‘You know what you should do, Dubya,’ Laura joked at the ranch last week, ‘you should make a list of things to do before you retire.’ We laughed at the time but then I gotta thinking, with only a few months left as President and a whole buncha stuff still to get done, maybe a list wasn’t such a bad idea. I’d been at the breakfast bar for a long while when Laura came by and looked down at my notepad. ‘You’re sure you only got one thing to do before you go, sweet pea?’ she says. ‘I guess so,’ I said. I had just one single line written on that there list: take down Iran.
When Dick first told me about his plan for the Middle East I thought he was either a genius or just plain crazy. I remember it clear as day. We were having a round of golf down in Waco and Dick was explaining this complicated foreign policy stuff. We were teeing off on the 17th and he says, ‘Look George, it’s kinda like how you’d play this hole. First you gotta study the terrain; find out where all the bunkers and roughs are. Then you gotta choose your hardware. You wouldn’t use a putter for a monster hole like this, would you?’ He takes out a wood and does a practice swing. ‘Now no matter how good a golfer you are, you’re not going to sink a hole-in-one on the 17th. A hole like this will need a couple of big thwacks at least before you even get up on the green.’ He hits the ball down the fairway. ‘The first thwack, Afghanistan.’ He tees up again and takes another drive. ‘The second thwack, Iraq.’ He tees up once more. ‘Then we thwack the real bad guy. Iran.’ He drives the golf ball into the scrub.
