I'm Not Okay, You're Not Okay

I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought.

To read Peter Beinart's latest mea culpa--the latest in a series notable for the increasing gaudiness of its contrition--is to behold a man possessed by a self-regard so absurdly and overly dramatic that I would call it operatic were it not so artless. Beinart began apologizing a couple of years ago with a zealous commitment to the basic precepts of his former wrongness: the old religious coviction that the miraculous is not a null set even in the total absence of miracles. But the unravelling in Iraq has shaken these principles also, and now Beinart positively moons with sentimentality, waxing poetic about South African exiles and Iraqi expatriates and every liberal's favorite failed intervention, the bombing of Kosovo. The paragraph excerpted above tells you all you need to know about our winsome know-nothing. He saw the first Gulf War on TV, and from it he formed a political philosophy. (I have seen an open heart surgery; I have never tried to get my cokehead friends to try to crack open a chest in service of my morbid fascination.)

Beinart's conclusion?

"Why, exactly, did you support this war?" asked my wife. Her sister is an Army brigade surgeon at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, treating kids burned from head to toe. [...] Our toddler niece is in San Antonio, spending the year without a mom. I'll always consider [former Iraqi exile] Makiya a hero. But I haven't seen him, or read anything he's said or written, in several years. He's living, and suffering, with the consequences of this war, I suppose. And so are we.

The "I suppose" betrays the unearned egoism at the rancid core of this fruit. It betrays a head swollen so grotesquely large that the eyes have been forced shut by the fat. It betrays the casual disinterest in human suffering that afflicts sociopaths.

On one hand, to live in this world is to innure oneself to the suffering of others. There will be wars, there will be disease, there will be repression, torture, poverty, crime, starvation, and the million other small miseries of man. Moreover, to advocate, as I do, a national posture of non-intervention is to disavow the capacity to do very much about such things, other than provide medicine or food or modest shelter where it is feasible, and trade and openness where minimal conditions of reciprocal openness are met. To do more, unfortunately, is to make worse: we have seen that play before, even if most of us haven't learned from it. But on the other hand, to understand that your advocacy helped enable the proximate, causative actions at the root of such suffering, and to flip that suffering away as equal to your own--to make the motherless toddler safe in a crib in America commensurate to a people now quite literally without a country--is to make so fundamental an error of scale that only one conclusion remains: it's intentional. That, friends, is the rubber on the fuckin' road. Peter Beinart believes that he can carve out exculpation by making his exquisite regret the equivalent of six hundred thousand deaths.

Operation Himmler

The Persian Gulf monarchies and sheikdoms, mostly small and vulnerable, have long relied on the United States to protect them. The United States Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain; the United States Central Command is based in nearby Qatar; and the Navy has long relied on docking facilities in the United Arab Emirates, which has one of the region’s deepest water ports at Jebel Ali.

[...]

The expansion has helped calm fears among gulf governments that the United States could pull out of the region in the future, even as it has raised concerns about a potential American confrontation with Iran, accidental or intentional.

As tensions with Iran rise, many gulf countries have come to see themselves as the likely first targets of an Iranian attack.

"Arab States, Wary of Iran, Add to Their Arsenals but Still Lean on the U.S."

From whom, exactly, have the "small and vulnerable" "Persian Gulf monarchies and sheikdoms" "relied on the United States to protect them?" What is an "accidental" confrontation? When has Iran attacked any nation? Why is the United States, self-nominated liberator and purported proponent of "democracy" as the nec plus ultra of sociopolitical development--end of history, last man, and all the rest of that congratulatory lip-smacking--spending piles of money and provoking what we're supposed to call, with great foreboding and dramatic crashes of thunder and lighting, "a wider regional war," in defense of "monarchies and sheikdoms?"

We're "protecting" our vulnerable friends from themselves. Had we not been so bone-crackingly stupid when it came to the communiss (that's J.K. Toole's memorable dialect), we might find ourselves today with a Middle East in which pseudo-socialist, broadly secular pan-Arabism was comin' around to Capital faster than you can build a skyscraper in Shanghai. Instead, we propped up any millio-barrel autocrat who'd say mean things about the Soviets, and our autocrats, in turn, bribed their tiny domestic populations with oil money, imported a lot of indentured servants, and gave 'em all a big helping of that (state-subsidized) good, old-time religion, figuring that a happy soul is a hardy worker, and more to the point, that a people sated on fire, brimstone, and the various moral depredations at work in this fallen world would be less inclined to political revolution. This proved to be something of a miscalculation. Our friendly autocrats are stuck with a gajillion guest-workers, a declining capacity to pay off their chronically under-employed males and, oh yes, everyone is just drooling to grab a stone or a Stinger and go absolutely ape-shit for Islam. The sheiks and monarchs, it turns out, like to yacht off for gambling and pussy in Europe, and, as the above-linked article makes so clear, they like and need to rent out their real estate to America, a convenient target, as we've seen, for preacherly wrath and pious indignation about barbarians in the lands of the Prophet.

Meanwhile: Iran. Here's a nation that suffered under the yolk of an American-backed autocrat of its own, an especially nasty bastard with a secret police so vicious that Dick Cheney can cum without touching himself at the slimmest daydream of them, who came to power in a CIA coup. Here's a nation that threw off its dictator on its own, without having to give up a single rose or peppermint to thank a single American liberator, and created for itself a goofy religious republic that, though not quite a model of Jeffersonian democracy, was in fact freer politically than any other Gulf State, the preponderance of which are, as I may have mentioned, ruled by sheiks and hereditary monarchs. The Iranian revolutionaries overwhelmed the American Embassy in Tehran and took hostages. Americans, in their inimitable style, view this event, like all others ever and anywhere, in a hermetic historical bubble, a vacuum in which all things occur sui generis, a pocket universe free of all causality. The hostage-taking, therefore, was an act of perfidy and aggression--of "terrorism," as the buzzword goes, of a collection of fanatics staging what amounted to an invasion. To Iranians, though, there was a backstory: the American embassy was to them as much a legitimate target of the revolution as the palaces of the Shah--the man, recall, that Schwartkopf père put into power twenty-five years before. I am no advocate of hostage-taking, but let's not pretend that the Iranians captured a bunch of innocent paper-pushers for no good reason but pique and madness. The hostages were all eventually released, and none of them was tortured, which is more than you can say for Guantanamo, and shortly thereafter Iran was invaded by another American proxy, and fought an eight-year war of attrition that cost a million-and-a-half Iranian lives.

This is all to say: Iran has never invaded anyone and is in no position to invade anyone. It's to say that there is no such thing as an accidental war. It's to say that we aren't arming our clients in the Gulf to defend against Iranian aggression; we are preparing them as staging grounds for American aggression. It's to say that this is all hew, cry, and bullshit. And it's to say to all the pansy-ass Donkle do-gooders who wring their hands over our warmaking but won't say empire, who look embarrassed and say, "I'm not actually comparing the United States to Nazi Germany"--stand the fuck up and ask it with me: What is the putative difference between what is now occuring vis-à-vis Iran and what once occured vis-à-vis Poland? Fuck the Gulf of Tonkin. The word of the day is Gleiwitz.

Accidental fucking war indeed.

Reach-around

Antiwar.Blog has been good to Who Is IOZ?, and so we blogroll.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, everyone you've heard today has said we've gotta get out of Iraq, and that's true, but you gotta answer a second question: Then what? Then what? What do we do next?"

That's Androgenic Alopecia denier Joe Biden at the Democratic Presidential Candidate's Forum in Nevada. You can hear him at 3:30 on this NPR report.

The "next" implies another step in our Middle-Eastern grand game, and for all the John Edwards apologies and Hillary Clinton non-apologies in the world, this is the question, in Hamlettian tones. It was Carter, a Democrat, who first said it, and this panel of Dems--lonely Kucinich the sole dissenter among them--reaffirms it: the Middle East is a "vital national interest" of the United States, and though it would be to our benefit and the benefit of everyone consigned by bad choice of birthplace and birthday to live in that corner of the world at this moment in time, no president emerging from this election is going to do the rational, right thing, which is to pack up, go home, pay fair market for our petrol, and leave "the region," as it is alternately euphemized, to its own damned devices.

If you listen to the whole NPR story, you can also hear Clinton snarl that she doesn't want to "defund our troops." She wants to, "defund those fucking wogs, who'd flush their own Korans rather than fight." (Her actual phrasing was marginally--but only marginally--less awful.) What a lamentable cast of clowns.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Occasion to Bullshit

I don't take Kevin Drum, house bloggah at the lame-o-liberal, daisy-chain technocracy booster mag called The Washington Monthly, very seriously, and Dog knows he's a snore, but with those caveats I admit that I read him daily because he seems to me--more even than your lib columnists at WaPo and the Times--to represent the unthinking, consensus imperialism of the fatty center of American politics: that sea of unexamined assumptions, exceptionalism, and bad history, tempered by a vaguely tolerant social semi-philosophy, dedicated to legacy entitlements, fond of public education, with poor taste in literature and an undue fondness for television, easily convinced by colorful graphs and charts, dismissive of the "anecdotal," enamored of gadgetry, giddily ecumenical, disturbed by George W. Bush, but unconcerned with his ancestors and antecedents.

Today he notes an interview by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, which plays out to the tune of Iran seeking rapprochement with the United States. He comments:

Look: Iran is not some wayward child with a heart of gold that can be made into our bosom buddy by sitting down and swapping a few stories. It's a harsh, illiberal theocracy that's been a state sponsor of terrorism for decades. But the weird thing is that this senior official is right: there really aren't any fundamental geopolitical reasons that Iran and the United States need to be enemies.

The phrase "a state sponsor of terrorism" must hurt in the throat, like an unchewed sliver of a potato chip. Just who the United States was supporting in, say, Nicaragua or Afghanistan, is the proper question. Just who we are supporting now in Iraq is another.

To the more fundamental point, and my apologies to Chalmers Johnson for stealing his thunder, but there most certainly is a "fundamental geopolitical reason" for Iran and the US to be enemies, which is that enemies are the fuel of the American imperial economy; without them and it's buh-bye to procurements; without those and it's a long slide to technological mediocrity and a national economy ripe for a little Bolivarian revolution of its own. The maintenance of an America-dominated international system demands at the most fundamental level a series of great enemies, whose unique threats require a Department of Defense that is, as others have noted, the second-largest planned economy in the world, after China. The entire geopolitical order as Drum understands and internalizes it depends on Iran as an enemy, and if not Iran, then someone--anyone--else.

K-Drum brings up the old Soviet Union and America's eventual rapprochement with it as a neat-enough analogue to the present situation with Iran. Recall (for the millionth time), Mencken's observation about Americans and the Bolshevik revolution:

[Americans] probably felt themselves, in a subtle and unconscious way, to be nearer to the Russians than any Europeans. Russia was not like Europe, but it was strangely like America. In the same way the Russians were like Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.

Replace Russia with Iran, Russian with Iranian, and read that again. I dare you.

From Wystan on his Hundredth and a Day

The Fall of Rome

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Murder and Mayhem

The Democratic presidential primary season is just underway, and already the hackles and dander of Los Netroots are up ("Like a twelve-year-old's dick," as Marky Mark memorably said of something else in The Departed). The nominal frontronners, HRC and BHO have begun snittering at each other like a couple of city rats over a crust of rotten bread, and now the various and sundry voices of the Bush-made-me-angry Left are shocked, shocked that the campaign is not being conducted on the high moral ground of right honorable this and right honorable that, tender as a virgin, pure as driven snow, etc., etc. Here's Digby mewling that one or the other of the pair isn't playing by whatever decorous rules she thinks should govern the pre-silly-season silly season. (Here The Son lays it out in pretty clear terms through the lens of L'affaire Marcotte.)

Democrats are always waiting for this or that white knight, tough but kind, good but firm, loving but steely, to ride in like Franklin Delano Shane, to fix the houses, saw the logs, tame the horses, arrest the bad guys, and so forth and so on. How precisely this character is going to win the White House in that "system" the Donkle always agitates that we must "work within" is another question. Clinton. Kennedy. Truman. Roosevelt. These were mean motherfuckers. Clinton would've eaten an infant alive for a vote, and Kennedy would've sold Jackie O. as a cocaine sex slave to Kruschev to win the big one. America is an empire, boys. Grow up and get used to it. Not even Jiminy Carter was a nice guy, although he played one well on TV, and in the end he lost for it.

David Geffen, the über-Donkle, once-Clinton, now-Obama partisan said "I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms." Digby and the Donkle phalanx finds this unconscionably crude coming from some billionaire. Wake up; smell the cigars, bubba. The smoke is just a metaphor. It's the room that counts, in this case the boardrooms of government-subsidized corporate America, the anti-free-market free-market economy at work. This "process," another word much in favor, is designed to preserve a patina of choice while finding a candidate most palatable to a very particular group of people. This is a profitable fucking gig for the dude or dudette who wins it, and they will say or do anything to get it. If you must be Democrats, at least grow up. They would kill each other in an arena if that's what it took. They are crazy. That's what it takes.

Who Needs Enemies?

Beginning:

NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb. 20 — Fierce mortar attacks killed at least 15 civilians in Somalia on Tuesday, and for a country that had seemed on the verge of ending 16 years of chaotic violence this is the new status quo. [...] It is hard to believe, but Somalia is actually becoming a more violent and chaotic place.

Middle:

There was a burst of optimism beginning Dec. 28, when government troops, with Ethiopian firepower behind them, marched into Mogadishu and planted the hope that the anarchy was ending. [...] But what has happened in the past few weeks has killed that mood. A deadly insurgency has started, beginning with a few clans connected to the Islamists and now expanding to several more

End:

[A]long came the Islamists, who during their six-month reign last year pacified the hornet’s nest of Mogadishu by persuading clans to voluntarily disarm their militias and persuading Somalis, most of whom are Sunni Muslims, to buy into their Islam-is-the-answer solution.

It's hard to avoid the impression that this story, reflecting a particular American narrative, carrying a particularly American "surprise," has in an important sense inverted causes and effects. It begins with "an internationally-supported [sic] transitional government" "steaming" into Mogadishu with "great expectations." (Whose?) The "great expectations" are odd, since the very next sentence concedes that "confidence in the government" was "never high."

If, in any event, it is "hard to believe" that Somalia is "becoming a more violent and chaotic place" following the "great expectations" of the "transitional government" that had just overthrown "the Islamist forces" ruling the country, then isn't the clear implication that the country under those forces was "violent and chaotic," and that its ouster was meant as a remedy to that situation?

After all, there was "a burst of optimism" when the "government" backed by Ethiopia (and, of course, the American Air Force--but that's little mentioned) "marched into Mogadishu and planted the hope that the anarchy was ending." That dovetails nicely with "violence and chaos." Violent, chaotic, anarchic. So the "internationally supported transitional government," backed by "Ethiopian firepower," had come to stop the "violence," the "chaos," and the "anarchy," but had been foiled by a "violent insurgency," which has returned the country to pre-invasion days when bloody Islamists roamed the anarchy-ridden cityscapes and countrysides, killing at will.

Ah, not quite.

It turns out that the "Islamists" were able, in a mere six months, to "pacify" restive Mogadishu, presuade clans to "voluntarily disarm their militias," and convince most Somalis, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims, to accept their legitimate authority. This after decades of "transitional" anarchy, warlordism, "chaos and violence," and anarchy.

Here we have an semi-official American newspaper propagandizing for a "War-on-Terror"-friendly position by intentionally obfuscating a series of events. It's clumsy and ineffectual, since it contains all the necessary self-refuting information, but there it is nevertheless. The "Islamists" are the enemy by grace of their name alone, although they evidently accomplished as much by compromise as by force of arms what America, the United Nations, the West, whomever, were collectively unable to accomplish for many, many blood-soaked years: calm.

This was unacceptable to America and our Ethopian proxies, however. So we smashed the calm, and now there is yet another state suffering through a grotesque "insurgency." America keeps puffing out its chest as a world-saver, while most of the world eyes us with increasing terror and thinks, "With friends like these . . ."

Standin' in Line for Titanic, Givin' away that She Sunk

Victor Davis Machiavelli Napoleon Achilles Quixote Don Carlo Hanson is writing a novel. He says:

I have almost finished a long novel (should be done by July), No Man A Slave, about the great march of the Boiotians under the general Epaminondas, in winter and spring 369 B.C., to liberate the Messenian helots from Spartan rule. While I can’t give away the plot and ending, from time to time I will post a few hundred words in mediis rebus from the narrative.

Now I hate to be the first sorority sister to puke at the party, but isn't the plot, such as it is, "given away" in the clause following "about." As for the ending, well, I'm no classicist, but let me go out on a limb: He liberates the Messenian helots from Sparan rule?

You can follow the link and scroll down for the full, syntax-inverted faux-anachronist prose, and the roaring classico-machismo of a D&D confab: "Then as he walked out, Alkidamas ended with a final laugh, 'There won’t be any Apothetai of the Spartans big enough to hide all our corpses.'" As Groucho once asked of opera divo Gaspari: "Isn't it hard to sleep on your stomach with such big buttons on your pajamas?" Personally, I'm gonna keep reading until we get some sex scenes.

Get Off My Lawn

Henley's got the linkage. Read it. Meanwhile, let me quote his fourth point in its entirety:

4. You can make a case that al-Qaeda’s second life in Waziristan is a result of the US getting “distracted” from Afghanistan by Iraq, but you can make at least as good a case that events show the pointlessness of invading Afghanistan in the first place. The political limitations on attacking Pakistan were always going to be there, whether the US invaded Iraq or not. There may have been better, less military means of g0ing Bin Laden and his brain trust after the massacres of September 11, 2001. The US as a whole and the Bush Administration in particular may have put more premium on the emotional satisfaction of hitting somebody than the bona fide achievement of shutting down the 9/11 killers. In other words, the current situation in Waziristan should make us reconsider the merits of the most marginalized figures in Western politics, the Afghan-war doves.

I was an Afghan-war dove. Here is what I wrote this January:

There may be military responses, but there are no solutions. The attacks of September 11, 2001--the apparrant casus belli for the Afghanistan invasion--were carried out by Saudis trained in mobile camps in a foreign country. That it occured in Afghanistan under a government that gave aid or shelter is really immaterial. There are any number of governments that would let any number of people do any number of things for the right kinds and amounts of kickbacks. The idea that deposing a government, bombing some encampments that--by video evidence at least--seem constructed entirely of canvas tents and jungle gyms, and propping up some marginally more friendly ethnic group as a new government serves materially to decrease either the capacity of non-state actors or to mitigate against their intentions is foolishness. And the inevitable outcome in Afghanistan, which we see clearly now, is that there will once again be internal strife until this or that group establishes dominance, or until several achieve equilibrium, and then everyone will go right on herding goats and growing poppy and firing off an occasional celebratory round or two on the old Kalishnikov. As it is, was, and ever shall be.

We will "lose" in Afghanistan because at some point--sooner rather than later on the timescale of an actually old civilization--we're going to pack up and go home. Perhaps, as certain liberals are now fond of suggesting for Iraq, we will "declare victory and withdraw." Perhaps we'll sort of slink off as the public attention further erodes. Who knows? Who cares? They have their millennia-old folkways and we have our omnibus budgets and patriotic parades and "obesity epidemics" and neverending Presidential election cycles and "severe weather teams" and "people of faith" and petty rivalries with the social-democratic states of continental Europe.

If the goal was "smashing the Taliban and al Qaeda," then it was as foolish as fighting a pond by throwing rocks at it. If the goal was the nobler, more sentimental line of "Democracy, Now!" then it was even more foolish. Here's one reason. Why it is so difficult to appreciate our own social systems and systems of governance as cultural artifacts, specific to our history and economy, tied up in particular cultural premises, produced through a long accrual of peculiar conditions and philosophical developments, is entirely beyond me. I like individualism; I like markets; I like limited government. These, to me, are all quite excellent ideas. But I don't delude myself by presuming them the steady-state, universal condition of liberated Man.

Our problems are products of our solutions. America, you must change your life.

I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours

Hot.

A Bird in Hand Is Worth Two in the . . .

It remains the persistent fantasy of a significant number of Americans--I will say a fairly solid majority--that In Re: The Matter of Man-on-Man Buttfucking, the "active partner" or "the top," which are both to say the man who does the inserting, retains a certain portion of the masculinity, itself a code for heterosexuality, that the "passive partnern," "the bottom," the "receiver," gives up. The internet and the back pages of free weeklies are full of "bi, discreet tops," who "don't kiss," perhaps, who are "masc" and "str8-acting," and any number of variations on the same general theme: that the difference between a vagina and an asshole is relatively minimal when it comes to serving as a vessel for a dick, both for the penetrator, who is invariable the man, and the penetrated, who is invariably the woman. In the various prison-rape fantasies popular in American culture as well, to be fucked is not only to be violated, but to be emasculated. You might argue that in such instances the emasculization stems from the fact of overpowerment, but the pathology at the heart of this conception is the deep belief that men don't recieve.

So it's not really surprising to find our child-in-chief, le dauphin, engaging the idea:

And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"

What he means, of course, is that in this engagingly Freudian version of foreign policy, he will prove our enemy to be a faggot, by which he means worse--a woman! But here is the thing, and it's rarely acknowledged, even among gay men themselves, many of whom (here is some community self-criticism) also conflate being a "top" and being "masculine," who see these sexual roles as essentially gendered, and who privilege the masculine/active far above the feminine/passive role: if you fuck a man in the ass, you too are a faggot. Through the endless circumlocutions and justifications, that fact remains. You are having sex with another man. You are a queer.

Irony of ironies: Our first gay president is a Bush.

Picture of the Day

Says it all. Dude has a funny blog, by the way.

Crise!

Joe Lieberman warns of a constitutional crisis. We've heard that phrase before. It popped up during "the contested 2000 presidential election" (an oddly common locution: aren't presidental elections meant to be contested? Asked and answered, as they say). Before that, it occured during the Ken Starr affair, a pedestrian jaunt through the sexual activites--antics is too strong and joyous a word--of a tenaciously popular president. The awkward alliteration tips off the phrase as a construct of the word-factories of "the permanent political class." Because they see the proper use of language as basically obfuscatory, they're not able to use language well or precisely. Since the United States fought one of the world's great civil wars over the purview of its constitutional government, you would be reasonable to conclude that "crisis," such as it is, is a term even whose relative application should meet a high bar of danger and necessity, and whose objective meaning would require the imminence of a substantial calamity.

Say it ain't so, Joe:

"Whatever our opinion of this war or its conduct, it is in no one's interest to stumble into a debilitating confrontation between our two great branches of government over war powers. The potential for a constitutional crisis here and now is real, with congressional interventions, presidential vetoes, and Supreme Court decisions."

It would seem, then, that the definition of a "constitutional crisis" in the eyes, ears, and bowels of this son of Connecticut is the ordinary disposition of the explicit duties and prerogatives of the independent and coequal brances of government, as outlined in this crisis-ridden Constitution of ours. Congress exercises its powers; the President vetoes such legislation when he disagrees with it; Congress either overrides or does not override his vetoes; the Supreme court settles intragovernmental disputs by making decisions.

We know, though, that the actual mechanics aren't what Lieberman is getting at. He is indulging the Washingtonian habit of concretizing abstractions like "unity" and "will." Explicitly:

"If there was ever a moment for nonpartisan cooperation to agree on a process that will respect both our personal opinions about this war and our nation's interests over the long term, this is it."

"Nonpartisan cooperation." "A process." "Respect both our personal opinions . . . and our nation's interest." Oh, indeed, let's all agree to disagree.

As the few of you who read what I write here know, I am of the opinion that most of the official opposition to this war, particularly among our "elected representatives," is rhetorical and not substantive, that it is meant to signal displeasure with a "poorly conducted" or "mismanaged" war whose indeterminacy and absence of clear successes has tired Americans and brought about their wide disapproval, while never trespassing beyond the exceptionalist pieties of American militarism. I'm not writing this as a defense of the the shadow-play of Democratic opposition to the Iraq War. I only want to point out that it requires an especially impoverished historical and political sensibility--and a particularly craven personal ethic--to stand up and demand an even more egregious supinity from an already abdicatory legislature.

On the merits, of course, all of this is staggeringly irrelevant. Our legislators have made it clear in word and action that they will do nothing to significantly constrain the warmaking powers claimed by the imperial presidency, an inclination based in large part on the demands of electoral expediency. So long as George Bush and the Republicans "own" the War, so long as the ongoing failure can be painted as the unitary act of one party over the cautionary opposition agreement of the other, then perhaps, in two years time, with wounds still open and opening in the Middle East, some vote-getting benefit will devlolve to the Democrats. What they will do beyond such point is unclear, but we can be reasonably certain, at least, that we will hear further cries of "crisis" from all the insiders until at last a sufficiently monarchical power is vested in a President that he may rid us of that troubling document altogether and for good.