The Bush administration has conducted an extensive spying operation on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his staff and others in the Iraqi government, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

"We know everything he says," according to one of multiple sources Woodward cites about the practice in "The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008," scheduled for release Monday. [...]

Given Bush's efforts to earn Maliki's trust, the surveillance of the Iraqi prime minister caused some consternation among several senior U.S. officials, who questioned whether it was worth the risk, Woodward reports. One official knowledgeable about the surveillance "recognized the sensitivity of the issue and then asked, 'Would it be better if we didn't?' "

But hey, what are friends for?

Meanwhile Woodward's book also paints a portrait of Bush as a President not too concerned with troop losses, and more interested in using a "body count" of insurgents killed as the metric for whether we were winnning the war in Iraq. Sound familiar? No wonder we have so many aerial attacks on "insurgent strongholds" by US forces and differing opinions about who were killed in those attacks: innocent civilians or "evil doers." Woodward's final assessment of Bush as Commander-in-Chief? Not a good one:

In a critical epilogue assessing the president's performance as commander-in-chief, Woodward concludes that Bush "rarely was the voice of realism on the Iraq war" and "too often failed to lead."

During the interviews with Woodward, the president spoke of the war as part of a recentering of American power in the Middle East. "And it should be," Bush said. "And the reason it should be: It is the place from which a deadly attack emanated. And it is the place where further deadly attacks could emanate."

It seems to me Bush sees himself as an American Emperor fighting the Barbarian Hordes in the Middle East. So we had to invade Iraq because a Saudi financed and manned terrorist group based out of Afghanistan successfully pulled off the 9/11 attacks in large part due to the fact that Bush and his administration was negligent in failing to take his own intelligence community's warnings seriously. And if you're the Emperor, anything goes. Torture, spying on your friends and your own people. Indefinite detentions. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with 9/11. Anything at all. Quite a vision of his role.

And how, exactly is John McCain's vision of his role as the next President any different from Bush's?