Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?

Yes, yes, to fight the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. But eight years later, American blood and treasure are still being poured into a country of dirt-poor, illiterate people who support themselves by growing poppy for opium and heroin under one of the most corrupt governments in the world.

As Barack Obama makes a midnight visit to honor the incoming dead and console their families, critics may sneer at his theatricality, but the President seems to be trying to clear his head and heart of the numbers and jargon that have dominated months of discussion about whether or not to send up to44,000 more troops to do what those who are now dying there in record numbers have been unable to do.

During the Bush years, despite pockets of fierce opposition, the American mindset was dominated by a Neo-Con vision, unleashed by the trauma of 9/11, of a superpower with "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."

That led us into Afghanistan and then Iraq, where the blood still flows in factional fighting, and now the pressure persists on a President elected with a far different vision to stay on that course at the risk of being accused of dithering and defeatism.

At home on the economy, Barack Obama has been forced into pushing for Change on an unprecedented, unsettling scale, but polling shows the American people slowly overcoming their doubts.

How would they react to a daring Change in foreign policy? What would happen if, instead of escalating troop levels, the US took a different approach? Tom Friedman suggests one possibility:

"Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.

"And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone."

This may be as wishful as the Neo-Con faith in nation-building in Afghanistan and Pakistan that has cost Americans so much and produced so little, but it deserves as serious consideration as what Friedman describes as the result of their alternative: "China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan."

Those are the choices Obama is facing.

Is Smart Enough?

At her confirmation yesterday, Hillary Clinton invoked the concept of "smart power" as a guide to American diplomacy.

In his hearings, Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited Barack Obama as a role model for America's school children. “Never before," he said "has being smart been so cool.”

And in another hearing room, Senators were mooning over Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the nominee for Energy Secretary. Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman enthused over Chu's "insight and vision" to carry out Obama's energy policies.

But is brilliance alone the panacea for all of America's problems? With the possible exception of the Defense Department's Douglas Feith, characterized as the "dumbest effing guy on the planet' by Gen.Tommy Franks, Bush's Neo-Cons were not stupid but blinkered in their perception of how the world works and too arrogant to learn from their mistakes.

The test for all that Obama brainpower will be to avoid replicating the record of JFK's "The Best and the Brightest" whose tunnel vision led to quagmire in Vietnam as surely as the Neo-Cons confidently took us into Iraq disaster and, back home, free-market ruin.

"It doesn’t help," Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, "that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas."

What's encouraging is that, although Obama has surrounded himself with figures like Lawrence Summers and Rahm Emanuel, who never suffer from an excess of doubt, he himself keeps showing the open-mindedness to empathize with opposition and avoid hubris.

Talking about measures to save the economy, the President-Elect said the other day, "“This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship. If members of Congress have good ideas, if they can identify a project for me that will create jobs in an efficient way--that does not hamper our ability to, over the long term, get control of our deficit; that is good for the economy--then I’m going to accept it.”

Now that sounds like the smart use of power.

The Diplomacy Gap

A convergence of events--the Russian crackdown in Georgia, Musharraf's imminent impeachment in Pakistan, the continuing impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions--is underscoring the damage of the bellicose Bush foreign policy to America's relations with the rest of the world.

As the McCain campaign mocks Obama's willingness to negotiate with rather than bully adversarial nations and dicey allies, reality keeps offering up situations that demonstrate the failure of the Neo-Con blueprint for American world dominance by military power that took us into an unending war in Iraq.

Nicholas Kristof points out today that "the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems. After all, you can’t bomb global warming."

Item: As Bush and Putin watch the Beijing Olympics together, the US is helpless to deter new Russian aggression. "While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries," an analysis concludes, "Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia."

Item: With Bush's best friend facing removal, the US, in Fareed Zakaria's words, "is seen by Pakistanis as having backed Musharraf for far too long and in too unqualified a manner...Just sending American troops in there, especially without coordination with Pakistan, would be a recipe for failure. But a genuinely political and military approach might succeed over time."

A New York Times editorial concludes, "There are no quick and easy fixes for Pakistan, but it will have no chance if its civilian leaders, its army and the United States do not work together to build more effective democratic governance, an economic future and a coordinated plan for routing the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

Item: As Iran continues to flex its nuclear muscles, the Bush State Department is barely beginning to engage the process of a coordinated carrot-and-stick international effort to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shooting off his mouth instead of test missiles.

All of this will require foreign-service brains, expertise and experience but, as Kristof points out, the US has more musicians in its military bands than diplomats.

Bush's Belated Change About "Change"

The man who set the theme for this year's election is off to the Middle East today on a quest to salvage something there, after conceding the US faces “economic challenges” at home, a euphemism for the threat of recession reflected in rising oil prices, the home mortgage crisis and a weakening job market.

After jawboning the Israelis and Palestinians to make nice, President Bush will be reunited with Tony Blair, who is there on a similar mission for the "Quartet"-- the US, UN, European Union and Russia--to reminisce about the glory days when they were going to topple Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to the region.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley still insists that the promotion of freedom as a "counterpoint" to terrorism remains "the essence" of the Bush strategy. "I don't think he's pulled back," Hadley says.

But most observers disagree. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "The trip will showcase a president shifting his focus from the big idea of a free and democratic Middle East to more traditional US foreign-policy goals: an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, the containment of a threatening state--in this case Iran--and the assurance of US energy security at a time of $100-a-barrel oil."

The belated dialing down of Neo-Con ambitions, if not the rhetoric, to remake an intractable part of the world is welcome and should inspire the next President to define change in more traditional American terms.

Left, Right and Dead Wrong

The news that William Kristol may be joining the New York Times as an OpEd columnist to provide ideological balance--left, right and dead wrong--is a dreary reminder of the new Neo-Con heaven in the mainstream media. With Karl Rove at Newsweek, can Scooter Libby be far behind?

Kristol would bring to the Times not only a spectacular record for unfulfilled predictions about the future but a turgid style to inspire nostalgia for William Safire's bouncy wrong-headedness.

David Brooks' pedantic pop sociology must not be enough to cover the paper's conservative flank, so the Times is going all the way to the right edge of reason by hiring a writer who describes it as "irredeemable" and deserving of prosecution for treason.

But we may be missing the point. The move may have more to do with being democratic about talent than politics.

As Sen. Roman Hruska famously said in defending a Nixon Supreme Court appointee called mediocre, "Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?"

Bon Voyage to Bush

The good news is that our President will be elsewhere much of next year, giving him less time in Washington to start disastrous wars and subvert the Constitution.

The bad news: He will be abroad, winning hearts and minds for America with his wit, warmth and incomparable charm.

In early January, Bush makes his first visit to Israel with side trips to the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In February, he goes to Africa, in April to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Romania, in June the U.S.-European summit in Slovenia followed by a July meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Japan, the summer Olympics in China and a November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru.

The US Secret Service and security people around the world will be exhausted by year's end. The Republican candidate for President should be relieved by not having to explain why the incumbent is not out there campaigning for him. And Dick Cheney could be a total wreck from overseeing all the Neo-Con mischief himself after the loss of Rove, Gonzales, Libby, Meiers and so many of the other elves.

Meanwhile, the sightseeing could do Bush some good after a year in the bunker and provide some upbeat material for the final chapter of his Presidential memoirs.

When they pack his bags, the White House staff could do the country a service by forgetting to put in the veto pens.

Nuts-and-Bolton on Iran

As most thinking Americans breathe a sigh of relief over the NIE report on Iran, John Bolton on the editorial page of the Washington Post, that island of insanity in a screw-loose world, is here to preserve our patriotic paranoia.

The thing has flaws, and who are these spooks to tell us what the stuff they gather means? "Too much of the intelligence community," Bolton writes, "is engaging in policy formulation rather than 'intelligence' analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it."

The man who was too disagreeable to be confirmed as US Ambassador to the UN, Scooter Libby's defender, who lectured Jon Stewart with fake news about Lincoln on the Daily Show, who has been out-Cheneying the Neo-Cons in pushing Bush to attack Iran, that John Bolton wants us to know that the NIE is rash in its "psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives" based on "internally contradictory and insufficiently supported" data, is being suckered by disinformation from Iran and relies too much on "the latest hot tidbit" from its spies.

Moreover, Bolton reveals, many are "not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department" who had "relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago, now...writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high."

Bolton, who has been hearing voices from on high much longer, outranks them all and is just the clear-sighted expert to set us straight.

Nuclear Hiccup

Oops. "A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold," the New York Times reports today.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, issued a statement spinning the new National Intelligence Estimate as good news rather than a sign that the same intelligence mistakes that got us into Iraq are still being made today.

“It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” Hadley said. “It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”

Shameless but par for the Bush-Cheney course to toss off their months-long drumbeat for invading or bombing Iran as a slight glitch that proves we scared Ahmadinejad in stopping a nuclear weapons buildup that never was.

It was only five weeks ago that a Zogby poll showed that more than half of voters would support a military strike to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and believed it was likely the US would do so before next year's election.

But all that is old news. Looking to the future, Hadley now says, “The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically--without the use of force--as the administration has been trying to do.” Did Barack Obama sneak into the White House and take over without anybody noticing?

Someone please get the smelling salts for Joe Lieberman and Norman Podhoretz, and wipe the foam off the snouts of Cheney's Neo-Con attack dogs.

Nuclear Shell Game

If we had a competent, open-minded and subtle Administration, the questions of what to do about Pakistan would still be dicey. As things stand, our clueless President, out-of-it Secretary of State and politically damaged diplomatic corps seem like rubes at the fair watching Musharraf run his games of repression and promises of free elections with no idea of where the nuclear pea is.

Nightmares that Pakistan might "lose control over a nuclear arsenal of uncertain size--estimated at from 55 to 115 weapons," the New York Times reports, are driving fears in Washington, London and Paris.

The Pakistan president has insisted his nuclear controls are "the best in the world," but, over the years, his assurances about everything have turned out to be full of empty bluster and, now that his control of the country is shaky, can we take the chance of believing him?

In a situation like this, it would be comforting to think that US intelligence assets have some answers but, even if they do, with our "What, me worry?" President and Vice President surrounded by Neo-Cons obsessed with Iran's nuclear potential, is anybody in charge of the titrating of carrots-and-sticks financial aid, covert actions and contingency planning that are needed?

"If General Musharraf is overthrown," the Times reports, "no one is quite sure what will happen to the team he has entrusted to safeguard the arsenal. There is some hope that the military as an institution could reliably keep things under control no matter who is in charge, but that is just a hope.

“'It’s a very professional military,'” said a senior American official who is trying to manage the crisis and insisted on anonymity because the White House has said this problem will not be discussed in public. “'But the truth is, we don’t know how many of the safeguards are institutionalized, and how many are dependent on Musharraf’s guys.'”

In a situation where "don't know" and "hope" could lead to disaster, the track record of this White House is not reassuring. From the outside, it looks as if regime change in Washington is more urgent than in Islamabad.

Rudy's Crusade

If he keeps moving right at this rate, Rudy Giuliani is in danger of falling off the edge of the flat earth.

The knight who drove criminals out of Manhattan, single-handedly cleaned up Ground Zero after 9/11 and kept al Qaeda from taking over New York has strapped on his armor to rid the Holy Land of Islamo-Fascism.

With an array of blood-related Neo-Con Sancho Panzas--Podhoretzes, Kagans and Kristols--Sir Rudy has been on the campaign trail tilting so hard at windmills that even the New York Times today has noticed what bloggers have been reporting for some time:

“Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for United Nations.

“But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

“Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.”

Sir Rudy gave some clues to his thinking last week in a speech during “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” blasting Democrats for never using “the word ‘Islamic terrorist.’ Ever.”

In the course of saddling up for his crusade, Guiliani, who has at times been accused of being too courtly, did not hesitate to take swipes at the opposition’s Lady in Waiting:

“Honestly, in most respects, I don’t know Hillary’s experience. She’s never run a city. She’s never run a state. She’s never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people.”

At this rate, Giuliani may yet win over the hearts of the Radical Right, who for some time now have been suspecting that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may have lost their cojones for doing God’s work in the Middle East.

John Bolton vs. George W. Bush

The man with the white walrus mustache is back in Washington after a European tour of touting war with Iran. He has a new book to promote and a new cause--rallying Republican Congressmen to oppose the nuclear agreement with North Korea by that left-wing softie, George W. Bush.

Last week he met with 42 GOP Neanderthals at the invitation of Iowa Rep. Steve King, whose main legislative goal is to abolish the income tax, and argued that “North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily, and that it is only a matter of time before their cheating is exposed, at which point one hopes that Bush will repudiate this charade.”

Bolton’s new book is titled “Surrender Is Not an Option,” reflecting the unyielding bellicosity of the man who calls himself a Goldwater conservative, as opposed to those parvenu Neo-Cons he considers “liberals who’d been mugged by reality.”

If he had his way, Bolton would solve all our world problems by bombing and invading, in contrast to his youthful aversion to warfare.

"I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy," Bolton wrote in the 25th reunion book of his graduation from Yale about his decision to join the National Guard and go to law school. "I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."

Unlike the war in Iraq today and whatever new ones he can instigate tomorrow.

Warriors for Peace

Children are supposed to be guileless enough to speak truths that adults are too compromised to tell. But on going to war with Iran, retired soldiers are taking the lead.

Last weekend, Gen. Wesley Clark wrote a Washington Post OpEd warning against the folly of attacking Iran, as the Bush Administration is clearly preparing to do.

Now another retired military leader, Gen. John Abizaid, who headed Central Command for almost four years, speaks out.

"There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran," Abizaid yesterday told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. "Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well."

The General was referring to such countries as “axis of evil” member North Korea and unstable ally Pakistan. But the Bush-Cheney Neo-Cons are beating the drums for an urgent war against Iran just as they did against Iraq five years ago.

Some years ago, someone I knew was planning a picture book titled “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are,” featuring the designer of the Edsel, LBJ directing the war in Vietnam and other perpetrators of huge follies.

The Bushies have earned their place in that volume and, before they can repeat their performance in Iran, Gen. Abizaid has some common sense to impart:

“I believe the United States, with our great military power, can contain Iran...can deliver clear messages to the Iranians that...while they may develop one or two nuclear weapons they'll never be able to compete with us in our true military might and power.”

What we need now are politicians who are as dedicated to peacekeeping as the men who were trained to make war.

Cheney's New, Improved War

The Vice-President of the United States is packaging his attack on Iran.

Unfazed by the disaster in Iraq, Cheney’s Neo-Cons are “rolling out” a “new product” exactly as they did in 2002 and, as then, over the resistance of the State Department.

The New York Times reports “Condoleezza Rice has been arguing for a continuation of a diplomatic approach, while officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have advocated a much tougher view. They seek to isolate and contain Iran, and to include greater consideration of a military strike.”

In the Washington Post, retired Gen. Wesley Clark writes, “Think another war can't happen? Think again. Unchastened by the Iraq fiasco, hawks in Vice President Cheney's office have been pushing the use of force...And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left.”

In the U.K., the Telegraph reports “Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran” and a senior intelligence officer warns “that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq--arming and training militants--would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories” to “provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.”

This follows a U.K. Times story about a speech by a conservative think tank expert saying “military planners were not preparing for ‘pinprick strikes’ against Iran’s nuclear facilities. ‘They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,’ he said.”

The President started the campaign rolling here with an echo of the warnings about Saddam’s WMD in a recent speech to the American Legion: “Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust...We will confront this danger before it is too late.”

Back in May, our bellicose former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was telling the British, ”We must attack Iran before it gets the bomb” and that “senior White House officials” share his thinking.

So even before the Surge and in the face of public clamor to get out of Iraq, Cheney and his crowd were covertly planning a war against Iran.

About all this, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning: "We have got to put pressure on the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies.”

He should be telling that to his Congressional colleagues and reminding them that another botched Bush war could create an unprecedented crisis for American democracy.

The Podhoretz Plague

In 1967, he wrote a book confessing he craved “money, power and especially fame.” Norman Podhoretz got all three but, at the age of 77, he wants more and this time his attention-getting devices are to call for bombing Iran now and starting a world war against “Islamofascism.”

Such Neo-Con nuttiness would be pitifully laughable if it weren’t influencing George Bush, who this year gave Podhoretz the Medal of Freedom, and Rudy Giuliani, who has taken him on as his foreign policy adviser.

Far be it for me, of all people, to denigrate senior sages, but Podhoretz sticks in my aged craw. Here he is, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this week, calling anyone who disagrees about Iraq part of a liberal cabal going back to the 1960s with "faith in America the ugly."

Here is Podhoretz aboard the recent National Review cruise, as described by a British journalist:

“Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been ‘an amazing success.’ He waves his fist and declaims: ‘There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better.’ He wants more wars, and fast.”

If this is Rudy Giuliani’s gray eminence on foreign policy, prayers for Fred Thompson may be in order.

Tower of Babble Over Iraq

It’s getting very Biblical. The debate over what to do next in the Middle East is splintering into as many factions in Washington, D.C. as there are sects, militias and street gangs fighting for turf in Iraq.

The confusion of tongues has reached the point where anyone with any opinion can find chapter and verse to support it.

Stay the course? Bill Kristol and the National Review crowd will provide evidence the Surge is working, and George Bush has proof positive from every war in history that to stop killing people leads to bad things.

Get out now? Take your pick of former generals, fringe Presidential candidates and a million bloggers with unshakable arguments that the way to go is just go.

Edge out carefully? It can be done at any pace from John Warner’s to Gen. Peter Pace’s to Hillary Clinton’s to that of anyone on cable TV or talk radio.

Keep al Maliki or dump him? President Bush says the Iraqi people will decide or maybe the Neo-Cons who are pushing his replacement with cash-heavy PR campaigns.

But help is on the way. Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are coming soon to tell us all how to speak in one voice.

Newest Middle East Adventure

When faithful Robert Novak starts blowing the whistle on a “dangerous and questionable new secret operation” by the surviving Neo-Cons, we are deep in the Twilight Zone.

With terrified Congressmen as his obvious sources, Novak reveals that “high level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.”

This brilliant plan, Novak reveals, is being shepherded by none other than Assistant Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman, a Cheney protégé, fresh from his triumph of insulting Hillary Clinton, who briefed lawmakers about using U.S. Special Forces to help the Turks.

Novak reports their reaction: “Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied.”

Terrific. Unless sanity suddenly sets in, the Bush Boy Scout Brigade is off on another Middle East adventure that could work out at least as well as toppling Saddam Hussein.

"My Country, Right or Wrong"

John Boehner is a living metaphor for the political muddle in Washington over Iraq.

During a meeting of the Republican Congressional caucus yesterday, the House Minority Leader reportedly characterized Senate colleagues as “wimps” for backing away from unquestioning support of the Bush policy.

He was rebuked by Rep. Heather Wilson, a former Air Force officer, who expressed admiration for Sen. Richard Lugar’s speech about rethinking Middle East policy.

Boehner is an emotional man. In May, before debate about the Surge, he wept openly as Rep. Sam Johnson talked of his years as a POW in North Vietnam, describing how his captors would play tapes of antiwar protesters back home over prison loudspeakers.

The Minority Leader was strongly moved by Johnson’s analogy of his experience in hearing that opposition to any expression of Congressional disapproval of the policy in Iraq.

There is no reason to question Boehner’s sincerity or patriotism, but his judgment is another matter. He embodies a classic American debate.

In 1816, after a victory, Naval Commander Stephen Decatur proposed a toast: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”

In 1872, Sen. Carl Schurz, a former General, amended that declaration: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

George Bush has complicated that difference by re-defining patriotism as support for a mindless, belligerent foreign policy that has alienated our country from almost all of the civilized world.

In Boehner’s heart, it may simply be a question of patriotism, yes or no. But someone should explain to him that Bush’s Neo-Cons have hijacked American patriotism and that some of those in both parties who truly love their country are fighting to get it back.

The Price of Law and Order

It was never just about abortion. The struggle for America’s soul goes deeper, as the Supreme Court and Congress have been showing us this week.

It was never as simple as faith vs. reason. Rational people can recognize a Higher Power, the religious can respect science and logic.

What it has been about is the conflict between our hopes and fears, between the risks of freedom and the comfort of control, between our needs to feel decent and to feel safe.

Before the trauma of 9/11, the tension between those impulses could be kept in balance. Without that, the vicious idiocy of Bush’s Neo-Cons would never had free rein. For a time, the frustrations of Vietnam allowed Nixon’s paranoia and secrecy to subvert basic American values, but it never came to this.

This is an Executive Branch that makes Nixon look like a paragon of openness and respect for the law.

This is a Congress without the will and guts to stop a war started out of fear and stupidity and too craven to resist the hysteria over immigration and navigate through competing passions and interests toward a responsible compromise.

This is a High Court retreating from messy freedoms such as individual privacy, racial equality, protections from predatory business practices and the right to express unpopular opinions.

A living symbol of all this is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has emerged, at least for now, as the deciding voter in our losing 5-4 struggle to balance freedom and responsibility.

The duty of judges, he once told an audience, is to "impose order on a disordered reality." But at what price?

By January 2009 we may, to our sorrow, have found the answer to that.

Cheney's Busted Flush on Iran

If the Vice President were a publicly traded stock, the Exchange would have start thinking about de-listing him. Even the truest-believing Neo-Cons will soon have to stop buying.

The latest bad news to hit the ticker is that the Iran card is getting harder to play. With rioting, stone-throwing and mass protests over the rise in gasoline prices, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking less and less like Saddam Hussein every day.

Cheney won’t be in a position to make any more rousing speeches on the decks of aircraft carriers any time soon, even if he can get out from under all rioting against him in Washington about the price of secrecy.

Bush and Cheney, Meet the Burkes

While so many blog our feelings about the war in Iraq, multitudes of other Americans, good people who love their country, are living with pain beyond words.

In the Boston Globe today, their story is embodied by the Burkes, George and Michael, father and son who served as Marines in Vietnam and Iraq, and came home wracked by post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Michael's story is sadly familiar,” Charles M. Sennott reports, “he has not been the same since seeing a friend killed in a roadside bomb blast in western Iraq.

“But what George, 63, is living through is part of something new--or rather something old that has returned with new force. Forty years after his tour of duty in the battles around Khe Sanh in the fall of 1967, he is overcome again by debilitating memories and nightmares from that war, symptoms triggered by televised images of the Iraq bloodshed, and by his fears for--and firsthand knowledge of --what his son was to encounter in Iraq.”

The head of VA readjustment counseling services confirms many such cases across the country--fathers who served in Vietnam having their PTSD reawakened by Iraq and what is happening to their sons serving there.

So now we have two-for-the-price-of-one tragedies, families in which the sins, not of the fathers but those who sent them off to insane wars, keep destroying American lives. Sleeplessness, nightmares, alcoholism, anxiety are their rewards for volunteering to serve their country.

In a just world, the Neo-Cons who lied us into this war and the new generation of Cheney nincompoops who want to invade Iran would be sentenced to live for the duration with the Burkes in Clinton, Mass. and see what patriotism--abused by high-level stupidity--has done to them.

Semper Fi.