BLITZER: In this new article you have in The New Yorker, you also write
this about the president: " 'The president is more determined than ever to stay
the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush
is a believer in the adage, "People may suffer and die, but the Church
advances." ' He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more
issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world
of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official
said." Could you be more specific on this former defense official?

HERSH: Sure, in this day and age, Wolf. No. I mean, that's -- we're having
a war over sourcing right now.

BLITZER: But this is someone who had day to day or contact, direct contact
with the president?

HERSH: Suffice to say this, that this president in private, at Camp David
with his friends, the people that I'm sure call him George, is very serene about
the war. He's upbeat. He thinks that he's going to be judged, maybe not in five
years or ten years, maybe in 20 years. He's committed to the course. He believes
in democracy.

HERSH: He believes that he's doing the right thing, and he's not going to
stop until he gets -- either until he's out of office, or he falls apart, or he
wins.

BLITZER: But this has become, your suggesting, a religious thing for him?

HERSH: Some people think it is. Other people think he's absolutely
committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He's been sold on this notion.
He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the
facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change. I'll tell you,
the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not
sure how you get to this guy.

We have generals that do not like -- anymore -- they're worried about
speaking truth to power. You know that. I mean that's -- Murtha in fact, John
Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, which most people don't know, has
tremendous contacts with the senior generals of the armies. He's a ranking old
war horse in Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The generals know him and like
him. His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the
average person in the public. They know that generals are privately telling him
things that they're not saying to them. And if you're a general and you have a
disagreement with this war, you cannot get that message into the White House.
And that gets people unnerved.

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and
intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it
is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to
political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he
disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is
proceeding."Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically
doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a
critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to
me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are
suddenly saying something much more alarming. They're beginning to talk about
some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest
destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don't want to sound like I'm off the wall here. But the issue is, is this
president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able
-- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to
accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else
that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may
not be judged for 10 or 20 years. He talks about being judged in 20 years to his
friends. And so it's a little alarming because that means that my and my
colleagues in the press corps, we can't get to him maybe with our views. You and
you can't get to him maybe with your interviews. How do you get to a guy to
convince him that perhaps he's not going the right way?

Jack Murtha certainly didn't do it. As I wrote, they were enraged at Murtha
in the White House. And so we have an election coming up -- Yes. I've had people
talk to me about maybe Congress is going to have to cut off the budget for this
war if it gets to that point. I don't think they're ready to do it now. But I'm
talking about sort of a crisis of management. That you have a management that's
seen by some of the people closely involved as not being able to function in
terms of getting information it doesn't want to receive.