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.

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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.