One perspective I see in Glenn Greenwald's articles on the ingrown, self-referential and self-interested character of 'official' Washington in general, and the foreign policy "community" in particular: What is the responsibility of a functionary in, or adviser to, the 'administration' and the Washington power structure around it, when the actions of that 'administration' may be judged as illegal and immoral?

This question is a fair context within which to consider the debate that Greenwald, Atrios, Johnathan Schwarz, and others have raised. Aspects of the Moral and the Legal are generally forgotten when discussing the actions of persons like O'Hanlon or Pollack -- or any of the foreign policy "community" who argued for, and continue to support the Iraq war.

Unfortunately, if any mention of this perspective is raised in a "Serious" discussion of foreign policy, it's dismissed by the Wise Ones with a nervous cough, as if the person who'd raised it had just broken wind. Foreign policy isn't about morality, they'd say; It's about power, and practicality. We live in the real world, surrounded by geopolitical power players, and what our government does has to mirror those realities.

Some of these Washington Wise Ones argue, Why shouldn't we rig the game to the advantage of our citizens, our institutions, our country? We can create the legal basis for our actions as we go -- and, please; leave discussions of morality to the theologians. After we've won, we can afford to worry about morality.

The argument for Empire is self-justifying. It assumes that projecting our power is de facto a legal act. Afterwards, those actions will bring the blessings of our superiority to so many... and this will, somehow, make up for whatever damage we caused on the way.

Recently, I've been rereading several books focusing on the mentality of the leadership of the nazi state -- not because America is now the functional equivalent of nazi Germany, but because precisely the dilemma of so many Germans at that time is now our own.

After the nazis were appointed to power and began making sweeping changes in German law and society -- including waging an aggressive war -- persons serving or advising the government had a hard choice: Between what was essentially personal gain, and refusing to support the legal government -- because its actions were illegal, or immoral.

After the war, nazi functionaries, many of them educated, intelligent men, were called to testify before the Nuremberg Tribunal. Reading their lengthy responses to even simple questions is painful: They twist, evade, and equivocate. Their answers are a rationalization of their abandonment of a distinction between right and wrong.

I don't suggest that members of the 'administration', or the government, may be called legally to account for participation in actions which some claim are 'called for under dire circumstances' -- the erosion of Constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights; the waging of an aggressive war based on falsified evidence and untrue statements; acts of systematized violence and torture against individuals at Abu Gihirab, and elsewhere in a network of secret prisons.

However, the foreign policy pundits, analysts and advisers who argued in favor of invading Iraq -- and those who support the 'administration' and its war today -- should be publicly singled out... not as a punishment, but because the 'administration' is utterly wrong and has committed what would have been declared crimes at Nuremberg -- and all justified on the same basis.

They should be called out, publicly -- because their acquiescence to, and vocal support of, these horrific acts makes them the American equivalent of those functionaries at Nuremberg who dissembled in the dock, who had purchased their comfortable lives by supporting acts they knew to be illegal and immoral.

The most burning question asked after the end of the Second World War in Europe was: How? How did ordinary, even extraordinary and intelligent people willingly participate in a system which committed crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination, even today? How did they abandon their consciences, their moral centers?

For those in the foreign policy "community" who support the 'administration' or the Iraq war, I strongly recommend reading Gitta Sereney's Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, or Karl-Heinz Reuband's What We Knew. Also, reviewing Nuremberg Trial testimonies available online through the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School.

It's a very strong recommendation.

[Note: This originally appeared as a Comment of mine to a posting on another site.]

(This is cross-posted on Dkos)

In numerous blog postings over events in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, there has been occasional language which suggested that the Israelis were behaving like nazis in Gaza and Lebanon -- and equal responses that even hinting at these comparisons was anti-Semitic.

I could see what I assumed was being said, on both sides, but it reminded me of demonstrations at various Israeli consulates in the United States this week -- usually two opposing crowds, a sea of Palestinian flags on one side, the blue-and-white of Israel on the other, each separated by the dark blue of police uniforms -- and dull grey of steel barriers, hastily set up. At the demonstration I witnessed, there was no overt violence -- but the atmosphere between the two sides was explosive, ugly and unreasoning in the extreme. There was an ocean of gasoline between them, searching for a flame.

Reading the blog postings and responses -- and they've been on almost every blog discussing the events in Israel and Palestine, and now Lebanon -- I remembered that one casualty of the nazi's rise between 1933 and 1945, was the use of critical language. The nazis repeatedly used specific turns of phrase, keywords, to begin the semantic transformation of the Jews of Germany (and later Europe) into things, not persons -- which would make ordering physical action against them later more simple.

People in Europe and America understand these same phrases, having heard them in documentaries and other media about the nazi era; there are enough Europeans alive (including some of my relatives) who can remember hearing them when they were actually in use. And because of the connections to the Holocaust, no one with any sensibility would contemplate comparing the government of Israel, or Israelis, over their relations with and treatment of Palestinians with the nazis.

The nazi regime practiced genocide -- the international legal definition of which is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. You can debate that, but under either article, I don't believe the actions of Israel's government to be genocidal -- you can describe them as reprehensible, inhumane, potential human rights violations, or limiting and ghettoizing the Palestinians if you prefer; but (again, you can argue the point) they aren't attempting to eliminate Palestinian art, music, or anything else which could be claimed as an expression of a regional culture; and the Israeli government isn't herding the Palestinians into gas chambers on a timetable with the intent of exterminating every single one of them, as a people, forever.

And in using or reacting to criticisim of Israeli actions in language that sounds even remotely like nazi propaganda, it might be helpful to remember that Israel is the one place on the planet where a Jew can be a Jew, without wondering when the next pogrom will occur, and that there are real-world reasons why that is so. The Holocaust is the worst example, but there are others.

But, Israel is also a nation-state, with a government that adopts specific policies and takes specific actions. There is a legitimate complaint on the part of the Palestinians over questions of land and sovereignty, which if it is a responsible nation, Israel's government is supposed to consider and negotiate in fairness. People can be free to criticize decisions or actions of the government of Israel, but not to abscribe those actions to all Jews. It isn't accurate, any more than saying about the Iraqis or Palestinians, or Syrians, or Lebanese, or Saudis, or Kuwaitis, or the OAE, or Iranians or Pakistanis -- 'Oh, you know how all the Arabs are; they're a bunch of tribal children; they're all thieves; and they'd kill every last Jew in the world if they had the chance."

That there is animosity on the level of a blood feud between specific groups of Arabs and Jews is beyond question -- but even so, that comment isn't accurate, either.

And, remember -- the United States is also a nation-state with a government, carrying out policies which under U.S. and international law may be determined unconstitutional and war crimes; which polls indicate few of our citizens want or support. As individual citizens, the distinction that "our 'government' is not acting in my name" is nearly the last refuge we have in any discussion of what that government continues to do. And there are Israelis who feel similarly about their own.

________________

All this triggered a whole series of memories around how I know what I know of European history, and what the nazis did there over the twelve years of their rule. In part, we're sensitive to anti-Semitic language -- to language that denigrates anyone on the basis of race, or religion, or even food choice -- through studies about the Holocaust which are (fortunately) now a part of scholastic curriculums.

The context of the teaching is not that the Holocaust was only a crime against the Jewish people (it was), but a stain and a crime against all of humanity. In order to prevent its repetition, for any people, you have to study genocide's most obvious and monstrous example -- because, sometimes, social responsibility has to be learned. And empathy.

What I took away from my own education was that even the Holocaust could give birth to a hopeful paradigm -- if people can recognize, and empathize with the suffering, the pain and fear of others, their response to that as individuals, and hopefully as governments, would come in action and not apathy. If people could learn to respond to that internal connection, we might begin to unlearn some of the supported beliefs around violence, hatred, and revenge that marks almost every corner of the planet to one degree or another.

(Someone may say, Oh, we know so much about the Holocaust because Jewish, and Zionist, organizations have promoted it as an act of manipulating guilt. I reject that; it's an argument David Irving might raise -- but whatever your heritage or race, if your people had experienced an almost universal persecution, over thousands of years, wouldn't you sieze the opportunity in turning an unthinkable human tragedy into a teaching lesson, for everyone, and to insure you could live without fear, handed down across generations like a dark heirloom, of being discriminated against, robbed, and murdered? I would. And so would you.)

Considering this and what is unfolding in the Middle East didn't stop there, for me, and the events of the past two weeks made me think seriously about the United States and Israel, about the Palestinians; about Iraq, the Sunni and Shiites; and Iran, which appears more and more to be the next target of a dangerous, and (in my opinion) criminally malevolent government.

________________

One of my memories as a boy is looking at a photograph in a book about the Second World War: A seven- or eight-year-old boy, part of a group of Jews being rounded up for transport, wearing a flat cap, knee pants and a coat with a Star of David sewn on it, his hands raised; in the background is an SS sargeant with a machine pistol.

I reread the book a number of times, and always paused over that picture to focus on the boy's face. The uncertainty, the fear, is obvious; his looking away from the photographer (probably wearing an SS uniform themselves); you can read the question in his expression: Where are we going? What is happening to me? Why are you doing this to us? The group he was with were being rounded up for Auschwitz, and in the selection on the loading ramp after arrival, his chances for survival were slim and none.

Later, I learned that the photograph had been used to positively identify the SS sargeant with the MP-40 standing in the background, and to send him to prison in West Germany. At the time, I felt a momentary rush of vengeful anger, satisfaction: Good; you should've blown his brains out instead.

In retrospect -- even though I was fifteen at the time -- I was studying a relic, another grave marker, in the long history of human violence and and revenge, and I really had learned nothing.

_________________

For almost twenty years, I've watched from the safe and comfortable remove of America as the Palestinians and Israelis continue to spin in that cycle. My constant feeling has been one of discomfort -- as if I had an appointment for something, but have continually put off meeting it. Whenever the subject of Israel, the Palestinians, the Intifada, Rabin's murder, came up in conversation, I used the same language as everyone else I spoke with: Horrible. Tragic. I just don't understand what's going on. Then I, or someone else, would change the subject.

After September 11th, and when the Iraq war began, it was natural, and easy, to focus on America's actions, our invasion; on the decisions of our sainted leaders. But that was still a comfortable remove -- especially in the bloody years after the invasion of Iraq, the continuing agony in Gaza and the West Bank, the suicide bombings in Israel -- and I knew intellectually what horror I was witnessing, but some voice in my mind kept repeating, They can't stop themselves; what can anyone do? What can I do?

Over the past year or so, I'd seen two photographs, from Israel and Palestine, on news websites which made me pause to study them. In the past several weeks, I've remembered them, held them side by side in my mind. They became, for me, a hand tugging at my coat, at my sleeve, from the level a child could reach. Something wants my attention, and I can't shake it off.

One photo showed a Palestinian boy of ten or twelve, dressed in dirty jeans and a torn green T-Shirt, his body swung in a classic pose as if he had just thrown a discus; he had just thrown a rock at an Israeli armored vehicle in Gaza. His expression seemed an utter abandonment to an anger and defiance that comes from the worst despair, part of the bottom of the human barrel of experience -- your rage is so all-encompassing, in that moment, you're willing to throw stones at a tank. For that instant, you don't care what happens to you because things are that bad.

Not a circumstance many Americans can identify with.

The other photograph was almost nondescript, except for its context: A middle-aged Israeli couple, standing at the side of the grave of their teenaged daughter, killed by a suicide bomber while out on a date. It may have been the speed of a camera shutter capturing a single moment, but they weren't yet wailing or gesturing; only standing quietly, the man's arm around his wife's shoulders. It was all in looking closely at their faces.

To me, the immensity of their grief was palpable; it jumped off the screen; and in that captured instant was so reined in, internalized, you knew how inexpressible their wound was. It was a sealed room they would carry with them for the rest of their lives. It was a depth of loss that separated them from the 'ordinary' world as if part of them would always be adrift on an ocean, never reaching any safe harbor again.

Both photographs, and other images that have come out of entire Middle East, made me look at them in the same way I'd studied the black-and-white photo of the European boy, years ago. And then I understood that my appointment with what all of these images represented couldn't be put off any longer. And it didn't only deal with the Middle East.

_________________

In all of my considering about the Holocaust, what part it played in teaching me about my own relation to human tragedy, is one of the roots of my response to the cycle of violence and revenge in the Middle East. What I took away from that part of European history was some idea of the depth of pain and misery we can inflict on each other, for reasons that are so worthless, so ignorantly devisive, that it still makes me feel ashamed, injured as a human being that any of my own species were responsible for it.

It taught me that any violence, any oppression against others, anywhere, should be resisted before it became something as dark as the organized murder of the Camps -- because the permission to commit mass murder for a belief in modern history was dragged into this world by the nazis, and could reappear. (And it has. Ask Cambodians of a certain age about Pol Pot. Ask the Muslims who were "ethnically cleansed" in what was once Jugoslavia. Ask almost any Rwandan.)

For me, the Holocaust was a lesson for all people, not just Europeans, or Arabs, or Chinese. It was a teaching story as much as any written by Nasrudeen or Confucius, one that applies equally to any people, any culture. And in part it informs my response to what is happening in the Middle East; and that is this:

It has to stop. It has to end. The way to interrupt a cycle of violence and revenge is to stop.

It's an act of sincerity, of hope in the face of what all rhetoric and what passes for reason says is wrong. But the time for only speech to stop violence is past. Someone needs to step forward, put their gun on the ground, and say, I do this even if I feel it isn't what I should do -- because all of this has to stop.

I'm aware of how this may sound, to some: It's simplistic and naive, more emotional and unsophisticated one-world nonsense. But I would argue that at this moment, we are beyond sophistication and rhetoric. There is a point at which the amount of death and misery no longer matters; a point where it's no longer important whom to blame -- only that it ends. And that point has been passed.

The circumstances in the entire Middle East at this moment have the potential to become a wider war in the blink of an eye. Some may see it as an opportunity to take on all Arabic governments or groups perceived as hostile to the United States and force them, somehow, to surrender; others may see it as an opportunity to unite the Arabic and Islamic world as never before against a hostile and imperialist West. Both of these perspectives are insane.

Would either side trade the life of any child for some goal, some belief they claim is more important than life? Go, look into that child's eyes. Look hard. Look at the expression written there: Where are you taking us? Why are you doing this? What will happen to me?

Will you tell them, when you put your pistol to their head, that it's for a greater good, for the glory of a faith; because your brother or sister, or your parent or cousins, were killed and revenge demands that now their life has to end?

Some are saying yes, to that. Some say their beliefs are worth taking any life, even a child's. That the lives of others, because they have different faiths, are worth less than their own. Because death demands more death.

People like this leave me stunned with an honest wonder, at whether we will survive as a species. Anyone who thinks that a belief or a side in an argument, or a religion, is the basis for killing a single human being is wrong.

There will be time enough for talk; it will be critical, unavoidable. But in the moment a choice is made for the violence to stop, it doesn't matter which side is wrong, more brutal, or who has the right to what land, who killed more of whose people; which religion is the more correct, or who stands on more of a moral high ground so as to shoot down on the Other.

It doesn't matter who actually takes the first step -- only that someone does. And it may not be a government or a side who takes that step; it may be one person, in one place and time who says None of this is right. I refuse to participate. I stand up as a single human being and say no.

Because this is what it comes down to. This is the appointment every single human being has: With our own consciences, with a real and wider world -- with the choice to save the child, or shoot them and by so doing proclaim that beliefs are worth more than life. And nearly as a species, we've defered that appointment for so long that it's a time which is coming to find us.

If we continue to refuse to face up to our responsibility, refuse to recognise we are parts of a community of human beings -- if we walk away from the child's hand we feel tugging at our sleeves, we may not have many more opportunities. And when real trouble comes -- even for all of us -- by then, it may be too late.

Lawrence Kaplan, on the New Republic's website, posted a brief three paragraphs on the insurgency in Iraq (I won't link to TNR on principle; you can read it in full via Josh Marshall, here.); it was a litany of real terror, and a stuttering admission by one of the Right's passionate neocon supporters of the war.

Kaplan's post made me consider what appears to be his grudging, dawning awareness of the utter horror our lack of foresight, our lack of any foreign policy, has brought to the people of Iraq -- and that one consequence of the neocon's bankrupt political theories may be the beginning of the end of one of humankind's most creative eras.

It wasn't an admission that he, and the rest of the neoconservative mitwissers were wrong in what they planned, or that they - along with Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley, Franks, Powell, Wolfowitz, and other members of the Cheney administration -- are personally responsible in some degree for making violence like this possible:

One international official told me of reports among his staff that a 15-year-old girl had been beheaded and a dog's head sewn on her body in its place; and of a young child who had had his hands drilled and bolted together before being killed. [Kaplan quoting CNN's Nic Robertson]

Instead, Kaplan fumbled with the truth and his own lack of personal responsibility, and only shrugged out an admission of policy failure, finally saying:

Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot. [All Emphasis added]

No matter how reprehensible and abhorrent the belief structure of a person like Kaplan may be, after pushing hard for an aggressive projection of American power into the world, he now tells everyone: No matter what we had done in Iraq, the all-but-openly-declared civil war between Sunnis and Shiites would have happened anyway.

Which naturally begs the question, If there were no WMD's, no Iraqi links to Al-Qaeda; if a civil war was the inevitable result; if we were going to suffer useless casualties, and condemn innocent civilians to die in cities without reliable electricity or sewage or proper medical care... If we knew children would be decapitated and mutilated -- then, why did we invade the country?

I don't think Kaplan has an answer to these questions -- or, rather, he's already given the answer; as much of one as we're likely to get from him or those like him.

I'd like to celebrate the fact that someone, who arguably has a degree of blood on his hands, begrudgingly admits that the philosophic core around which he's constructed his working life as an adult is a failure -- worse, the spirit of that philosophy has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings.

I'd feel gratified -- except my mind keeps returning to the images of a mutilated child's corpse. I try to imagine the rage, the need to dominate as an antidote to despair, and the utter lack of empathy in the human being who committed such an atrocity.

Even if Robertson's CNN report turned out to be apocryphal, there are plentiful horrors in Iraq with more documentation:

... Green and other soldiers planned to rape a young woman who lived near the checkpoint they manned in Mahmoudiya... three soldiers allegedly accompanied Green into the house, and another soldier was told to monitor the radio while the assault took place.... Green shot the woman's relatives, including a girl of about 5; raped the young woman; then fatally shot her... [the soldiers]  then set the family's house afire... [CNN, 7/10/06, "U.S. Military Names Soldiers Charged In Rape, Murder Probe"]

In this story, too, I try to fathom the rage, the pain, and the utter lack of empathy.

That absence of the ability to identify with another human being's misery and fear has the chance to become the hallmark of the early 21st Century.

Not precisely the legacy Kaplan and his crowd had in mind.

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

It has been five years since the Cheney administration, and the peevish dullard who is its mouthpiece, decided to inflict on America and the world a mixture of arrogant brutality abroad and a `faith-based', corrupt, Fox-news culture at home. It's routinely exposed as a rudderless government which, in its pathology and disorganization, encourages anti-intellectualism and "enlightened self-interest", and rules by fear in place of policy. It isn't Nineteen Eighty-Four; it's Brazil.

It's a prevalent opinion that the small clique of `christian' zealots and hardcase neocons running the country enable violence and corruption in the world simply through example. They would like America to become a more pliable society -- one in which the past hundred and fifty years of social progress, much of it bought with lives, can be supressed. But we aren't alone -- Islamic fundamentalists would also like to turn the clock back, by five hundred, or even a thousand years.

All of this makes made me consider what we, as a civilization spanning a planet, really have to lose in the present ideological conflict, created by two very similar groups of men: the spirit of reason, and the conscience of the future.

The Enlightenment -- described in Wikipedia as a flowering of "rationalization, standardization and the search for fundamental unities ... the economics of Adam Smith, the physical chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier, the idea of evolution pursued by Goethe; the declaration by Jefferson of inalienable rights [which] in the end overshadowed the idea of divine right and direct alteration of the world by the hand of God."

The Enlightenment began based in faith, but drove the growth of secular philosophy and logic as the basis for science -- and works by Rousseau, Voltaire; eventually Thomas Jefferson's and Tom Paine's writings, leading to a political and social Revolution that put actual fact behind the ideals of inalienable rights and the equality of humankind.

But the entire period was a process, a backlash against six hundred years of Feudalism and the intellectual constraints of the Middle Ages. No doubt: it created as many opportunities for repression and violent change, and helped to foster a variety of social ills -- but it has been the foundations for much of what we claim to be the best about Western culture. It has been an almost unbroken tapestry of thought, achievement and experimentation, which not even the disruption of the Great War, or fascism and the Holocaust that followed, could extinguish.

Reading Nic Robertson's quote in Kaplan's post made me consider that in the ebb and flow of history, in the early 21st Century we may be experiencing another backlash that has always lain under the surface - one against an almost unfettered, sometimes chaotic progression of secular thought. It's a backlash against what some see as the real evils in personal freedom and creativity - the rise of openly gay identity; the images in modern art, literature and film; a diminishing of religion as a primary cultural focus; the development of the consciousness of Feminism, the expansion of women's roles, and the establishment of reproductive rights.

(With not much of a stretch, you could include Social Security, Medicare; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, paid for in blood and pain and lives; and many workplace rights protecting every American with a job, which were bought at the price of one hundred years of strikes and blood on the picket lines. The conservative Taliban in this country -- some of them squatting in Congress, claiming to be Republicans -- would consider it manna from heaven if they could erase or repeal most of the major social legislation created since 1933.)

This cultural backlash intends to replace the best possibilities of our future with fear, and can only offer answers to uncertainty through the comfort of unquestioning faith. And it is taking place in both the Western, 'Christian' world, and the Muslim.

At some point -- after Paul Wolfowitz (as the primary author), Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressed then-President George H. W. Bush to adopt a strategic posture based on a no-apologies, do-ya-feel-lucky-punk? aggression; and after the GOP decided upon a political strategy which relied heavily on fundamentalist 'christians', the foundations were laid to export what the new Right termed a "cultural war" from America to the Middle East. And Iraq was already the target.

Even after September 11th, it was a confrontation that didn't have to occur -- but the Lawrence Kaplans worked to make it a certainty. And the geopolitical outcome? A large portion of the Muslim world more and more alienated from not only U.S., but European and 'Western' culture. America -- increasingly isolated from the world community, seen as a rogue state, referred to by some as "the new nazis" -- sliding towards economic decline as the rising cost of war, coupled with what will shortly be a nine trillion dollar National Debt will make our 'higher standard of living' unsustainable for all but "the 'haves' and the 'have mores' ", as the dullard says.

(If Gibbons were alive, it's even money he would either shake his head sadly at our going the way of Rome, or be laughing fit to bust at the irony of it all. That we may well have passed a tipping point for our country, as well as in the global environment, fills me with disgust; it is enough, seriously, to break spirits and hearts. Not that Cheney or any in his administration miss a moment's sleep or give a damn.)

This is the result of the real `clash of civilizations' - a contest between states of consciousness. It is a contest between the freedom to ask 'Why?', and a pathological greed for power masquerading as patriotism and religious faith. Both Islamic and American fundamentalists draw their strength from similar currents, because their desire for domination is based on an interpretation of a prevailing religion. Both sides spout politically extreme rhetoric, and both are fighting to convince their populations of the rightness of their cause.

So on one hand, we get Hidatha -- the slaughter of thirty-plus villagers, an Iraqi Mi Lai -- and on the other, July 10th's murder of forty Sunnis in Baghdad by Shiia militia who pulled terrified people from their cars, demanded identification, and killed anyone whose ID bore a Sunni surname.

On one side, torture and secret prisons; on the other, a child's hands drilled through and bolted together -- while they were still living; before they were murdered.

When bin Laden refers to Bush as a `Crusader', a description of a religious zealot, with overtones of imperialism, aggressively proud of his ignorance, it isn't far from the mark. But bin Laden is Bush's political and religious doppelganger -- he, and other Islamic fundamentalists, dream of a world with only a single permitted religion, where tribal domination and corruption are the major themes -- and where bin Laden and Al-Zwahiri become the political and spiritual leaders of an entire faith.

Bush is the self-appointed poster child for a world where American democracy is spread abroad (through military action, or the threat of it), with our mission to end "evil" (and shape international events to our liking); to place former enemies -- even if they never knew they were enemies of America -- on the path to "Freedom" (and maintain majority control over natural resources, to keep our petroleum-driven economy afloat for a few more election cycles).

At home, a minority of 'christian' true believers, whom the GOP now depends upon as a voting base, have to be served; and Bush -- who says he is a 'christian' as they are -- claims to be able to deliver their votes. Bush's handlers -- the Robertsons and Dobsons, the Cheneys and Feiths and Wolfowitzes, the lobbyists and CEOs who require the GOP to court them before being paid for services to be rendered -- these are the real leaders.

Bush lives in a bubble of self-delusion about the extent of his authority and power. He appears to believe that by making speech after speech before pre-selected civilian audiences, or soldiers, about faith and sacrifice; our noble dead; and our economy whose upward growth is always just around the corner is proof that he is the President -- but not one serious 'Presidential' decision is made without Cheney's knowledge and concurrence.

(Offering the unsubstantiated observations of friends, they advise me that the word in Washington has been for some time that Bush is referred to, dismissively, by critics and even GOP insiders as "Charlie" -- i.e., Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist's dummy -- based on Bush's continual, and [to some Republicans who witness it] embarrassing deference to and obvious reliance on Cheney during numerous meetings.)

Both Bush and bin Laden appear to believe that obtaining and keeping power, wielded through a domination that tolerates no opposition, are qualities of leadership more important than compassion and service. Both offer examples to the world of leadership that justifies violence as legitimate because they, as the leader, say it is, and rationalize the brutality of any directive or order through scripture or appeals to prejudice and revenge.

And, both men are icons for, the personification of, groups which each need the existence of the other in order to justify the crimes their leadership orders carried out.

I don't have the ability or the right (no one does, I think), to judge the relative evil in sewing a dog's head on the body of a murdered child, decapitated simply because she was of a different religious sect -- versus a child blown to pieces by airborne munitions simply because she lived in or near a designated target. To my mind, both leave me equally speechless with horror and sadness.

What I fear most is that much of the world, exhausted by war and the threat of violence, will drift further into fear and seductively simple answers - and that we lose both sides of the human heritage: the freedom of an honest spiritual search, and the full development of our intelligence, ability, and recognition of the inherent equality in being human.

Sadly, these don't appear to be valid goals for True Believers on either side of the conflict between radical conservatives in the East, and the West.

The Feiths and Kristoffs and Kaplans can continue to mumble about success or failure of their war, but they will always continue to miss the essential point - not that there would have been a civil war in Iraq, no matter what we did ... but that their political theories, which pushed for, demanded that invasion, have made the rise of a darker and more brutal world possible. That their dreams in projecting American power into the Middle East have ended -- in a nightmare, which their mouthpiece has said will be solved by some other President, after the dullard leaves the office purchased for him -- in 2009.

America, for all its serious faults, once embodied for a large part of the world the hope that people might achieve the best in the human spirit, secular and spiritual. I want to believe we still have an opportunity to salvage our country, for our own sake if not for a wider community -- we could do far worse than aspiring to set the standards for How A Democratic System Should Work, and How A Diverse Society Can Succeed.

We need to. It may be the only chance for salvation for our national soul, because we are going to have to suffer the consequences for what these people have done and are still doing, claiming to do so in our names.

If all we have to hold on to, on the day when the trouble comes, are self-serving rhetoric of Republican politicians and the hollow smiles of a Reed or a Dobson, then as a People we will truly be in great and mortal peril.

Trying to turn the ship might save us from ending up in the 'dustbin of history' -- just another failed nation-state which sold its principles for the price of a no-bid contract, or rigging economic distribution to benefit a small percentage of its citizens. Or, where political conservatives forced a government to follow a questionable and nightmarish strategic policy -- the kind that creates a rage and despair so deep it ends in the decapitation of a child. And which, possibly, helped create a world where secular and humanist views we take for granted, in 2006, are not only historical footnotes but forbidden.