist. An independent panel found that star foreign correspondent Jack Kelley had made up several major "exclusives" over more than a decade, among them an account of visiting Osama bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan. He described how after a suicide bombing in Israel the heads of victims rolled down the street. Israeli police said that didn't happen. The sceptical editors cut out a detail about their eyes still blinking but still ran the story. The panel blamed a failure of editorial leadership and Kelley, who left in January, admitted "serious mistakes". Meanwhile, the fallout over the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times last year continues in the shape of a tell-all article by fired executive editor Howell Raines in the current Atlantic Monthly. Raines attacks what he calls the culture of complacency at the Times.
It has a "defining myth of effortless superiority" under which "it's not news until we say it's news," he writes. He also criticises the system where new recruits get tenure for life after a 14-week probationary period. One supervising editor overlooked the 14-week deadline and suggested to the unproductive staffer he surely would not want to stay on account of a technicality. The employee said he could live with it and is still there a quarter of a century later. Raines says he tried so hard to change the culture he had no reservoir of goodwill on which to draw when the crisis over Blair's invented stories convulsed the paper.
One snowy day in 1992, after President Clinton held an outdoor press conference in the Rose Garden, his aide George Stephanopoulos came over to us and invited Mary McGrory into the White House for a coffee. It was a measure of the enormous respect and affection in which the Washington Post columnist was held in the US capital. Not that she spared anyone in power - except perhaps JFK - during her half-century as a "must-read" columnist in Washington. She was enormously proud of the fact that Nixon put her on his "enemies list". What struck me that day, too, was the fact that though well into her 70s, McGrory was still doing the footwork on a cold winter day. An example for us all. The daughter of a Boston Irish postal clerk, Edward Patrick McGrory, Mary McGrory died on Wednesday, aged 85. It is no exaggeration to say that Washington is in mourning.
Nobody has ever suggested anything improper in the relationship between George Bush and his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, though she works out with him and spends weekends at the family ranch in Crawford, Texas. But her widely-reported faux pas at a dinner party in Washington has raised delighted eyebrows. "As I was telling my husb . . . ," she began, before correcting herself. "As I was telling President Bush . . ."