On Reading "Fiasco" and "Bush on the Couch" Back-to-Back

First of all, I'm not sure I would recommend such an enterprise. Although I must admit, "Fiasco" is explained to a large degree by "Couch."

"Fiasco," by Thomas Ricks, is about the failed American adventure in Iraq. The central thesis of the book appears to be that all of our problems in Iraq derive from the manner of its execution. Mr. Ricks, in general (as might be expected of a Pentagon writer for the Washington Post), takes a sympathetic view of the military's efforts to succeed. Such charity must not always have been easy, as for example when reporting on the treatment of Iraqi detainees by U.S. forces. Nevertheless, he appears to imply, amid the dense flurry of military acronyms and code-named operations, that the U.S. military might have "accomplished" their "mission" had it not been for civilians screwing up the enterprise. Thus, Mr. Ricks hits all the usual points covered on cable talk shows and Tom Friedman apologetic columns. We didn't have enough troops. We disbanded the Iraqi army. The de-Baathification proceeded too soon and too comprehensively. We alienated the populace with strong-arm detention practices and mistreatment of prisoners.

Blah, blah, blah. It's a long book, but that's essentially what it says. Its value lies mainly in creating a source book for Administration critics who want to argue that the Bush people took an adventure doomed from the start and then proceeded to make it much worse than it needed to be. But that's about all, in my opinion.

The truth is simpler. Donald Rumsfeld may have been more prescient than we give him credit for. He was not gung-ho on this invasion from the beginning. It may have been his decision not to waste more of the U.S. military than was absolutely necessary. More perceptive critics of the war, such as Peter Galbraith, are now pointing out that Iraq is not now nor ever has been an actual "country," in the sense of a people sharing a unified indentity committed to a common polity. Since Churchill stitched its three essential fragments together in 1921, Iraq has struggled restively to break apart at any opportunity. The iron hand of Saddam Hussein held it together by means of a police state during modern times. The United States, on the other hand, in its blissful ignorance decided that the same cohesion could be accomplished by the "Iraqi" people through voluntary commitment to democracy.

This is not going to happen. George W. Bush can continue to say that it is happening until he's left office and is permanently employed as chief brush-clearer at the Crawford ranch. It will make no difference. The Kurds, as the favored sons of the U.S. occupation, are biding their time until they can present their secession as a fait accompli. The Shia are waiting until the U.S. leaves so they can enlist the aid of the Iranians in finishing a Sunni genocide, utilizing their growing militias (trained as the "Iraqi army" by the U.S.). The Sunnis are wondering what to do and who will be on their side.

As for "Bush on the Couch," by Justin Frank, M.D.: Dr. Frank styles this book a work of "applied psychoanalysis," by which he reaches tentative conclusions on Bush's psychological "formulation," both its origins and its current manifestations. In essence, he reaches the conclusion that Bush is a megalomaniac, with strong currents of paranoid ideation, and probably a sufferer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Dr. Frank traces Bush's mental problems not so much to his decades of alcohol and substance abuse as to formative experiences as an infant under the cold and distracted care of Barbara Bush. Relying heavily on the work of Melanie Klein, Dr. Frank attributes Bush's learning disabilities, linguistic difficulties and anxiety-management problems to a fundamental lack of nurturance. The good doctor is honest in admitting the limitations of diagnosis-at-a-distance and reliance upon secondary sources for much of the evidence.

I think it is interesting, in the first place, that a well-respected psychoanalyst would be moved to engage in such an endeavor. For there definitely is something about Bush that is so perplexing, so troubling, so creepy, that one wants to contain and control it through understanding. Bush is like the girlfriend who drove us nuts with her flightiness, her infidelity, her indifference, her casual cruelty, so much so that we begin to read about "borderline personalities" and "narcissistic disorders" on the Internet, and we check books out of the library and read at great length, all in an effort to distance ourselves from our emotions, to see ourselves as victims in solidarity with other poor souls who have suffered at the hands of similar monsters lacking any trace of empathy....it's kind of like that. Dr. Frank pours it on, adding anecdote to observation, mining the great seminal texts of his specialty (Freud, Jung, Klein), building an airtight case...which, as he knows and as we really know, doesn't really tell us all that much.

Bush is sui generis, one of those nightmarish apparitions who come along once in a great while to vex and haunt us, the girlfriend who cures you of all future "borderlines," who makes you yearn for someone down-to-earth and sensible who doesn't make your life "exciting" all the time. Just lets you breathe, and calm down, and stop worrying. Coming to terms with such a person is the great enterprise of which psychoanalysis and "understanding" are but a part. Mostly, you simply wait for it to be over.

A defense lawyer makes the case for Bush

Suppose, however, I took the other side; how would I go about it?

Probably the best defense for Bush is based on the legal concept of "diminished capacity," and since the doctrine received its most elaborated development in the gifted hands of Roger Traynor, former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court (and a law professor of mine), it comes quickly to mind. Diminished capacity proceeds on the assumption that a crime which would otherwise look like an intentional homicide, for example, can be downgraded to a lesser offense such as manslaughter if the perp, because of some mental defect or condition falling short of actual insanity by legal definition, lacks the "capacity" to form the necessary intent (the mens rea) for the higher offense. There is something quaint about the idea now; the Twinkie Defense that spared Dan White a lengthier stretch (and that ultimately led to his premature release and subsequent suicide not long after his release from Soledad), was based on this hoary legal construct.

I don't think anyone can prove Bush is actually "insane," although this epithet is thrown around casually by his legions of detractors. I think his years of self-indulgent, prodigious abuse left him, like Richard III, "half-made," so that mugging like a 13 year old for the national press, flatulence jokes in the Oval Office and molesting foreign heads of state are all par for the course for W. But these same qualities make me doubt that he's actually, essentially evil. He doesn't actually have the heft for evil.

As one example, he's such an ineffective liar. His lies are transparent. In his last press conference, he said that he never said that Iraq "ordered the attacks of 9-11." Well, of course he never did. It's an infantile defense, to retreat behind literalisms. The 9-11 conspiracy wasn't something you sent out for like a pepperoni pizza. Who in their right mind ever thought Saddam had picked up a phone, called Kandahar or Hamburg and said, "I'd like the World Trade Center knocked down, please. And can I get a salad with that?"? On the other hand, there is absolutely no doubt that Bush created the impression that Iraq was involved in the 9-11 plot.

Sept. 25, 2002: "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein when you talk about the war on terror," Bush said. Three days later, Donald Rumsfeld said that the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda was "accurate and not debatable."

Sure you can distinguish between Saddam and al-Qaeda. You'd be a fool not to. But Bush wanted to preside over a war against Iraq for his own reasons, which were at least partly mixed up with his ideas of liberating the people of Iraq. His views of what would ensue after Saddam's overthrow were naive in the extreme, the result of his ignorance of Iraqi, Arab and Muslim culture. Bush was and is a lazy American thinker who thinks everybody everywhere is just the same. He ignored the crucial effects of history, culture and religion because understanding these things would have required an intellectual discipline he doesn't have. His attitude about Constitutional restraints (due process, the 4th Amendment) were summed up in his famous dictum, "It's just a goddam piece of paper." Because he's fundamentally a silly man of diminished capacity, with no depth whatsoever, Bush doesn't see that the legal and political system built on that piece of paper has to be maintained carefully, observed with humility, or it will be lost. You can't routinely violate the FISA law, for example, because your "intentions are good." You can't preside over systematic violations of the War Crimes Act when your subordinates torture and kill human beings because "America is in a war with evil doers." That way lies anarchy and dissolution, regardless of your intentions.

He's careless and destructive because he simply doesn't understand what's at stake, and he doesn't know how to find out. In fact, he can't. There are many, many Americans like him, as we degenerate into a country of anti-intellectual, anti-rational, religiously-zealous halfwits. As I've thought many times, the scariest thing about Bush is that he looks, really, so much like Modern America.

Taking Bush to School on the War in Iraq

W is a bullshitter from way back. We all know that. You can imagine how he handled final exams during high school and his 5 or 6 years of college education. He wouldn't have read a single book in the syllabus. On an American history final, his answer on the causes of the Civil War would have read something like, "The Civil War was an interesting war. In other words, it is worth knowing that there's reasons the two sides, who were the North and the South, went to war. One thing was slavery. Another was the different things they didn't share. In other words, differences in the two different parts of the country." Et cetera. His public explanations for all the stupid things he does as President have this quality of meandering vacuity. Doubtless, given the easy path afforded him by life, his privileged background, the guaranteed entrance to elite halls of learning, none of which he ever came close to actually earning, Bush couldn't help but form the opinion that he could get what he wanted simply because of who he was, and that any sort of disciplined mastery of the subject matter of a profession, for example, was for others who had to try hard to make money. People would simply give him money and grease his track to success. Thus, Bush was spared the arduous task of learning how to form and express opinions based on actual mastery of a factual record or evidence, as one does in law, medicine, science, teaching, or anything else humans do where you need to know your ass from a hole in the ground.

Naturally Bush carried this same know-nothing approach to his job as President, and fully expected, because he's George W. Bush, that the public would afford great deference to his inane utterances, however specious, illogical or even illegal. It is the reason his answers to questions at press conferences have the quality of term papers begun and finished at 2 am on the day they are due, copied from a World Book Encyclopedia, and probably from the wrong volume. As a specific example, the rationale for the war in Iraq, as given most recently in Monday's press conference:

"Now look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was -- the main reason we went into Iraq, at the time, was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.

"But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq. And I also saw the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my answer to your question is that -- imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens."

Here is what Congress in 2002 actually authorized Bush to do:

"SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION. The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.

(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION.

In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq, and..."

*****************

The Resolution is noteworthy because the operative language of the Authorization refers specifically to United Nations resolutions regarding Iraq's obligations to cooperate in inspections and disclosure of WMD stockpiles, which we now know (for certain, but as strongly suggested at the time) did not exist in March, 2003. Elsewhere in the Authorization (in the Preambles), Congress does make reference to the "sense" of Congress that regime change in Iraq is desirable, based upon a 1998 Congressional Resolution to this effect. However, using a canon of statutory construction by which all parts of the legislation are consulted to determine its overall meaning, note that the Authorization further requires the President to report on the efficacy of negotiations to secure either the (a) security of the United States or (b) compliance with UN resolutions by Iraq. While at the very 11th hour, Bush (no doubt on the advice of counsel) "offered" to resolve the looming conflict through the immediate abdication of Saddam and his two sons, in fact the Authorization strongly suggests that force was not to be used if negotiations with Saddam (as the leader of a sovereign country) could succeed in achieving UN compliance, which ipso facto would also alleviate any "threat" posed by Iraq to the United States. Thus, "regime change" was not itself a sufficient condition for American military action against Iraq; it is not a realistic construction of the Authorization to imagine that Congress envisioned negotiations with Iraq which would effect regime change, and failing such voluntary abdication, that force was authorized. The UN Resolutions, of course, did not in any sense require Iraq to depose or replace its leader as a condition of compliance.

Therefore, the amelioration of "human suffering" in Iraq through regime change was not a basis for an authorized American invasion. With all of his official rationales in a shambles (WMD, ties to al-Qaeda), Bush, ever the undisciplined student, simply pulled this reason out of his ass and acted as if it justified the continuing American presence in Iraq. It "sounds good." He intends, in his shifty way, to put reporters and detractors on the defensive: are you for human suffering in Iraq?

Here is where we are: there simply is no Congressionally authorized basis (or authority from the United Nations) for the American military to remain in Iraq. Iraq does not have and did not have at the relevant time any weapons of mass destruction. It had no ties to al-Qaeda and was completely uninvolved in the attacks of 9-11, as even The Decider conceded categorically at the press conference. The present Iraqi "regime" cannot pose a credible threat to the United States homeland; the ability of any Iraqi to pose a serious and immediate threat to the United States depends completely on the military remaining in the country with a target painted on itself. If the standard now is that Iraqis who are pissed off at the USA because of the occupation pose such an enduring threat, then no rational basis for ever leaving Iraq can exist until every last Iraqi is dead. A project which probably has occurred to Bush.

The "freedom agenda" which Bush first announced at his (ugh) 2nd Inaugural was never part of a UN Resolution or of Congress's Authorization. The actual premises for the invasion no longer exist because (1) the Hussein regime cannot be a threat to the United States if there is no Hussein regime, and (2) the question of compliance on WMD has become entirely moot.

What Bush is now arguing is that America should continue expending lives and $1.6 billion per week (money which the United States simply does not have and has to borrow from Asian creditors) until a certain type of government in Iraq appears (to Bush) sufficiently stable. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Authorization to Use Military Force, and is in fact light years away from the original rationale. American soldiers should not die, and America should not go broke, for a theory of social engineering concocted by a goof-off who didn't know the difference between Shia and Sunni until he began to awe himself with the shock of the first bombing runs.

Alice Finds the Tea Party in Full Swing

Wonderland had a curious quality, Alice had noted during the five and a half years she had wandered unhappily over its hills and dales, down its strange tunnels and rabbit holes, through its bizarre chambers and counting rooms. No matter where you went, you felt you had been there before, so it was of little surprise when Alice staggered up yet another ladder, crashed through the low brush at the edge of a forest and found herself again in a sunlit meadow on the far side of which stood the picnic table and its weird celebrants, shouting, throwing food and occasionally falling to the ground. Alice had no particular desire to join that party again, so she quietly turned left along the path, intending to resume her search for a way out.

But not quietly enough, it would seem, for the Mad Hatter presiding over the bacchanal was apparently possessed of exceptional hearing, an advantage, Alice mused, of his curious batwing ears and disquieting habit of jerking his head from side to side and shooting glances everywhere around him. "Hey, asshole!" he shouted across the meadow. "Come and have a drink!"

Alice was enticed neither by his manner nor his offer, but she was curious whether he might have something new to say about an exit strategy, so she disconsolately trudged through the high grass to the messy tableau beneath the oak tree. The Hatter was dressed as he was almost three and a half years ago, but his cutaway coat was now stained profusely with mustard and catsup and he was wearing a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. The silk top hat was pushed back from his low brow, and the ticket reading "9-11" was still stuck at a jaunty angle in his hat band. There were now only two others at the table, the troll-like character who spoke always from the corner of his mouth in a gravelly voice, and a dark woman with lacquered hair who had taken the precaution of donning foul weather gear and sat somewhat apart from the two others.

"I see your manners haven't changed at all," said Alice disapprovingly as she approached.

"I see you haven't changed that dress either," snickered the Mad Hatter. "Whatsa matter, you broke?"

He laughed heartily at this, and it may have been that the Troll laughed too, but whatever he did manifested itself only as a serie of snorting noises from his mouth corner.

"I have been lost," said Alice, "and I'm dreadfully hungry." She looked plaintively at the woman, who seemed to have replaced the Colon who was here on her last visit.

"Don't count on her," the Hatter jeered. "She ain't the maternal type. Anyway, nothin' to eat here. Things are a little bare in the cupboard."

"Yet winter's coming," said Alice. "Is it wise to plan so poorly?"

"What's a snot-nosed brat like you know about planning?" shouted the Hatter. Alice was about to repeat the question to him, but said instead:

"And why are things do drear?"

"The war, the war, the war," tooted the Troll from his mouth hole. "We must have the war, the war, the war."

"Surely you don't mean that same war," Alice said. "When last I dropped by, I thought you'd learned the Sadman was really no threat to Wonderland at all."

"Not the Sadman himself, but his aroused populace," the woman suddenly broke in, speaking in a monotone of great and practiced precision. "We remain in the Realm of Sadman because the populace resists our mission."

"The mission of removing his weapons?" said Alice.

"Nah, ya dummy," said the Hatter. "He's got no weapons. But imagine if we left now with that aroused populace of his, they'd be likely to come to Wonderland and mess up this place good."

Alice looked at the littered table, the empty bottles, the trash all around on the ground, and wondered how they ever would be able to tell.

"And why are they so aroused?"

"Because we're there, ya nitwit!" shouted the Mad Hatter.

"So that's why you needed to invade the Realm of Sadman, because they would have attacked here first?" Alice asked, acquiring again that sense of utter incomprehension that overtook her whenever she listened to the Hatter talk.

"Boy are you dense," said the Hatter. "They wouldn't have been aroused enough to do that until we invaded them."

"And your mission is?" said Alice.

"To make them happy," said the Troll. "Don't you even know that?"

"But they're obviously not happy," Alice pointed out, "or they wouldn't be planning to attack you."

"And I'm disappointed in that," said the Hatter. "because they should be happy."

"Because you invaded them?" Alice ventured.

"Because we toppled the Sadman," said the Troll.

"But if you toppled the Sadman, why can't you leave?" Alice persisted.

The Hatter sniggered derisively. "Like explaining things to a child! Oh, I'm sorry. You are a child. Just not a very attractive one."

"The country would descend into chaos if we left," said the Troll.

"If they're as aroused as you say, isn't it chaos now?" said Alice.

"Complete and utter chaos," growled the Troll, trying again to pour whiskey from an empty bottle into a greasy glass. "They attack us every day, all day long, and they kill each other by the bushel."

"My goodness," said Alice. "That sounds dreadful. Would it help matters if you left their Realm?"

"Maybe," chortled the Hatter. "But that's not completing the mission. That's cutting and running."

Alice thought about trying one more time, but just then the Troll seized a shotgun, shouted "Quail!" and fired both barrels at something in the meadow. His aim was a little off and he blew a stiff outcropping of black hair from the woman's head.

"Ol' Deadeye!" shouted the Hatter, and fell backwards off his chair. Alice took the moment to trot quickly away into the forest, vowing, if her luck should hold, never to be near these people again.

The Waking Nightmare of the Bush Presidency

Prison inmates "do time." If you've worked as a lawyer and come into contact with people who have actually spent time in a prison, and they have described their experience to you, you get a sense of what it means to endure punishment in the form of watching your life slip away while you rot in a stinking, noisy, brutal environment where most of the softer human emotions have vanished and you are left with one thing, and one thing only: the slow, inexorable ticking of a clock. Someday you may get out of there, if you survive, if luck is with you. You live only for that.

Being an American citizen has much of that quality for most sensitive and intelligent citizens these days. Life is a waking nightmare. We're waiting for morning, to wake up and find Bush gone. He continues to pile on horror upon horror from his seemingly inexhaustible trove of bad ideas. If you think through everything he says and does, you are left with the simple and inescapable conclusion -- he is opposed to human joy. He is a Destroyer, a Wrecker, a Disease. Every day I read the work of writers who fall all over themselves in attempts to capture the essential awfulness of the man, who resort to tactics which are really beneath them as intellectuals. They call him names, attack all of his personal qualities, employ ridicule, caricature, vicious satire. It is because you can't quite say it, you can't quite get at it. The frustration is palpable, soul-sickening. George W. Bush is still president. He's still there. It will be more than two years before our societal case is reviewed by the Great Parole Board.

Maybe we feel like prisoners at Auschwitz in 1945. We've heard the Allies are coming, from the East and from the West. We've seen the bombers overhead, the SS guards have intimated that the camp will be closing soon. Many of the Nazis have already left. You probably feel profoundly ill at ease. You sense liberation will be snatched from you somehow, you'll starve, or be shot, or led away at the last moment to some grisly death. So here in America in 2006 we're trying to hold it together long enough so we can thrive on the far side of the Bush presidency. Still, we're bitter that 8 years were not just wasted but squandered, that America was set on a retrograde course, that we have lost precious time on critical problems affecting human survival while an insufferable idiot who screws up everything he touches makes mistake after mistake after mistake, yet is so dense, so implacably incapable of recognition, so unaware, that he persists in insisting he has some faint idea what he's doing. Yet humans survive because they hope. If the democracy can be held together, if we can thwart the hacking of the electronic voting machines, maybe we can restore something of the Old America. It keeps us going. We know that Bush, when his time is up, will retreat to his "ranch" and essentially vegetate. No one will be interested in what he has to say. He won't write anything. He will not be "consulted," because his demoralizing mediocrity will foreclose consultation. He will be not so much forgotten as willfully suppressed by a relieved American collective memory.

So like many others, I'm trying to hold on, to hope America and the world survive Bush. I have noticed over the years that the e-mailing among the American dissident community has slowed, that our dispiritedness has become more a private affair. We feel powerless to change things, and we've already entertained each other with our zingers. We can fix things in our heads, but we can't fix them in real life. As another analogy, maybe we feel like the Eastern Bloc countries before the Berlin Wall fell. It's just the way it is. The powers that be. They own everything, the Congress, the media, the money. Most of that will be true when Bush is gone.

So that remains the point, the hope, the prismatic sheen of rainbow's end in the gray cloudiness of the horizon. At least Bush will be gone. After all those years. After all that sadness, that cruelty, that debasement. Bush, at least, will be gone.

Can Bush's Ex Post Facto Amendment to the War Crimes Act Shield Him From An Ex Post Facto Amendment of the War Crimes Act?

In law, this is what we call a "nice" problem, in the 6th sense of my American Heritage Dictionary, "showing or marked by great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle; a nice distinction." I will leave it to the legal academics, such as Jack Balkin whose excellent website is linked above, to do the heavy lifting on the question when it is joined, in another nice legalism, but to sketch out the general outlines:

President George W. Bush has been a little worried, in the wake of the Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld decision which held, lo and behold, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to the United States of America even when it is torturing or beating the living shit out of an Arab or a sort of Arab-looking person (such as an Afghan) in some American hellhole like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. That is (get this) the U.S. military, the CIA and any mercernary hired to do the rough stuff is subject to the War Crimes Act, even though the scum or lower life form on the receiving end of the mayhem is not actually part of a regular army of a country which is signatory to the Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court, "in other words" (in Georgie's favorite phrase), has ruled that the Arab or Arabo-human is entitled to protection just because he is a human being. Prior to this decision, on the basis of legal opinions bought and paid for by the Bush Administration (including, to my lasting shame, the opinion of John Yoo of UC Berkeley), Bush & Co. had proceeded on the assumption they could do any damn thing they wanted with complete impunity. Not so, said the Supremes. After the Hamdan decision was explained to Bush, he must have had a Jimmy Durante moment: What a revoltin' development dis is!

Indeed, it does pose a parlous situation for W. That's because the War Crimes Act is a little austere in its disapprobations:

§ 2441. War crimes.

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death. (b) Circumstances.— The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act). (c) Definition.— As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct— (1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party; (2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907; (3) which constitutes a violation of common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva, 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party and which deals with non-international armed conflict; or (4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians. Remember what a big fan George was of the death penalty when he was governor of Texas? He was practically running a human slaughterhouse. I suspect his enthusiasm for the Ultimate Punishment has been tempered in recent weeks, so much so that his staff has been working on draft legislation (which I used to think was the province of Congress) to amend the War Crimes Act. Apparently, when this amendment is unveiled, or "rolled out," it will provide immunity for U.S. military personnel and "policy makers" (who could they be?) who acted in "good faith" on the basis of a preexisting understanding that the Untermenschen were entitled to no rights whatsoever, having been born in or near a country within the Axis of Evil, being a little on the dusky side, and saying "Allah" too often. The Constitution of the United States of America, what is left of it, proscribes ex post facto laws which impugn or criminalize conduct which occurred before passage of the statute. As Tweedledum and -dee might have said it, if it had been a crime, it would be; but as it wasn't, it isn't - that's legal logic. Also, another shibboleth lawyers like to throw around is that this sort of immunity from prosecution is a "shield, not a sword," meaning it's okay to pass a law after the conduct in question which decriminalizes the act. So, for example, if one of the "policy makers" in the Oval office issued a Presidential Bull which said let's beat these ragheads to within an inch, or even just beyond an inch, of their lives, and said Arabistic person died; and if the Supreme Court then inconveniently ruled that this particular species of murder is in fact a War Crime; well then, a Republican controlled Congress could immunize such "policy maker" from prosecution, conviction and maybe lethal injection after it all happened without violating the Ex Post Facto provision. Now, with this as background, you can see that the scriveners in the offices down the hall from the Oval Office might have kicked into overdrive, seeing that November date out there when the pet Congress currently in session might be replaced by a bunch of snarling, hostile Democrats. Another Jimmy Durante moment. Currently, the White House has the sanctimonious, unctuous assistance of such Senators as Lindsay Graham, who has decried, long and hard, the awful specter of U.S. military personnel now confronted by actual consequences for what they did. We can't have that, not in this America, not now. It would be like Caesar getting exercised about Roman legions out in the provinces hanging a few dissidents on crosses. It keeps the vassals of the Empire in line. But the "nice" question: can Congress, in a later, Democratically-controlled Congress, revive the War Crimes Act as originally, sanely and humanely passed, without this preposterous and evil "amendment" allowing exactly what the Act intended to make illegal? And can everyone who violated the Act, grunts and "policy makers" alike, be called to the dock to answer for their inhumanity? My guess is that a subsequent amendment deleting the amendment, or loophole, would not violate the Ex Post Facto clause. It was a crime when the barbarity was ordered and executed; it ought to be a crime again when the nation comes to its senses.

A Word on H.D. Thoreau

Probably someone who styles his blog "Waldenswimmer" ought to say something about Henry David Thoreau once in a while, just for the sake of authenticity. I recently found my copy of "Walden," a little the worse for wear, perhaps understandably when the cover indicates I paid $1.00 for it, even though it's an edition we would now call a trade paperback. I have to read for a long time before I come to a line I don't remember word-for-word; I've read it that many times.

I suppose the thing I like most about Thoreau is his unquestionable sincerity and enthusiasm. The prose of "Walden" is a little archaic, even after considering that most of it was written in the early 1840's; nevertheless, he got his ideas across, sometimes with stunning insight. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He wondered, mainly, whether this condition was necessary. I don't know what his answer really was. I think he may have found answers for himself but not for the mass of men, although he never had intentions of being an elitist. He was trying to find, in his noble experiment, answers of general application. The peroration of Walden dwarfs the loftiest self-help bromides of Dr. Phil or Dr. Wayne Dyer (all these "doctors.") "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." For years I kept those words taped to my bathroom mirror.

Thoreau, perhaps, was not what we would now call a "complete" man. He wasn't fully "realized" because he didn't have a wife, or family, or even a solid body of work. His writing is full of the untempered defiance of youth because he didn't outlive his youth. He was born in 1817 and died of tuberculosis in 1862, just short of his 45th birthday. The two years and two months at the Pond were spent in his late twenties. Nevertheless, his penetrating intelligence was such that he saw through to eternal verities from the start. This seems to me the defining characteristic of great genius. It seems impossible for someone to overcome the limiting prejudices and conceptions of his era and write something true not just for the moment, but for the ages. Thoreau did exactly that. Living and writing in an environment, the New England of the first half of the 19th Century, that we might now consider idyllic, he nevertheless foresaw and described the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and what it would mean for modern life as men were increasingly forced into roles as cogs in an immense social machine.

160 years after Thoreau spent his 26 months at Walden Pond, we now see what life is in a "globalized" economy and observe, in its fully realized form, the sense of pervasive helplessness that now afflicts a human species completely alienated from its natural environment. I think about problems like global warming and reflect that Thoreau, musing in 1845, noted that even then there were "professors of philosophy but no philosophers." So today, while everyone continues to drive the same cars, heat the same huge houses, fly anywhere they want in the jumbo jets that deposit CO2 right at the atmospheric level where it does the most damage, we judge the relative "virtue" of our polluting friends and neighbors by their "attitudes" about what they're doing. If they feel bad about it, and talk about the books they've read on the subject, they can do whatever they want. Someday we'll begin dealing with the problem, someday when it's not as inconvenient. A celebrity might have houses in West L.A. and in Martha's Vineyard and sear the atmosphere with a CO2 contrail of Heat Death, but if she drives a Prius and makes the right noises, she's a heroine for the modern age.

Thoreau would have laughed ruefully at all of this, then gone for his morning swim. His virtue was its own reward. He would have been more out of place in this day and age than ever, his drummer striking a cadence, measured and far away, which we simply can't hear anymore.

OBL's Favorite American Politician

The Incomparable, Quotable Dick is at it again:

"The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task."

Thus Cheney on the Lamont victory in the Connecticut primary. An ally of the Iraq war has been lost, says the VP, thus calling into question our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. Cheney finds this development "partly disturbing," in the same manner he found the prospect, in 2004, of a Kerry victory, raising as it did the odds America would be hit again, and this time in a devastating way.

I've never quite understood why Cheney doesn't believe his own administration screwed up in allowing 9-11 to happen in the first place. Are they entitled to some sort of national security mulligan? America was "hit hard in a devastating way" when Bush & Cheney were in office. The planning stages for 9-11, according to government investigations, took the better part of 5 years. While the 4 pilots (Atta, Hanjour, al-Sheihi and Jurrah) had been in the United States off and on for several years prior to 2001, almost all the 15 muscle hijackers made their first entry after Cheney's inauguration. One could almost say, in other words, that the hijackers were waiting until true incompetents were in charge of American security. Clinton had smart people in charge who had foiled the Millenium Plot, and captured, prosecuted and imprisoned the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bush & Cheney appointed a woman who didn't and doesn't know anything about national security to defend America against terrorist threats. No one in the West Wing had any real interest in terrorism before 9-11, despite clear warnings and nearly frantic messages from FBI field offices that something was dangerously imminent.

One should not forget that Osama bin Laden starred in a videotape in the fall of 2004 which had as its obvious purpose the consolidation of Bush's position as the front runner in the presidential election. Maybe that crafty and definitely deranged auteur Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, produced and directed the film, but it was clear they were quite content with America's leadership, and perhaps, most of all, with Dick Cheney. For hadn't Cheney been in on the ground floor of the stupidest, costliest, and most distracting endeavor of all, the "fiasco" of the Iraq war? Hadn't he said:

"We would be greeted as liberators."

"There is now no doubt that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear capability."

"The insurgency is in its death throes."

"Al Qaeda is glad that Lamont won the Connecticut primary."

Does Cheney ever say anything that is not 100% wrong? He's a bumbler, a pretender, and grossly incompetent. How could bin Laden ever hope for anything better than what he's got? A Vice President who apparently pulls the policy strings of the American leadership, who participates in the disclosure of American undercover operatives, who urges a bankrupting and unnecessary war against an Arab nation unrelated to any terrorist threat while we are supposedly in the middle of a life-and-death struggle elsewhere, who stumbles along with an 18% approval rating at home -- if Cheney didn't exist, wouldn't Osama have to invent him? Doesn't Osama, wherever he is, in whatever grotto or Persian condominium the night finds him, conclude his day by praying to Allah for Cheney's fragile health? That no short circuit or power failure disturbs the delicate operation of Cheney's pacemaker/defib device? That he is allowed to serve out his term, spreading propaganda in the USA that this same incompetent regime which allowed 9-11 in the first place, and then let Osama himself vanish into the Afghan mists so Cheney's harebrained idea of invading Iraq could command center stage, should continue to have undiluted Republican support for these follies?

America's adversaries, "if you will," are not reassured by changes in the American political landscape. It disturbs them, it unnerves them. America, against all odds, might be wising up. Bush's 33% rating and Cheney's life-support 18% disturb them. They miss the good old days when the stupidity of the Bush Administration, and particularly of Cheney himself, went unchallenged.

Islamo-fascists? A plea for accuracy in apocalyptic nomenclature

George W. Bush just never gets tired of bugging me. I thought he'd settled on "Islamic extremists" or "Islamic fundamentalist extremists" (admittedly a mouthful) as the scourge of the Earth. Now, in the wake of the Heathrow Airport terrorist plot, he's out there with "Islamic fascists." I don't know what else to expect from a man whose only reported reading is of children's books, from which he could not tear himself away during America's own brush with disaster.

But this is intolerably bad taxonomy. I think he picked this term up from Tom Friedman, another superficial thinker who doesn't mind ruining perfectly good, specific terms for stigmatizing heinous regimes. Friedman used "Islamo-fascist," for some reason, maybe because he was thinking of Austro-Hungary, mezzo-soprano, gingko-biloba or something and concluded, incorrectly, that an "o" at the end of a hyphenated word converted the first word to adjectival form. In any event, Friedman is the originator of some of the clumsiest, clunkiest neologisms ever coined, and it's a pity when his infelicities get picked up in general usage.

Why didn't either one of these poor students of history, for example, consult Mussolini on the subject? Who would know more? In his 1932 paper (co-written with Giuseppe Gentile), Il Duce lays it out:

"The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after... "

I ask you: does that sound like any jihadist you know? Fascism is a social and political system, and arose as a counterweight to Marxist Communism. But back to Benito, because, like another Italian, Antonin Scalia, I believe in Originalism, of deriving our definitions and meaning from seminal texts whenever possible:

"The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...."

Get it? It's a top-down system. Authoritarian, of course, and it doesn't see any point in leaving its citizenry any "useless and possibly harmful freedoms," such as, for example, the right to privacy, or protection from unwarranted searches and seizures, or...no, we won't go there today. The point is simple: Fascism is a state system, where corporate interests and the policies of the authoritarian government are fused so that Big Money dictates the legislation and ... gee, it's so hard to stay away from, isn't it?

Anyway the whole difficulty, I thought, behind this epic Clash of Civilizations was that the jihadists were non-state actors, a "new kind of enemy." We already defeated the old kind of enemy, the true Fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Japan, during World War II. In what sense do "Islamo-fascists" despise suicide? What corporations control their daily lives and destinies? I thought we were trying to bring corporatism to Iraq as part of conducting the Central War on Terror; if Fascism is already in Baghdad, what's the point?

I prefer "Jihadista" as the nom de slur. Admittedly, it's a little too colorful and romantic, it brings to mind Pancho Villa and other folk heroes, but I don't want to be reminded all the time of Hitler and Mussolini. I've got enough reminders of them already.

The "Defining Moment" Fallacy

The Democratic Party, and those who remain optimistic about the party, are of course jubilant about the victory of Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman in the senatorial primary in Connecticut. It is seen as proof positive that the nation has turned the corner on the Iraq war, even calling it an "insurgency" which holds grave implications for Republican incumbents everywhere. Rather than seeing it as a special case, bloggers and the mainstream media view the Lamont victory as a key momentum builder. In so arguing, the pro-Lamont crowd sounds a little like the Bush Administration in its recitation of "corner-turning" events in Iraq itself, such as writing a constitution, capturing Saddam, holding elections, killing Zarqawi, forming a government, and so on. Each of these defining moments turned out, in retrospect, to be a rest stop on the Highway to Hell that is liberated Iraq.

I think Lieberman is a special case in a special state. He went way overboard in his accommodation of Bush, even on social issues like the Schiavo case, and his war hawkishness in many ways was far more aggressive than even moderate members of the Republican Party, such as Chuck Hagel. Politics in Connecticut, as in California, are complicated by its status both as a bastion of liberal, highly educated voters, and as the headquarters of a number of America's largest defense contractors. Lieberman was a man who tried to be all things to all people and corporate interests, and this squishiness in his views, coupled with his Mr. Mumbles presentation, fell victim to a younger, more dynamic, and less sullied challenger.

Whether this translates to a massive alteration in the Senate or Congress is another question altogether. One ironical point is that this great "victory" in Connecticut was of one Democrat over another. Lamont managed a narrow win, and if he succeeds in November (with his vote possibly diluted by Lieberman's egomaniacal independent run), the Democrats in the Senate will simply have held a seat they already own. One might well remember the election in the San Diego area to replace the House seat vacated by Randy Cunningham, where the Democrats were defeated running against a Republican, which is a truer horse race.

In July the Harris Poll found that 50% of American adults believe that the U.S. military discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the March, 2003 invasion. Stated another way, half the American adults selected at random and with the the wherewithal to own and operate a telephone maintain an abiding belief in the original justification for the Iraq invasion. Depending on the week, a little over half of all Americans oppose the continuation of the war in Iraq. In 2004, a little over half of American voters decided to return The Decider to the high office he continues, against all logic and common sense, to occupy. Yet Bush remains, most of the time, between 12 and 15% below this 50/50 Golden Mean which seems to define most of American politics. I suspect, at base, his unpopularity derives mainly from the high cost of gasoline and from the increasing sense among America's lumpen proletariat that things are getting worse here as they get better in Asia. Dinner table issues, in other words, and not the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is a catastrophe of the first water, and it is breaking down the spiritual, financial and military structure of an already beleagured United States, but in the vast reaches of Red State America, the war issue will not be a decisive whisk broom propelling all the Republican officeholders out of Congress. Some Democratic gains, yes. Maybe near parity in the Senate. Not enough, constitutionally, to get rid of the Impostor in the White House. Not enough to make a big difference either way.

U.S. Foreign Policy as a Marx Brothers Movie

Maybe even George W. Bush has begun to appreciate the "emerging" paradoxes in Iraq. ("Paradox?" says Groucho, cigar held to one side. "No, but I've got three surgeons waiting in the foyer.") At his last public appearance with al-Maliki, Bush petulantly conceded that the security situation (a paradoxical term in itself) in Baghdad was "terrible." This, of course, was not a sign of growth or recognition in Bush, but simply symptomatic of Bush's style of personalizing his foreign policy. Either you're his friend or you're not his friend, and al-Maliki had committed the unpardonable and utterly predictable offense of decrying Israeli "aggression" against Lebanon. As a Shiite Muslim, it would have been surprising if Maliki felt otherwise, but Bush does not judge positions on the basis of "merits" or "facts" or anything remotely empirical. He bases his judgments of your positions on whether you agree with him or not. Maliki had gone off the reservation, and so Bush took that public opportunity to embarrass Maliki in front of the world press. Bush was saying, in effect, that while 6 weeks ago (while the security in Baghdad was terrible), he had worked out with Maliki a new strategy for stabilizing the Baghdad street, in the interim Hezbollah and Israel had gone to war, Maliki had sided with Muslims instead of Jews, and now Bush was going to say out loud that Maliki's plan sucked because Bush didn't like Maliki anymore.

At least an interpretation such as this makes sense, which you cannot say about the rest of America's Iraq policy. Maliki has also been wandering outside the fold in his support for the Mahdi Army run by the Muslim cleric (inevitably referred to as a "firebrand") Sadr, for whom an unexecuted arrest warrant has been floating around Iraq for about 2 years, ever since Sadr led an uprising against American troops in 2004. Maliki has expressed his profound disapproval of recent American attacks against the Mahdi stronghold in east Baghdad. It is the official position of the U.S., of course, since Iraq is now a sovereign nation, that its criminal system is run by Iraqis, and so it is up to the Iraqi government to decide whether to rein in Sadr, or to arrest him, or to do anything about him other than defend him from American military aggression.

Thus the leader of a kind of alt-Army, the Sadr Brigade, which has killed members of the liberating American army in an "uprising" and poses a continuing threat to any hope to stabilize Iraq, is the darling of the freely elected Shiite government made possible by America's toppling of the Sunni strongman Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure Groucho would touch this scenario; it's simply too outlandish. The freely elected government of Iraq is now on the wrong side of most issues, from the U.S. perspective. The American vision for Iraq is one in which the Sunni and Shia stop killing each other and the Kurds cease their centrifugal aspirations, to borrow a term from old political science at Cal days. Maliki, a Shiite, does not really believe that accommodation with the Sunni is possible, and probably resents the hell out of all those years he spent under the iron heel of Saddam's Sunni police state, and so does not want to hobble or enfeeble in any way the unofficial army of a key supporter, the one, the only, Mukhtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, who offers a potent counterweight to the utterly corrupt and anarchic official Iraqi army being "trained" by the Americans for a kind of nonpartisan maintenance of order. Both sides, Sunni and Shia, are waiting out the American departure and want to have their powder dry and their forces massed for that day when the real civil war can break out in earnest, after these troublemaking Americans, having made a fair fight possible by wrecking Saddam's army of oppression, give up and leave.

That would appear to sum up the "noble cause" of American involvement in Iraq. All of these developments were completely predictable, were in fact predicted, and all such predictions were completely ignored. Bush will not fundamentally change his Iraq policy, however, because he is incapable of understanding how messed up it is. He has only a passing familiarity with basic ethnic and sectarian forces at play in Iraq, and has approached the problem with the sophistication of a third grader writing an essay on democracy for his social studies class. The U.S.A. will keep spending billions, American soldiers will keep dying and killing Iraqis, and Iraq will, in time, unravel completely.

Plan C in Iraq

Scene: Oval Office, just prior to Bush's vacation departure.

Present with George W. Bush are the President's awesome Brain Trust, including V.P. Dick Cheney; Chief of Staff Josh "Hands" Bolten; Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice; Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Richard Perle, French wine connoisseur and Emissary from the Undead; and, from the press, William Kristol, and David Brooks of The New York Times, for some reason.

Bush: Before I taken off, I was thinking we should go through thinking through the extent of the Iraqi situation and sort of revisit some of our opportunities.

Cheney: (growling amicably) Options, sir?

Bush: Right. To refigure what roads may be open now, or closed, depending on events on the ground.

Kristol: Friedman in the Times has some ideas, one is to convene a kind of Kosovo summit and invite everyone and talk about it some more, and then his second idea is to partition Iraq into three parts, Sunni, Shia and the Kurds.

Bush: Who are the Kurds?

Kristol: Up north.

Brooks: What's so special about Friedman? I've done more to support your ideas, Mr. President.(pleadingly) Dick - anything to say?

Cheney: (growling reassuringly) David has been there for you, Mr. President.

Rumsfeld: Do we have problems in Iraq? Sure. Is it a civil war? Not in a classical sense. Are the streets of Baghdad littered every morning with people whose brains have been drilled out with Black&Decker tools? Of course. Is this normal? Probably not.

Rice: My own preference is for the status quo ante.

Rumsfeld: Have we heard that before? Sure. Do we watch the talk shows? Always. Are you the teacher's pet? What do you think.

Bolten: I've been thinking along the lines of Condi's comment. We do have some developing problems in the region.

Bush: No shit, Sherlock.

Cheney: (growling dyspeptically) One place where we're taking heat is that midwifing a Shiite government in Iraq has strengthened Iran's hand in the region.

Bolten: Hand?

Rumsfeld: (ignoring Bolten) Tell me about it, Tubby. Does Iran like having a Shia theocracy next door? You bet. Are they sending troops and money into the south of Iraq? All the time. Are those Shia militias and phony police killing our soldiers? Smell the coffee. Is this situation fucked up beyond all recognition? Bingo, first try.

Rice: Iraq did act as a cordon sanitaire against Iranian aggression and expansionism in the region, a firewall to deter the Persian ambitions...

Bush: (sniggering, his mouth full of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) A sanitary what? Please, Condi, there are ladies present.

Kristol: Regrettably, this revitalization of Iran has redounded to the disadvantage of Israel, since Iran feels unimpeded in its supply of Hezbollah with missiles and funding, leading to...

Bush: (pulling a bolus of half-chewed sandwich from his mouth and placing it on the desk) Rebounds? Who ya talking about now, Chandelier, the basketball player Yo-Yo Ma?

Perle: (in sepulchral tones, the shadows beneath his eyes darkening to a deep ebony, as the light in the room fades slightly as he murmurs hypnotically) It is of the essence to remonstrate consistently with existing monarchies in the region against such revanchist aspirations, lest a Persian suzerainty arise anew in a hegemonic...

Rumsfeld: Do you talk like an Oxford don on Quaaludes? I'll say.

Cheney: (growling nostalgically) You know, there was a time when Iraq was sort of that bulwark I think you're talking about, in the middle of all those hundred dollar words.

Bush: Bull works?

Cheney: (growling obliviously ) There are ways to implement...

Rice: A kind of status quo ante...

Bolten: Because while we talked about "dead or alive" as usual, fortunately he's still alive. And Aziz is still on the scene.

Rice: We're just missing Qusay and Uday, or Quday and Usay. Whatever.

Rumsfeld: Are they a big loss? No. Glad they're not among the living? You bet.

Cheney: (growling more intensely) So we've still got Saddam as a fallback.

Kristol: He was the one Iraqi who knew how to hold that mess together. Now he could run an army!

Rumsfeld: Are you a horse's ass, Bill? Sure thing. Another civilian who thinks it's all so easy from an armchair? I'd lay a bet. Am I the guy in that picture with Saddam 20 years ago and not you? Seems to me.

Bush: (choking up milk and hocking a loogie on the carpet): This guy Maliki's a floater.

Cheney: (growling ecstatically) This has great promise, a new opening.

Rice: Historically, this kind of reversion...

Perle: (lights in Oval Office are temporarily extinguished until auxiliary power kicks in) Reversion is not technically le mot juste. You are referring actually to the concept of restoration, as occurred after the French Revolution and Napoleonic accession, followed by...

Rumsfeld: Are you a pompous ass sucking off the public tit? Slam dunk. Do we get tired of your kind of nosing in? That just might be.

Cheney: (growling ruminatively) Have we talked to Rove about this? Putting Saddam back in power will require a hell of a lot of public relations finesse. You remember, regime change, torture rooms...

Bolten: (raising own hand, photographing it, then speaking) If I could suggest something. Abu Ghraib offers another opening on that. Suppose we tell the American people that U.S. oversight will ensure that Saddam's torture of his "own people" will not exceed the kind and extent already practiced by the CIA and military in Iraq.

Kristol: We've set a new standard, in other words!

Perle: (moaning shriek is heard in the far catacombs of the White House) Death squads will operate according to American protocols.

Cheney: (growling collegially) Good addendum, Dick.

Perle: Thanks, Dick.

Bush: (snorting amber foam from his Diet Coke) If you Dicks are done congratulating each other, when do we hit the decks with this street news?

Bolten: A phased implementation would be best, immediately after breaking Saddam out of jail.

Rice: Mussolini, as you'll recall, was spirited away from a Roman prison in 1943 and installed near Lake Maggiore in the Salo Government, where he...

Rumsfeld: Was part of the Fascist Restoration? We've heard it. Another status quo ante? How many more, I wonder. Are we about done here? I think so.

Brooks: Can I assume that you won't tell Friedman or (gulping) Dowd about this till I have a chance to run it as Plan C? Can you see the look on their faces when I scoop this?

Bush: Somebody throw Brooks another Milk-Bone. I've got a copter to catch and brush to clear.

The Internalized Democracy

In the summer of 1973 I was living in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, and working farther north on the Peninsula. It was a place-holding kind of job, clerical, a way to pay the rent and finance my tennis habit, something to do after returning from a lengthy stay in Europe. I had a fairly new RCA color television, the first I'd ever owned, probably 17" on the diagonal, but the size hardly mattered, since it sat on a coffee table a few feet in front of the sofa, and during the summer I only used one channel. There weren't many channels to choose from anyway, in those days, but I only needed Channel 9, public broadcasting's local outlet, because they were providing, in those days before C-SPAN, wall-to-wall (or gavel-to-gavel) coverage of the Watergate hearings.

To say I was engrossed in those hearings would greatly understate matters. Obsessed would be more like it. I couldn't imagine greater drama, to watch as the mighty forces of constitutional democracy clashed and struggled. At issue, I came to realize, was the attempt of one individual and his henchmen in the Oval Office to knock out of kilter the delicate, ingenious, unique balance of powers devised two centuries before by some of the Enlightenment's greatest political thinkers. And Americans all. I listened to the live feed on the radio on the way to work, sitting in the car as I wolfed down a sandwich, then hurried home through the coastal mountains of the western Peninsula to see the taped version of John Dean, H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichmann, the spooks, the rats, the true-believers play out on that small color screen. Every night I drank a couple of beers and ate a TV dinner, all through June and July, resenting the weekend recesses, thrilling at the occasional bombshell breaktrhroughs (all the Oval Office conversations were on tape!). On the concrete balcony outside the sliding glass door, a couple of lovestruck pigeons started a family in the unused hibachi, covering the floor with droppings, until the chicks hatched. I watched their clumsy progress out of the corner of one eye as Sam Dash drilled away at Erlichmann's obfuscations and contemptuous scorn for the truth, as Senator Sam, his volcanic wrath and self-righteousness swelling magnificently up within him, told the weaselly cabal just what he thought about "inoperative truths" and "modified limited hang-outs."

The Senate Select Committee, functioning on a fully bipartisan basis (Ervin, Howard Baker, Lowell Weiker), worked their way through to a just result. In truth, I had little doubt the right thing would happen. The Supreme Court, on an 8-0 vote, had squashed Nixon's last hope of escaping the noose. The Senators bore in relentlessly, uncovering layer upon layer of corruption and misprision, and all of them, Republicans and Democrats alike, put partisan politics to one side, judged harshly Tricky Dick's efforts to subvert the Constitutional processes, to play off the CIA against the FBI, to lie, to bribe, to cheat, to break the law. And when the hearings were just about over, the pigeon chicks were nudged off the high balcony and flew away to their own independent freedom.

I think I decided to become a lawyer after watching the Watergate hearings. It seemed like a magnificent calling, to be an officer of the court, to be one of those guardians of due process and a fair trial, to assure a level playing field for litigants, to learn all those complicated rules of evidence, to expose the cheats and frauds, to make sure the system worked.

What I didn't realize at the time, perhaps, was how much those lofty ideals depended on a particular mindset, on an inculcated sense of morality, on what you might call the Internalized Democracy. The tools of democracy, the Constitution, the three branches of government, the electorate, the free press -- all those still exist 33 years later. But the people who gave those things a living, breathing spirit are gone. Now the Senate and House, and of course the White House, and increasingly the Supreme Court, are infested with power-mongering careerists who simply do not care about the ideals the Senate Select Committee fought for. They care only about their petty, lifetime sinecures, with its chance to sell the influence of their office to lobbyists, and have become experts primarily at the manipulation of public opinion in the most cynical, venal and ultimately destructive ways imaginable. The Republicans refuse to rein in President Bush, despite the clear, illegal and corrupt practices of his Administration, because maintaining the power of their party is more important to them than the viability of the American democracy. The Democrats triangulate and focus-group their way to positions they think will sell, so that they can once again enjoy that majority status which is worth so much on the open market.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar,

said T.S. Eliot, speaking of another morally depleted time. So we've come full circle.

I don't know what became of that television. It was actually made in America, by the way. I guess it went the way of my tennis game. And the American Democracy. The Senate now works with the President to hide facts from the American public. They have become co-conspirators with a cabal Senator Sam would have called "a bunch o' burglars." Do not think, for a moment, that the Internalized Democracy, once lost, once squandered, is easily reinstated. Those brave souls who preserved the Union 33 years ago were the products of another moral era, one which has sunk beneath deep sedimentary layers of dishonesty and ethical rot.

Mel Gibson Decoded

The first big mistake Mel made was diverging from the clear and triumphant trail blazed by Hugh Grant years ago when he was found parked in West L.A. with a prostitute parked face-down in his lap. In essence, Hugh said, "I fucked up big time." The blow job blew over and Hugh went on to do some of his best work. In my book, Hugh set the standard against which all mea culpas must be measured. When you're caught carrying on in public like men frequently carry on in private, don't try to reinvent yourself as a misunderstood choir boy who simply lapsed, this one time, from otherwise exemplary behavior. It's, I don't know--wussy. No one buys it, and most especially the intended audience, the ticket-buying public. Elizabeth Hurley, of course, wasn't going to buy any of it anyway.

Of course - Hugh wasn't drunk, didn't resist arrest, didn't ask the arresting officer about his foreskin, and didn't blame Jews for all the wars in the world. Thus, Mel from the beginning, had a much tougher job of rehabilitation on his hands. Impossible task, in fact. He's through, and he probably knows it, despite his abject, obsequious, groveling, sickening press release, which would have made Uriah Heep blush, if he could have worked his way to the end. It included goodies such as:

''I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable,'' the actor-director said without elaborating.

Well, right away we see the problem of spending your life in make-believe. You didn't "act" out of control, Mel; you WERE out of control. Not, however (and this is quite odd), because of alcohol. Your BAC (blood alcohol concentration) was .12%, somewhat over the California standard of .08, not much over the old standard of .10, but if you really have the "disease" of alcoholism, which you cop to elsewhere in your nauseating apologia, this is really small beer.

I will confess that on festive occasions, I have, in the distant past, entered the .12 range myself. I know you shouldn't be driving, especially at 2:30 am on the Pacific Coast Highway on a weekend night when you're under that much sail. It's irresponsible, as Mel laudably admits. But it's not fall down drunk. If it were, half the tail-gaters at a Raiders game would never make it to their stadium seats by kickoff. A 170 pound man (I figure this is approximately Mel's tonnage, because I was surprised to read he's about 5'7" - that sly camera work!) needs about 5 beers in a one hour period to hit the .12% mark, but the concentration falls away at the rate of .015% per hour since the time of the first drink. It looks suspiciously like calculus to figure out how drunk you are at any snapshot in time, something you don't want to try with a full heater on.

But driving a car and knowing not to reveal your anti-Semitism are two very different things. The first involves motor skills, judgment and reflexes; the second requires having your head screwed on straight. Here is where I take issue with what Mel says in his PR note: with a buzz on, you don't "say things you don't believe to be true;" you say things you wish you hadn't said. At a cocktail party that goes on for two or three hours, with strong martinis going down the hatches, with maybe half the revelers nudging up against that .12% Rubicon, you don't ordinarily expect the guests to start screaming out anti-Jewish invective, revealing fears their children's blood may have found its way into the matzoh down at the synagogue. Not unless, of course, you happen to be throwing your cocktail party in Nuremburg in 1938.

Mel drank enough to reveal that he's a rabid anti-Semite. I suspected as much. His artful dodging on the question of the Holocaust, where he couldn't quite bring himself to dissociate himself from his father's denial, was a clue. The grotesque portrayal of Jews in "The Passion of the Christ" was another; and the slight loss of inhibition on the side of the PCH a few nights ago sealed the case. We now know what informed his "artistic" decisions in his Christian snuff film. Mel has been decoded, and we can thank his bad habits for that. He's diseased, all right, and it's safer to stay away from diseased people.

An Innumerate Look at Iraq

John Paulos, a math professor at Temple University, wrote a series of books years ago about American "innumeracy," the quantitative corollary to illiteracy, by which he referred to basic misunderstandings about statistics and probabilities. Innumeracy was the first of the oeuvre, and laid out such commonplace mistakes as fearing a trip to Europe because of the chance of a terrorist attack (about 1 in 238,000) while remaining sanguine about driving to the airport for a trip somewhere "safer," oblivious to the 1 in 5,000 chance of a fatal car wreck on the way to the plane. We misunderstand statistics and probabilities for a variety of reasons, such as a "focus"or "selection" error where dramatized events acquire an importance out of scale with their actual frequency, or where we fail to appreciate proportionality in assessing a risk.

I was thinking about this phenomenon recently while reading about the 100 or so deaths per day in Iraq because of car bombings, kidnappings, drive-by shootings and other mayhem inflicted on the citizenry, and I realized that a kind of reverse innumeracy was at work in my own thinking. The reports on daily carnage, total killed in Iraq, etc., never (in my reading) attempt to place these numbers in a population context, so we might acquire a sense of scale in assessing the impact on daily life in Iraq. The absolute numbers, in other words, don't tell the whole story.

Iraq has about 25 million people. The official census of the United States places the population here at about 300 million, or 12 times larger. Thus, here is what the Iraqi numbers would look like if scaled up to American proportions:

1. If 100 people per day are getting blown up, tortured to death or shot in Iraq, this would translate to 1,200 American citizens getting blown up, tortured to death or shot (over and above baseline violent crime rates) each and every day. For comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which was at the time the deadliest single act of terrorism in American history, killed 138 people, slightly more than the actual number of Iraqis killed every day as the result of insurgent violence and the ongoing civil war. Thus, at Iraqi levels, the USA would now sustain 8.7 Oklahoma City bombings each and every day under such conditions. 9-11 caused about 2,700 deaths; thus, at Iraqi levels, every two days or so the U.S. would witness slaughter equal to the worst attack in American history.

2. The total number of Iraqis violently killed, over and above the preexisting death rate, since the American invasion of March, 2003, is the subject of debate. President Bush has conceded 30,000; the Baghdad morgue report in late June estimated 50,000; the famous Johns Hopkins report estimated about 100,000 (at the time, almost 2 years ago). Some estimates have been higher than these.

Scaled up to American proportions, these death tallies are 360,000; 600,000; and 1.2 million. The lowest estimate (based on Bush's concession) means that proportionally more Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion than all battle deaths of U.S. service personnel during World War II (about 291,000). The middle estimate produces a death toll exceeding the total number of battle and nontheater deaths of both armies during the American Civil War (about 500,000); and the highest number (Johns Hopkins study) exceeds the total number of battle deaths (651,000) plus nontheater deaths (525,000) of all wars fought during America's entire history, beginning with the American Revolution.

3. Using a similar analysis, how is the American occupation perceived by the Iraqi people? The Pentagon has deployed approximately 130,000 service personnel in Iraq, equal to about 1/2 of 1% of the total population there. A proportionate occupying force in the U.S.A. would equal 1,560,000 troops spread out over the American landscape, driving our roads in fearsome Humvees bristling with machine guns, building permanent bases, importing contractors and dictating the operation of our governance. We would notice, in other words.

And given how many of us were dying every single day, we would probably begin to resent the occupation, too.