I'd invite Mr. Goldberg – or anyone else – to poll those positions, and find out how well they do. Not just in the Democratic Party, but in the party has a whole. The beltway zeitgeist that what American needs after 30 years of reactionary Republicans and conservative Democrats is a conservative Democrat to clean up the mess so that we can have another reactionary Republican lurch America yet farther to the right in 2012 or 2016 – simply does not make sense given the hard numbers that the polls have.

The problem with the Democratic Party and the White House isn't a matter of positions, but a matter of stance. The American people want out of Iraq, they want a different economic course and a different structure to the economy. The faster home prices drop, the less attached to the current order they become. When gas was cheap and homes were dear, people were willing to go along. Now, they poll heavily on the description of America, being on the "wrong track".

This means that the salient fact isn't liberal/conservative identification, it is right track/wrong track. The Republican Congress needs to convince a third of the people who believe America is on the wrong track to vote for the status quo. That is, they have to sell the idea that the only thing wrong with America is that people have too much access to health care, and are expecting too much from Social Security. There simply aren't that many people who believe that God is punishing America for allowing homosexuals to marry in three states.

The individual who offers the most incisive comment is possible Republican Presidential candidate – Newt Gingrich. His advice to the Democrats was to run on "Had Enough?" Given that a swath of Democratic activists have adopted "Enough is Enough" as the informal slogan of this campaign – it isn't coming completely from right field.

The challenge – as presidential scholar Wilentz notes, is that to revive a Democratic grand coalition, requires someone who can do it. It should be noted that in 1930 the Democrats muddled out gains, simply because the economy had already begun sinking like a stone, but they did not have a clear idea of what they were too do. That Congress produced "Smoot Hawley" and a house that fiddled with intentions without ideas.

However, for all of its faults, that Congress served as the springboard to FDR's electoral existence, because it meant that FDR's coattails needed to give him a strong working majority, and not merely a bankshot play for a merely numerical one.

Thus we are treated to a very one sided article that is a paean to one particular viewpoint, that of "the swingers". The swingers believe that the focus should be on the most stupid 1% of the electorate that votes, but is only marginally attached to the political system. The friends of people who barely pay attention to politics, but can be mobilized by peer pressure. It's led to the longest losing streak for the Democrats in Congress since the 1920's – but once again is demanding complete control of the party. Dean's rise is, to no small extent, the result of a mounting frustration, not just among adherents, but by state party committees – with this "media bomb the battlegrounds" approach. As in Vietnam, just dropping bombs hasn't done the trick, so the top downers want to drop more bombs.

And this is one of the key issues that Goldberg looks at, and then side steps – the internal contradiction of the swinger electoral strategy. On the one hand Rahm Emmanuel criticizes Dean for putting money all over the map – and on the other hand, moderate patron saint Warner attacks the notion of a "16 State Strategy" – hoping for a "triple bankshot" win in Ohio or Florida. Which is it? Are elections won by "opening up new areas of the country" or in pouring resources into swing areas. If Holding the base and attacking into Florida and Ohio is bad for Kerry, why is attacking only into close swing districts in 2008 good for Emmanuel?

Arrayed against the swingers, are those who seek a transformation by building a movement. The builders look at the swingers failure, and wonder why it is media consultants demand that the party and the movement spend all of the available money every election cycle on ads whose effects are, to use a Keatsian phrase, writ on water. The progressive side of the ledger has a coherent idea, namely, to turn a nation that is split 20-50-30 Liberal-Moderate Conservative, to one that is split 30-50-20 Progresive/Centrist/Reactionary. All three words are important. The key to this conversion is to talk to the third of people who are "modetate" on the 1960's division of the country, but who fee a growing frustration with business as usual. These people are not part of the party's metropolitan or near metropolitan base, they are found in rural areas hit by the price of gasoline, and pressures from immigration and lack of basic industry.

The "swing" strategy pays a great deal more attention to a group of people who are both farther away from the Democratic Party base, and who are harder to persuade of the need for transformation, easier to drift on hot button issues, and, vote for vote, far more expensive. Than the progressive moderates.

However, going after either group involves what could be called "pain" and not optional pain.

The reasons for this are two fold, the people who are most likely to go over to being full time progressives are represented, on the whole, by the individual politicians who have made more of a career out of bashing the base than most. The paradigmatic example is Joe Lieberman. Taking out a few cardinal moments, and Joe Lieberman is a progressive – and even on many occasions a Liberal. The Department of Homeland Security is a big government liberal approach.

However the asides are large, and the reasons for this are obvious politically: first, he must hold onto a large sliver of votes who have to have passionate differentiation from politicians who are "left" of Lieberman. Secondly, his state consists of people who are connected with the metro-economy, but do not want to live in the metropolis itself. For these reasons, the intensity of identification must be stronger. As a result, Lieberman has made himself "George Bush's favorite democrat". Even though, for example, Ben Nelson of Nebraska is much more conservative than Lieberman is.

But Lieberman represents the left flank of the moderates who are ready to bolt from George Bush. More important to progressive aspirations are the moderate 6 of the North east – Specter, Collins, Snowe, Chaffee, DeWine and Voinavich. Voinavich and Specter survived challenges in 2004 – protected by the wave of stasis in the country – DeWine and Chaffee face challenges this year, along with the probable defeat of Santorum by Conservative Democrat Bob Casey.

And it is in Casey that we see the difference between the two strategies and their effects. Casey, a dynasty politician had no effective opposition in the primary, even though he is against key issues that the base supports – possible challengers were cleared out. It is not that the DSCC needed to nominate a conservative to win the race in Pennsylvania – it is that it is cheaper to do so, and that is seen by the swing strategy moderates as freeing up resources for other races. In the swing moderate strategy, getting two Senators who will often vote against the party, is much better than getting one that will always vote with the party. Conservative Democrats, breed other conservative Democrats.

Lieberman, who is to the left of Casey, has a very serious challenge in Ned Lamont – it isn't that bloggers and internetizens were not willing to back a challenge to Casey in Pennsylvania, it is that local passions in Pennsylvania were not aroused by stopping Casey, where as the anger at Lieberman's neglecting of the party stalwarts in Connecticut was the powder on which ideological sparks fell. Even with credentialing out pro-Lamont delegates from Hartford, Leiberman had 30% of the delegates go against him. In some cases whole towns voted straight slate against Lieberman.

There in lies the difference – in Pennsylvania Democratic support is heavily concentrated in two cities, and a few patches around the capital. In Connecticut, there are Democrats everywhere. In PA, pay attention to the local base in two cities, and there is no possibility of revolt.

These two facts – that a more liberal sitting Senator has more opposition than a conservative nominee – and that part of the difference is that in one state there are Democrats everywhere, and in the other races are fought by piling up big margins in the cities, and then swinging key suburbs – define the conflict between the swing strategy moderates, and the transformation strategy progressives. To a moderate the base is a geographic fact, and the moderates are defined by hot button images that evoke the instability of the 1960's and early 1970's.

What this points to is that the swing moderates are thinking as old politics media politics. The race is about whatever CNN Headline News puts in tight rotation. Even in the case of Warner, who is billing himself as the first dot com presidential campaign, the question, in the end is hot button images, and geography. And when a swinger talks about geography, he means "the Sowth". Not the south, the Sowth. Bubbaland. It's not an authentic South, any more than DeLay, Gingrich or Bush are authentic southerners, but it is a south which has a highly stylized sense of its identity, which passes for authenticity.

The transformers – even though their strategy is as geographically based as the swinger's strategy, do not think of themselves as being located in a particular geographic place.

The transformers, if they are to have power at the party table, must win over the course of the next 6 years, the 8 seats which are the natural proof of the transformative thesis: that there are a wave of people willing to defect: Santorum, Lieberman, Chaffee, Collins, Snowe, DeWine, Specter and Voinavich.must be replaced by transformation progressives. They must also win in the region which would shatter the notion that the transformation progressives are merely angrier lefties with better websites.

This reach is the Rockies and the desert southwest ex-Utah and Idaho. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona. Currently these states are home to some of the most conservative of Republicans, they are seen as being naturally conservative areas. But if one looks at the "red pole" of America – that band running parallel to the Mississippi, only 350 miles West from the Texas Border to Idaho – these states are not in that batch of counties where George W. Bush is still doing, as far as the locals are concerned, a good job.

The builders then see the Northeast as "the new South" the place where there will be a radical shift in party allegiance to a new ideology. They also see the super sunbelt – Robert David Sullivan's southern most presidential band in his influential article on Beyond Red and Blue.

The builders see the challenge as taking the presidential dominance in the Upper Coasts region, the Great Lakes region and the Northeast Corridor, and translate that into Congressional dominance – meaning the flipping of a host of House seats and the core Senate Seats. Added to this is making inroads in Northern Virginia which is beginning to creep into the Northeast Corridor, and tactical assaults into the Southern Lowlands. But most importantly, it means welding El Norte into the Democratic Presidential and Congressional Coalition.

In this world view – the attacks into the areas of Republican dominance – even into core Republican areas like Southern Comfort and Sagebrush, are not diversions which waste money, but key to the concept of making it so that the Republicans, rather than the Democrats, enter every election with a defensive mindset, thinking about how to protect their candidates from the Democratic line of attack. By pressuring even the Republican base - it places elections outside of the Republican advantage in money.

A large part of the reason for this is not merely that the Republicans have the money advantage, but because the Republicans, as keepers of the pork, are able to marshal the resources of the Defense Department and other federal apparatus to bomb real money, not just media money, on marginal races. They did it successfully in 2002 and 2004 – and are going to try and do it again in 2006.

The builder's moderates are not Southern anti-cosmopolitan voters, but

With a geographic base of Upper Coasts, Great Lakes, Big River, Northeast Corridor and El Norte – the Democrats will begin with a larger base of electoral votes than the Republicans, and have more places to attack. The key to the workability of this strategy is to shift Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada into the "toss up, leans Democrat" colum from the Republican to toss up leans Republican categories – and most importantly, flipping Ohio into the Presidential coalition. The key to Republican victory since 1988, as been the shifting of Texas to being the anchor man of the Republican coalition. By shifting Ohio to the Democrats, the net value of Texas is limited – instead of a huge block of electoral votes, money, candidates, and ethos – all rolled into one, the Republican Party is the Texas Party – the Republicans will have traded Texas for the rest of the old North, and for the hot southern rim of the country.

- - -

This leads to two fundamentally different futures. The builders see the Party's base as being people with aspirations to a better life, while the swingers see the base as being people who have no choice but to vote to protect ever eroding programs and rights. The swingers tell the base "vote for us, serfs, or it is so much the worse for you." In the world of apocalyptic direct mail appeals, and media bombing of the guns, gays and god crowd with the latest big government bribe – the base is something to be attacked in order to get swing votes. Trade 10 base votes in New York for one precious one in North Carolina or Virginia.

The sign is that institutionally, the swingers are winning the battle to be the institutional party. One indicator of this is that Hillary Clinton is the hands down favorite to be the Democratic nominee – and that Mark Warner is the hands down favorite to be the Vice Presidential nominee. Warner's candidacy contains a second proof – Jerome Armstrong's joining of his campaign team to reach out to the "net roots". Warner, with enough money is trying to coöpt both a center of anti-Hillary sentiment – according to polls 12% of all Democrats see Hillary unfavorably, but the proportion in the electronic space is much larger – and to establish that if she wants to have swinger credibility, she has to make him the Vice Presidential nominee, and thus the front runner in 2012 should she lose.

Warner then can tell Hillary that if she wants a crack at the South - particularly the possibly in play Arkansas, Virginia and North Carolina electoral votes - she has to come to him. And if she wants to quell the rebellion on her flank, she has to come to him.

However, it is not clear whether this strategy is going to be enough – the builders have been unhappy with personnel in the Democratic Party, but they are not solely about candidates. Instead, the very steps that a swinger party wants to take – emphasize the Democratic Party as a service delivery party – are exactly what the builders don't agree with.

The builders, however, need a candidate. The road to builder candidacy is a realization among "The Big Five" of unHillary candidates – Kerry, Edwards, Gore, Clark and Feingold – that as five candidates they are fighting over 40% of the vote, and cannot conceivably beat Hillary's base of 40% - with 10% due to head to the right flanking VP candidate, of whom Warner is going to clobber Biden and Dodd who are currently in that pool.

With an agreement among the big five to choose one of them as the candidate – by, for example, agreeing to have a series of "preprimary" internet tests which will determine which is given the chance to be the standard bearer – and a decision that they must gut Hillary early and establish the builder ethos as their own – the 2008 race becomes interesting, because at that point Hillary is squeezed. On the right Warner will eat into the South, blocking Hillary from rolling up early victories, on the left, she will get hammered on the war, budgets and basic bread and butter civil libertarian issues. Warner will have an incentive to keep hammering Hillary, because the builder candidate will need him as much, if not more, than Hillary does.

In the general election, with a builder running against McCain, the circumstances are different. Rather than being the last television election between two well known media brands, it will be McCain's television brand, against the builder's electronic one. And McCain can be beaten at close quarters, because he is personally brittle and can be cracked. Hillary can't crack McCain on television, in no small part because she, like him, is a brittle television personality.

So in the end, the future comes down to whether the builders get a chance to flip the left most moderates into a permanent stance as progressives, or whether the swingers get their way and spend millions, again, convincing a few people that they hate the Republicans a little more than they fear the Democrats.

I feel that Jonathan Alter's book on FDR's "First Hundred Days" is a timely and useful addition to the discourse, well researched and filled with well taken points.

Which is why his Newsweek column is so disappointing. It is a poorly researched, poorly thought out, factually inaccurate. He gets basic terms wrong, such as what "Open Source" means. He didn't do his research, since he contacted no one who is an acknowledged creator of the term or the idea. He instead commits a series of intellectual dishonest catagorical blunders, in a dishonest attempt to push top down thinking. In every respect, this article is a disservice to his readers, in that it lies to them about the basic mean of terms.

he first point is the meaning of the term "Open Source". Alter instead pushes a top down viral project. There is no "open source" here - there is no core code, nor submission of code - as opposed to preference - to that center, tested beyond consensus. SEIU's "Since Sliced Bread" is partially open source, but Unity '08 is simply American Idol on the internet.

Open source is the process of opening not merely expression of preferences - which is consumerism - but basic material. Unity08 doesn't do that, the source is closed, the ideology is closed. It's not digitality - it's cheap post-modernism.

What is worse is that Alter stenos basic inaccuracies. The biggest historical howler is on how "extremes" have seized the nominating process. Looking at the Democratic Party, other than in the case of LBJ in 1964 and Clinton in 1996 each of whom had no competition - one has to go back to Adlai Stevenson to find a case where the most liberal/left viable candidate was nominated. In 2004 Dean was considered left of Kerry, in 2000 Bradley left of Gore. In 1992 Clinton was not the left most candidate, but an intentional product of a southern "Super Tuesday". In 1998 Brown and Jesse Jackson Jr. were to the left of Dukakis, neither Hart nor Mondale established themselves as left of the other, Carter beat a left challenge from Ted Kennedy in 1980, he was the centrist who beat Mo Udall in 1976. McGovern was not the farthest left Democrat in 1972, that was McCarthy. As it was in 1968 when HHH was the nominee. In 1960 Stevenson hoped for a third draft. JFK ran as being to the right of LBJ, as a "conservative" Democrat.

In short an examination of the record shows that the nomination of the Democratic Party isn't beholden to its extremes, or to its left base. And Alter's supposed to be historian - why didn't push back?

New - that's the one thing this isn't. The attempt to use fake viral is as old as marketting - hiring a crowd.

Alter writes about "New Open Source Politics" and gets three words wrong. But one thing was write - it has gone viral - to the Washington Post. The The Post and the Post have both jumped on board accepting the astro-smurfing.

What is astrosmurfing? Astrosmurfing is simply fake netroots, just like astroturfing is fake grass roots. The "Unity 08" is a bunch of washed ups who can't get in the big game, trying to use cheap hit and run and their rolodex to gin something up. There is, in fact, alot of demand for a third party run - but Unity 08 is a bunch of consultants looking for a candidate to raise money and pay them.

Viral isn't the same thing as open source, something can be viral, and still closed. Word of mouth is viral, but not everything passed by word of mouth is open source. A party can exist on a laptop, but if people are only given consumerized, bottom, preferences, it is no more open source than MS Windows is - another thing which spread virally through pirating, but is not open source in any way.

Thus what we have is cheap old politics, fascinated by the low barrier to entry of the internet, trying to get in on the game. This isn't the first time. For example, the telecos tried to create a libertarian astrosmurfing of net neutrality, begging libertarians "not to regulate" the internet. It didn't work, because the "don't get it" nature of the astrosmurfers is still out there.

How do I know that people like Alter don't get it? Where is his email address? It isn't on his site, it isn't on his piece. Any time someone can bellow at you, and you can't even email back to him, it is a clear sign of being a top downer.

Astrosmurfing - coming soon to a K Street lobbying group near you.

The announcement of Snow's resignation from the Treasury and his probable replacement rates, in reality, as non-news. Snow was never a core policy making member of the government. While rumored to be an advocate of a "strong dollar", the reality is that there is not a single policy originating from Treasury which can be called a "strong dollar policy" under his watch - the dollar appreciation of 2005 was entirely attributable to the improvement in the US profit picture and the Federal Reserve raising rates as other nations held them steady.

No one should really care. And yet the dollar has taken a sharp drop and the markets are engaged in another sell off.

With the end of those effects - while US profits are still healthy, they are no longer suprising to the upside, and the Fed seems to be ready to pause their rate campaign as other nations are beginning to ready to raise rates - has come the end of the brief dollar revival, and a return to the dropping dollar against floating currencies, and pressure on those that keep a formal or informal dollar peg to either buy dollars or see currency appreciation.

Thus Snow leaving and being replaced by Paulson, a Bush pioneer, is simply an affirmation that this is an administration that is collapsing into to its core and circling the wagons. It has no monetary meaning, and yet, it seems to be the signal to both currency markets and equity markets, that the balance of risks has moved to a weakening dollar and rising oil.

Normally a Wall Street Treasury Secretary would be seen as a sign that the dollar was going to be defended and strengthened, however, the handwriting is on the wall.

It is not that Paulson is a poor choice for Treasury - since increasingly the problem the administration has is in placing the large volumes of bonds that the current federal budget deficit necessitates. Having a well respected figure from a premier financial institution such as GoldmanSachs is a strong step towards building confidence. Indeed, in other circumstances, appointing Paulson would be a welcome move - Paulson is well known as an environmentalist, and has been one of the motivating forces behind GS investing in new energy sources, such as cell-eth (cellulose ethanol).

However he enters the picture at a point where it is clear that this administration has played all of its cards, and has now new sources of stimulus, at the same time it is facing pressures on the wage and resource inflation front.

The weak dollar means rising oil prices, which puts pressure on companies such as Wal-Mart, and on homebuidling, which is already stumbling under oversupply, falling prices, rising interest rates and an exhausted consumer. While bulls hope this is "finding a bottom", the reality is that investment flows simply are not there for a sustained rally higher in the short term.

Europe in the mean time - and I remind people of my February bearish call on Europe - has not just sold off, but been taken a hit in a full scale retreat into correction.

The fear is that this short term pressure from a summer oil bulge and a hiring market which is just now beginning to see upward wage movement - will become a sustained drag on the economy in the second half of the year and going forward. This fear, in turn, means that the financial community is looking to the Federal Government for leadership. But leadership is precisely what is not allowed in the Bush administration. By not picking an individual who would have a mandate to press sharply for fiscal restructuring, and that would include revenue increases as well as massive spending reductions, and a restructuring of the US borrowing curve - Bush has presented an indication that he was merely looking for someone else's credibility to burn through. Having burned through Snow's - which never recovered after the dishonest social security proposals that were touted last year - and having not established credibility on issues such as trade or willingness to stand up to Republican protectionist interests, the administration must bring fresh credibility in to burn.

Paulson himself has credibility in the sense that he is personally wealthy, but also because has led Goldman Sachs through a turbulent time, and established it as the foremost seeker of alpha on the planet - that is investment advantage over others in the same sector. Goldman Sachs under Paulson has consistently invested smarter and gained more than its competitors in the same spaces. Some believe that this is luck, or aggression. But it is also Paulson's forward looking style of leadership, and ability to run a very tight ship. Not in the sense of micromanaging, but a very focused organization which pursued advantage.

This kind of individual, if he had been appointed early in an administration, or even during the peak of power during core policy establishment periods, would be taken as an extremely positive sign - to do for Treasury what he had done on Wall Street. It would have been seen as a Rubinesque choice - a sign that Treasury would be at the table and a focus of activity.

Coming in the waning days of an administration it has the reverse effect, it seems shallow and symbolic - putting someone in charge after Snow had carried all the water that he could carry. Which is unfortunate, because there are significant challenges that Treasury should be addressing, as the world monetary system is in the process of being restructured. While the shape of that restructuring will require a new executive, and an election to determine his or her mandate, there are numerous steps that must come in preparation for this, as well as the above mentioned short term pressures on the US economy and the global equity and currency markets. The Secretary of Treasury, by forcefully laying out a road map to US fiscal and trade sanity, and backing this with such measures as can be taken - including ending the mania for throwing tax cuts on an inflationary fire which the Congress and other parts of the executive are indulging in - could help give the global financial system time to work through the structural adjustments.

Paulson should be speedily confirmed, but also told that the Congress expects him to vigorously attach the same intensity to his new shareholders - the American public as a whole, as well as our allies and trading partners - as he did at Goldman Sachs.

Within the heart of the turblent and provisional world of discourse, decision and democracy, their lives a deep seated urge to certainty. A wish for the dust to settle. To come to have, among all of the possessions that a person is allowed to have, a sense of the rightness of heaven and earth, and achieve a moral certainty of action that is beyond the reach of decision.

While this urge is often acted upon by demogouges and politicians engorged by ego, it afflicts even the most dedicated. It is for this reason that we must remind ourselves of the evils, the moral evils, of closed societies. The danger of course, is to be hypnotized by its own rhetoric. Closed societies exist all over the world, but they can no more be made into open societies by fiant than paper can be made into money by fiat. It is the value and functioning of the whole society which makes an election, or a dollar, work.

The case of Saddam Hussein serves as an example of the difficulty. There is no question that his regime was both abhorent and dangerous - a cominbination which called for a continuous and direct pressure by the open societies of this world, and a realiation that in the end, Iraq would have to breath free.

But the very nature of this realization also carries with it a second one, that the time to have attempted to establish such a new regime, and backed it with a package of aid and transitional authority which would have ended with the creation of, in all likelihood, a federal or even partition set of states - remaking both the imperial overthrows of the nacent democratic governments that had occured in the 1950's and the colonialist imposition of boundaries in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Western pressure after World War I.

But once this moment slipped by, and the attempt to topple Saddam by coup and economic coercion takein, the reality is that there was no turning back. The very process of attempting to overthrow Saddam by proxy was pulverizng the base of his society, was also destroying the social infrastructure which would have made a democracy possible.

With the coming of the new millenium, a difficult choice faced the United States and what used to be called "the free world". It was a choice that both electorates and elites refused to face, and instead there was the pretense that the disputes were merely a matter of partisan politics, and were, in effect, about patronage, not policy.

The result was that the United States was on a collision course - the only large expansion in global oil capacity was in Iraq. And yet the regime could not be trusted with the revenues that lifting of sanctions would have allowed. Saddam had complied with the requirements of disarmament, but he had done so in a manner which left no trust that he would stay disarmed any longer than was needed.

Lfiting sanctions was, in theory, required, and the economic pressure would make it required. Iraq's attempt to evade "Oil for Food" kicked into higher gear. It was with the coming of Bush that there was a systematic attempt by Iraq to evade the requirements of the program, and the selling of illegal concessions.

Many of Saddam's worst crimes against humanity were in the distant past, ironically, disarming him took away the ability to engage in acts that were flagrantly worse than the admitedly low standards that dictators are held to. By removing WMD and the means to deliver them, the international community saved lives, but made it more difficult to build a case. After all, if the international community had felt that his actions fell below the standard of international law, then they should have taken him out when they had the chance.

George H. W. Bush blundered, but it was a forced error - leading a nation that could not afford war and occupation, he was forced to accept a truce rather than a peace. His successor in the White House never had the freedom of action than to do more than back a coup.

The result is a failed state that was the source of yet more failed policies. These failed policies would continue to compound.

The first dividend would be the need for a lack of public debate over Iraq. There were two questions on Iraq, the first was the question of whether, and the second of how. There was wide acceptance of the inevitability of regime change in Iraq by 2001, and with September 11th, this became a virtual article of faith in the policy making classes. But there was still the matter of how.

Bush required not only an invasion of Iraq, but an invasion on his terms for his purposes. He needed to combine the invasion with slashing of tax rates, leaving only enough for "invasion lite". The reason that Bush could not tolerate a public debate on means and ends and had to create a fraudulent rationale - is that there could be no questioning of how he was to accomplish his end, or how he was to spend the money once invasion began.

Only in this way could invasion lite win approval, and could the money be funnelled into the "Project for the New American Century" idea of replacing bases in Saudi Arabia, with an even weaker proxy state in Iraq, and without the war material to effect such a strategy. It was the best war that a broke nation could afford. The difference that Bush gambled on is that the rise of Asian central banks and other nations desiring a trade advantage with the United States would buy treasuries to keep their own currencies down. In essence, hold devaluing dollars to pay for his war.

On the other side of this, it is clear that the worst part of the invasion of Iraq was a lack of debate on both of these points. It is not clear how the public would, in the end, have acted.

However an engaged and participatory public might still have decided on intervention, or a more interventionalist course, but it would not have adopted "invasion lite" and the budgetary horrors which have accompanied the Bush war strategy. For Bush, it was paramount not to even risk the possibility that the public, or even the informed public, would demand a consensus rather than an "Just so long as I'm the dictator" approach that was taken.

Here is where the deceptive use of liberal morally normative language was essential t to the project. Using proxies such as Christopher Hitchens, the fallacy of the excluded middle never received a more loving demonstration - either Saddam had to be removed with Bush in absolute and indeed absolutist control, or one is betraying the morally normative aspects of liberalism - the belief in the dignity of freedom itself, and the necessity that all peoples should be free.

The reality of course is that freedom is not merely a negative - the absence of a dictator does not make a people free. The question that needed to be asked, but was not, was what was required to make Iraq free. This is a different question than the question of meeting some empty procedural definition of "not under a dictator." As Hobbes argued in the 1600's, life under a leviathan is preferable to death under the "war of all against all". The natural state of affairs in a failed state is, indeed, the war of all against all.

Given the long standing liberal belief in being grounded in empirical reality, arguing against the false use of liberal doctrine of internationalism was as simple as arguing in favor of positive, versus negative, freedom.

- - -

The failure to do this shows that those who nominally were thought of as the leaders of hawkish liberalism have a fundamental misunderstanding of the credo of the philosophy. Political change is an internal, and to some extent revolutionary, state - it is not merely the overthrow of the old order which is essential for liberty, but the coming of a new order. This is the liberal critique of the French Revolution, for all of its high ideals, it did not change the fundamental nature of the public, and thus France would spend much of the rest of the next 80 years under one form or another of monarchy - restored, Bourbon or Second Empire.

The failure of liberal hawks to make this argument, or even bring it up, indicates that the trap - of desiring certainty, of giving into what one famous despot called "the need to obey" - indicates that the reform of liberalism as a doctrine - beyond modern liberalism, or any particular partisan formulation, must proceed from a reassertion of basic world view, and basic axioms. The first of these is that only a people can make themselves free, even if other peoples assist them in the mechanics of this process.

The Iraqi people were not, and are not, ready for self-government. There is no reason to believe that they cannot become ready for self-government, and at this point there is a quasi-moral imperative to attempt this transformation. But it will take longer and cost more blood than other methods of containing Saddam which could have been effectuated without violence to the international order, even if they might have entailed some use of military force now or in the future to finalize the transition.

The basic realization of liberal thought is that one must make choices, and make them between the present real alternatives. Removing Saddam did not save lives, though it did alter which lives were lost - the people who "would have" died under an extended addition of his regime have been replaced by others bombed, murdered, shot, starved, beaten, squashed and dismembered under the present conditions of chaos and civil war. Liberalism does not see the state of anarchy as preferable to the state of despotism, indeed the two share a host of traits that make them more alike than either are to a functioning state.

Part of the reason for the pragmatic failure of liberalism was the adherence to a kind of nationalized "cheap" liberalism, which had lost its ability to produce, and then advocate and implement, visionary actions which have costs in the present. The Clinton era saw the margins where change could be made as very thin, and placed deficit reduction as the first and, in the end, only policy. The failure of liberalism to make present sacrifice worthy and worthwhile, allowed those who took foolish risks with other people's lives and money, seem more bold and innovative than they were. In fact, the Bush executive merely has red green color-blindness: American's bleed red, and all they see is green.

These failures of the liberal ideology's spokes people indicates that it is time for a renewal which can only be accomplished by a changing of the guard. There are no more six month extensions for those whose judgement has been shown to be consistently wrong, nor any more excuses as to why, out of both ideological and pragmatic failure, those who were supposed to be defending liberalism capitulated to a need to obey.