Presidents hate to admit mistakes. This one seems to hate it even more than his predecessors.

After all, it’s easier to blame one’s problems on someone else – especially an inviting political target. But history will render the ultimate verdict.

For President Bush and other top officials, the most obvious example has been the war in Iraq, both the course of the conflict in general and the handling of Iraqi and other prisoners in particular.

They insist things are going well, despite a steadily growing death toll and the failure of U.S. troops and the new government to curb violence by insurgent forces. They have been reluctant to admit wrongdoing in handling prisoners, and their first reaction is usually to criticize their critics.

That was evident in the way Bush on Tuesday suggested a political motivation in the recent release of a British memo alleging that his administration “fixed” data to justify attacking Iraq and in the heated reaction to two recent cases in which U.S. handling of prisoners came under fire.

One was the Amnesty International report invoking the worst abuses of Soviet Communism in accusing the United States of establishing “a new gulag” for mistreating prisoners.

The other was the Newsweek article that erroneously said a forthcoming U.S. report contained information about alleged desecration of the Quran by American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, including one in which a copy had been flushed down the toilet.

Bush called Amnesty’s use of the word gulag “absurd” and cited the group’s liberal leanings. Likewise, many of those often critical of the administration have said the language used in the report was extreme.

Nonetheless, the problem, as Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., suggested Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” is there has been no way to evaluate these reports of extra-legal actions at Guantanamo.

Biden, who has backed U.S. military action in Iraq but criticized the administration’s handling of it, reiterated his call for an independent commission to look into the prison situation, terming it “the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting terrorists around the world.”

As for the Newsweek item, the administration blamed the report for anti-U.S. riots in the Muslim world and denounced the magazine, which conceded it should not have run an article based on a single source.

But later Pentagon clarifications indicated that, while there was no corroboration of Newsweek’s specific allegation, there had been insensitive U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.

The most recent clarification issued last Friday confirmed that a soldier had deliberately kicked a copy of the Quran, that a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran, and that an obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of another copy.

Whether deliberate or accidental, treatment of prisoners clearly has sometimes lacked the respect Americans traditionally expect, regardless of the nature of the crime.

Yet no administration official has paid a price for prisoner abuse, including at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Ditto for the intelligence failures leading up to the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the mistakes in planning and implementing the postwar U.S. occupation in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the echo of a past scandal reminds us that, in the end, the verdict of history cuts through the contemporary spin.

That was the disclosure that retired FBI official Mark Felt was the fabled “Deep Throat” who helped guide two Washington Post reporters toward the truth in the months after the break-in of Democratic Party headquarters.

Though recent debate has focused on the propriety of Felt’s role in leaking secret data to the press, the real value was to remind yet another generation of Americans how Richard Nixon and his associates sought to manipulate the criminal justice system to cover up political espionage.

In the ironic words of the 1968 campaign slogan for the only president ever forced from office, “Nixon’s the one!”

Though Iraq is no Watergate, Bush, too, will ultimately receive the credit or the blame for the things that happen on his watch.