I just finished Scott McClellan's book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.  It is surprisingly good, or at least it was surprising to me.  This was not, as some had suggested the week the book was released, a book to whitewash his own record, or to settle scores.  It is the thoughtful reflections of a White House insider, who likes and respects George W. Bush, but who also believes that Mr. Bush unwittingly became captive of the "permanent campaign" mentality that led to some destructive consequences.  This included the selling of the Iraq war to the public.  McClellan suggests that the primary motivation behind Bush's decision to invade Iraq was eliminating a ruthless dictator and establishing a democracy that would serve as an inspiring example to Iraq's Arab and Muslim neighbors.   Since the American public was not likely to endorse launching a war for the purpose of bringing democracy to the Middle East, he emphasized and embellished the WMD and the supposed imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies by Saddam Hussein.  Bush and other administration officials were not lying - in the sense of knowingly making false statements of fact.  Instead, they unconsciously cherry picked (as the saying goes) the intelligence, overplaying tidbits of information (without questioning the reliability of that information) that reinforced what they wanted to believe, while downplaying any information that conflicted with their assumptions.  Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, his main justification proved to be false, after he had staked his credibility on the WMD premise. 

The final chapter of the book sums up the problems of the Bush presidency well.  Here is the opening paragraph of that chapter: 

When George W. Bush arrived at the White House, I believed he offered a real opportunity to move beyond the hyperpartisanship and excessive politicking that have come to characterize Washington.  But it was not to be.  The permanent campaign approach we publicly denounced and distanced ourselves from in the 2000 campaign was vigorously embraced after Election Day.  The massive Bush campaign machine was integrally woven into his White House governance, without adequate controls or corresponding checks and balances.  Ultimately, that machine worked not only to spin the media and defeat our opponents but to spin and defeat ourselves. 

Anyway, I thought the book was well written, and I appreciate the tone of it.  McClellan is sympathetic to Bush, but he also acknowledges that as the president, Bush is ultimately responsible for all the mistakes made by any members of his administration.