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Karl Rove leaves Washington with mountainous political and strategic achievements, and yet empty-handed. His great dream of changing the political geography forever is unrealized. If most presidents come to Washington to govern within the framework of their political ideology, Rove hoped that his man would go way beyond that and permanently change the political landscape, ushering in a new era of lasting conservatism. Rove is a visionary and in the early days of the Bush ascendancy–something he engineered almost single-handedly–it appeared he might triumph.

Rove’s vision is as formidable as is his campaign execution; and his comprehension of electoral architecture is without peer. Rove believes that elections are won by an intimate understanding of not just states, but counties and precincts. He also believes a little sugar helps the medicine go down. That was the case when he discovered conservatism was viewed as harsh and unfeeling. Rove reached for the sugar and gave us “compassionate conservatism.” It was an idea both vague and transcendental: a bromide that could be swallowed by both the masses and the high priests. In the beginning, and the end, it was a hoax. But it was one that candidate George W. Bush could believe in, and it sped him on to the presidency.

Rove, an adoptive Texan, needed both shock troops and a Praetorian guard to advance his agenda. They were the Christian right and the graduates of the organization he had once run, College Republicans. The religious right was hand-fed by Rove, who spent enormous effort nurturing them and promising them Old Testament red meat. The new president would give them what they wanted, so much as he could: conservative judges, opposition to Roe v. Wade, limits on stem cell research, school prayer and school choice, and family friendly taxes. For their part, the conservative churches had to get out the vote and preach against the sinful liberals. The College Republicans Rove held close. He found jobs for them in the administration, the White House, and as lobbyists. Key figures like his old friend Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, were bolstered. They were encouraged to emphasize their links to Rove. The Christian right was the brawn and the College Republicans were the brains.

Rove’s Bush strategy did not produce a sweeping victory for Bush, but a messy conclusion in Florida. However, it was a victory for Rove. When Karl the Kingmaker was moved in to the White House by his friend, now grateful friend, George W. Bush, he arrived as the third most important person in the West Wing after the vice president. The chief of staff, Andrew Card, ranked Rove on paper. But Rove had the power, and he exercised it. He was the intellectual, the man with the charts and the power-point displays, and the quick historical references.

Before 9/11, Rove dabbled in foreign policy and even chaired a group on Iraq. But after the attacks another strain of the Republican activists, the so-called “neocons,” seized foreign policy and found a channel to Vice President Cheney. Rove, was now free to push the president’s agenda domestically. With one of his heroes in mind, William McKinley, Rove sought to bring about structural changes in policy that would turn America inexorably right. He failed.

Only two major pieces of the president’s domestic agenda were enacted in the first term: tax cuts and education reform. The faith-based initiative was watered down, Social Security reform was strangled at birth, immigration reform failed, and extending the tax cuts has not happened. Meanwhile the Republicans, especially conservatives, have lost faith in their White House team. Too many missteps; too many scandals or near scandals; and, hanging over everything, is Iraq.

In the end Rove, the political scientist and electoral engineer, failed in the politics of Capitol Hill. He is accused of being too dictatorial in dealing with members of his own party and too autodidactic with the opposition.

Rove, who admires Winston Churchill along with McKinley, missed Churchill’s respect for the House of Commons. Rove expected Republicans on the Hill to sign on to legislation because it furthered The Great Cause. Lawmakers did not like his style: Although they admired what he had achieved, they resented his lack of deference. Even Tom DeLay had screaming matches with Rove, by the former House speaker’s own report.

It has been a helluva ride, Karl.

Political pressure is mounting in Washington for a significant Iraq pullout by 2009. Under similar pressure, London withdrew from a much larger and older project in August 1947. Indeed, Ian Jack wrote in The Guardian, the British exited India “with a speed and directness that alarmed many Indians and with a purpose that stemmed in small part from America’s then anti-colonial pressure on a country that was broke and badly in America’s debt.”

While India is far from a perfect analogy with Iraq, in 1947 it offered some remarkably similar problems, Jack wrote. “Its politics had become lethally communalized–not Shia v Sunni, but Muslim v Hindu and Sikh. London attempted to preserve a one-nation India, but failed; by early 1947 there was still no form of Indian government to which power could be transferred. British troops in India, not counting British officers in the Indian Army, had dwindled from a prewar figure of 60,000 to no more than 12,000 two years after the second world war ended, and all of them were very anxious to come home. When Attlee’s Labor government took office in 1945, withdrawal from India was no longer a matter of if, but when.”

Discussions in the White House about setting a date to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq echo those on Downing Street in the mid-1940s. “In Downing Street on the last day of 1946, a cabinet meeting pondered the wisdom of announcing a precise date when, to quote from the record, ‘we had no assurance that there would by then be a representative authority to whom we could hand over power.’ Still, the cabinet felt that a precise date might knock a few heads together and that withdrawal could be dressed up so as not to ‘appear to be forced upon us by our weakness’ but instead the logical conclusion of policies pursued by successive British governments,” Jack wrote.

“The truth is that a blunt document written in September by Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy, had scared them. ‘In India one must either rule firmly or not at all,’ he wrote. ‘With a largely uneducated and excitable people, easily moved to violence, it is essential that agitation and incitement to unbridled riot should be stopped at once.’ Britain lacked the will and means for the long haul. Wavell said Britain needed to quit no later than spring 1948. In February 1947, the government earmarked June, and then appointed Wavell’s successor, Louis Mountbatten.”

Mountbatten set the partition of India into motion and similarly, U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) has proposed it for Iraq.

“Mountbatten was a military nincompoop and one of stupendous vanity, with a boyish preoccupation with flags, medals, uniforms and orders of ceremony. But in India he and his cleverer wife, Edwina, charmed people, particularly India’s most significant politician, Jawaharlal Nehru. For their day and class, they were remarkably free of racial condescension. A combination of charm, bluster, rashness and perhaps ignorance achieved a political settlement within months, though it meant the partition of India,” Jack wrote.

“By 1947, Indian politicians on all sides had begun to see the idea of Pakistan as inevitable, though neither Britain nor the U.S. was particularly in favor of it. What may not have been inevitable was the slaughter that accompanied Pakistan’s creation and for which Mountbatten’s haste is sometimes held to blame; according to the historian Andrew Roberts, he should have been courtmartialled when he got back to London. Somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people died.”

But slowness may only have postponed and aggravated the carnage, Jack wrote. As with the Shiites and Sunnis in today’s Iraq, Hindu-Muslim killings were an everyday event in British India—in 1946, 4,000 died in the Calcutta riots.

“Mountbatten had few British troops to call on, and probably even fewer willing to risk their lives in the cause of communal harmony. And most politicians wanted the British out as soon as possible. Nehru had said, ‘I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than necessary,’ ” Jack wrote.

Murder and mayhem in Iraq would likely accompany a swift exit by the United States. But would U.S. troops be slaughtered on their way out, as some have suggested? Maybe not.”The indubitable benefit, from a strictly British point of view, is that very few British soldiers died between the declaration of India’s independence and the last troop ship home—seven officers in one statistic,” Jack wrote.

The residents of Happy Valley, aka The Wall Street Journal, are deeply gloomy that their new proprietor will almost certainly be Rupert Murdoch. There is irony here: The world’s best business newspaper is about to be acquired by the world’s most successful and imaginative publisher.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal will not have a column by Bill Kristol on Page One, nor will it have naked women on Page Three.

Murdoch’s real genius is that he knows his markets. He has also learned the hard way that newspapers in the U.S. are different than those in the U.K. or Australia. Based on past performance, he will move cautiously at The Journal, and will probably make few editorial changes. It is the management where his ax will most likely fall. Murdoch likes his managements lean and mean.

Why will he leave the news side of The Journal alone? The answer lies in Murdoch’s history. When he expanded into the U.K., Murdoch exploited the already salacious News of the World and took a middling tabloid, The Sun, to quite a difference place. Initially, The Sun had been the property of the British trade unions, and was bought by the Daily Mirror group. The group was sympathetic to the unions.

But The Mirror’s attitude to the working man was forged in the 1930s. It patronized the workers; saw them as horny-handed, exploited and ghettoized. But by the 1970s, when Murdoch made his move, the British worker owned a car and took his vacation in Spain.

Yes Murdoch vulgarized The Mirror, but he also appealed to the aspirations of the readers. He flipped the politics of the paper from left to right, and it took off to become the most successful of the British tabloids.

At The Times and The Sunday Times, Murdoch eradicated the sense of superiority, aiming the papers at the prosperous middle class, not at the hide-bound aristocracy and their set. Commercially, the results have been less dramatic than they were at The Sun. Nonetheless, Murdoch has saved two great newspapers, which were on their deathbeds when he came through the door.

Along the way, Murdoch tamed the unions, brought in new technology, and repudiated the blandishments of the British establishment. When he was denied a toehold in British television, Murdoch did a courageous and superb end-run. He bet his assets on establishing BSkyB, as satellite service that sold subscribers the dishes as well as the programs. It has been a success.

When Murdoch romped into the U.S., his British formulas did not work in American newspapers. Those he bought did not respond to his innovations. When he owned it, The Chicago Sun Times lost circulation. And he found no traction in Boston and San Antonio, Tex. The New York Post is not a commercial success; rather, it is Murdoch’s indulgence. He can afford it.

If Murdoch has failed as a newspaper proprietor in the U.S., he has succeeded mightily in television. The formula that worked in his British tabloids has worked even better in his American TV projects: conservatism with vulgarity. Particularly with Fox cable, Murdoch has been able to replicate what he achieved with the saucy Sun newspaper.

So why are they so worried at The Wall Street Journal? Could it be that the paper has become smug and self-satisfied, and fears change? Can it be that the staff would rather the paper die in a long, slow war of attrition than allow the world’s most innovative proprietor launch an offensive?

But there is one issue that The Journal should worry about: It is that Murdoch is 76 years old, and has a large and querulous family.

ZIMBABWE, July 4 — During the past 27 years of Zanu PF government in Zimbabwe under Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the state has slipped from being a reasonably stable, open democracy with a good civil service and real potential for growth and development, to an autocratic, corrupt predatory regime that pays scant regard to the law or the interests of its people. The numbers are astounding. GDP has fallen by over half, exports by two-thirds, food production by 80 percent, industrial output by 50 percent. In the social sphere, life expectancy has declined to the lowest in the world, falling by a year for every year Mugabe has been in power; all social indicators are negative and the real incomes of formal sector workers has declined by 90 percent.

In the sphere of macroeconomic management, by no means rocket science today, the regime has run a budget deficit of over 60 percent of GDP, raised taxes equal to another 50 percent of GDP, stolen at least a third of real economic output with most of the resulting wealth being spread amongst an elite of perhaps 2,000 individuals and the security establishment.

As a result, in the midst of a steep decline in economic activity, a massive expansion in absolute poverty and the collapse of all state-managed services, we have the specter of a small political and military elite who drive expensive cars, go on shopping trips to Dubai, and are building mansions that would grace the cities of the richest countries in the world.

It is obscene. While this is going on, we have seen our democracy subverted and our human rights taken from us in a similar fashion to the nightmare regimes of the Soviet Union or Germany circa 1930–45. It is no exaggeration to say we have seen thousands of political killings(gukurahundi), hundreds of thousands tortured, beaten and raped and millions displaced, both internally and externally.

We know we are not alone in this sort of situation–there are several such regimes in Africa and even a few elsewhere. The scary thing is that the Zanu regime would be getting away with all of this if it were not for a small, brave and dedicated cadre of activists who have worked tirelessly to record what is going on, publicize the outcome and fight for matters to be corrected.

It was this group who wrote the report “Breaking the Silence” that first revealed the horrors of gukurahundi. It was the UN that disclosed the extent and seriousness of the Murambatsvina exercise, it was a lone cameraman working for the state-controlled media who photographed the rioting and subsequent beatings of MDC leaders in March this year and was beaten to death for his courage.

Even the much maligned IMF has played a small role by continuing to prepare and put out on its Web site, detailed technical reports that have spelt out the truth about the economy in the face of state propaganda. The great failure has been in Africa itself. There is no point in Britain or the United States coming out with a harsh critique of Mugabe and his regime, this is simply brushed aside by Mugabe and his cronies as another example of “neo-colonialism”. Other African leaders, and the regime here, deliberately misinterpret even the targeted sanctions aimed at the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity as economic sanctions directed at the people of Zimbabwe rather than the actual targets themselves.

Gradually, the crimes of Mugabe and his entourage has dawned on African leaders. When they attend events such as the World Economic Forum in Cape Town recently they are confronted by the need to resemble some sort of a profitable and secure place for investment flows from the rest of the world. It is very difficult to do so while you have errant and truant regimes like that which exists in Zimbabwe still being treated as a “respected” member of the African Club of Nations.

Just take the current madness. Mugabe announces that the runaway inflation in Zimbabwe is part of an international “regime change” agenda. He declares that Britain and the United States are behind the inflation. Do not laugh, in many quarters he is taken seriously when he makes such ridiculous claims. He then sends out his armed thugs in small groups to force industrialists and retailers to roll back their prices. No rational basis–just reduce your prices by “X” or we will do “Y”. So for the past four days, we have seen hundreds of businesses raided, managers and owners beaten in some cases, nearly 200 taken into police custody and billions of dollars written off stocks of products already paid for.

I am struggling right now to work out what we have lost in our small business. Customers fighting to get into the supermarket have smashed the glass front of the store and we have long queues: people anxious to buy what is available at the low prices and before stocks run out. I have frozen all buying and by the end of today, we will start to close down–42 staff out of work. Many others are doing the same thing. Wholesalers have marked down their stocks and are now billing suppliers for rebates.

I am contemplating what to do at our level, but cannot see anyone being willing or able to give me a check for many hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the measures forced on us. When finally the whole futile exercise collapses in a heap and we go back to normal trading, we will not have the cash to pay for new stocks. Of course there may not be any manufacturers still operating at that point.

Just to give one example of nutty economics, Mugabe style. An empty bag for 10 kilograms of cornmeal costs Z$79,000, the corn at subsidized prices from the GMB costs Z$26,000 and the new controlled price is Z$85,000, about half of total costs before any profit accrues to the miller. Fuel is the same: the landed cost is about US85 cents per liter and this is equal to Z$170,000. The controlled price is Z$60,000. By the end of today, the only place you will be able to buy fuel will be behind closed doors in some back alley after dark, at Z$250,000 a liter or more.

On Saturday, the two teams from the MDC and Zanu PF resume talks in Pretoria. They are discussing the conditions for the March 2008 elections. I do not think we will get there. Perhaps that is the real game being played behind the scenes by the predatory, kleptocratic regime that some call our government.

The writer is a businessman who lives in Zimbabwe.

Periodically, a fever rages in the political class in Washington. Remember term limits? The fever raging among them now is that they must be addicted to physical fitness in order to qualify for high office.

But history, Arnold Schwarzenegger notwithstanding, does not suggest that people in the peak of physical fitness are any more suited to govern than the sedentary.

Indeed, as in most things, history’s lessons are contradictory. Winston Churchill started drinking at breakfast, Franklin D. Roosevelt was disabled, and William Howard Taft challenged his chefs and his tailors. Adolf Hitler was lazy, took no exercise, and was a vegetarian. In contrast, Saddam Hussein insisted on fitness and swam regularly in the Tigris with his coterie of murderers.

At one time, most American politicians were probably physically fit: People who have to travel on horseback end up that way. Only urban slugs, like Benjamin Franklin, got around by carriage and avoided the involuntary conditioning.

The horseback-riding factor is an important one. People who ride know that they feel much better after an hour on a horse than if they worked out an hour in the gym. Ronald Reagan rode throughout his presidency on horses provided by the U.S. Park Service. He said: “There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”

Given Reagan’s mythical status in Republican circles, it is astounding that the entire GOP has not saddled up. Can’t you see Republican members of Congress galloping up Capitol Hill at the mention of socialized medicine, amnesty for illegal aliens, or gun registration? Imagine Mitch McConnell and John Boehner shouting, “Tally ho”?

If you want a good example of the electability of the fit, it is George W. Bush. The president used to run on a treadmill, but now he takes half-day bike-riding excursions at the U.S. Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md. The concept of the leader of the free world hurtling around on a bike is most disconcerting.

Gerald Ford, always fitness-conscious, preferred the anonymity of swimming in the White House pool. Bill Clinton liked the idea of exercising, or he liked us to think he liked the idea of exercising. But his jogging was an embarrassment. Dwight Eisenhower had enough of that in the military, and preferred to putt on the South Lawn of the White House. There he engaged in a long war against the squirrels that stole his golf balls. Ike, I am told, deported them to Sylvan Theater on the Mall.

Of course, the man who had it both ways was Teddy Roosevelt. He loved sports of all kinds, but he was deliciously paunchy. Vigorous activities—of the athletic and gastronomic kind–were a way of life for him.

At the White House these days, the gym is a very active place. After a 16-hour day, I am told, a staffer was hoping that somebody would buy her a drink. No such luck. Her superior told her that she would have more energy if she went to the gym.

When Karl Marx was writing his tracts in the Reading Room of the British Museum, he was known for his flatulence and for always complaining about his poor health. And when Churchill was told about this, he declared that history was made by men who felt unwell.

Nevertheless, Arnold Schwarzenegger is something to behold: fit, trim and charismatic. Never mind that Clive James, the Australian-born writer, said Schwarzenegger looked like a brown condom filled with walnuts.