p m carpenter's commentary

Grading Bush's war on the buddy system: the same way he got through college

Yet another independent Iraq study group has looked into its mandated subject matter and concluded that things are a bust. "We should start over" is how a Bush administration official characterized its findings, in the hope that "disclosing them publicly would help diffuse their impact and focus attention on the Petraeus-Crocker report" -- you know, the creative-writing project that is sure to receive a passing grade, since the grader is doing the writing.

This latest report card comes from the Jones commission, a 14-member group of "former or retired military officers, Defense Department officials and law enforcement officers," charged by Congress "to study the Iraqi security forces." And just what and how have they been doing? -- these "security" forces?

From their point of view, splendidly, I suppose, since they abound with "corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings." According to the commission, this situation "has existed since the formation of the police force."

From our point of view, not so splendidly, since "in some cases" the Iraqi security forces have "attack[ed] Americans directly."

It took an outside commission to report on this, of course. But what is the administration planning on doing about it? Dismantle the forces? Maybe weed out the bad guys, if that's at all possible? Even start from scratch, perhaps?

No, a Pentagon spokesman "said that an American effort to retrain the Iraqi police forces was under way," adding that "such an effort could succeed in removing sectarianism from the ranks without requiring a complete overhaul of the Iraqi force."

Yes, you read that right: Retrain. Evidently the administration believes that Iraqi security forces -- tutored and supplied by Americans, mind you -- are coming up short on the job only because they failed to learn during training that they're not supposed to attack Americans.

Unfrigginbelievable.

Plenty believable, however, is that the selfsame Pentagon spokesman said the administration is "not giving up on the Iraqi National Police"; that we are "committed to seeing it through." Why, sure. Who wouldn't, with such a bright group of students.

In a related grade-card matter, the Pentagon is disputing that F- the Iraqi government received from the General Accountability Office. It wants an upgrade to a solid F.

No, no, no, says the Pentagon. The Iraqi government didn't meet just three of the 18 benchmarks demanded. It met five, thereby changing its score from 17 to 28 percent out of 100. Under some old IQ-rating tests, you see, this would move Iraqi officials from the profoundly idiotic to the merely moronic.

So here we stand: one independent commission says the people we trained are killing us; a U.S. government agency says the Iraqi government is as incompetent as ... well, as incompetent as the Bush administration; and a recent National Intelligence Estimate draws conclusions that stand one's hair on end.

And what will we do about it -- which is to ask, what will the check-and-balance, war-authorizing and overseeing Congress do about it?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Want a treat? Here's what Michael Reagan has to say about the Craig incident (I think)

Just for grins, this morning I went intellectually slumming over at ultraconservative Townhall.com to see how its resident commentators were coping with the Craig incident. Not well, I'm sorry to report. But my reporting is limited, because I couldn't get beyond one article. It was that bad.

The one I landed on was a 583-word piece of incoherent frothing by presidential-son and talk-radio host Michael Reagan, titled "The Craig Affair: Rampant Hypocrisy." To give you some idea of just how bad, how incoherent, it was, after reading it twice I'm still not sure whose hypocrisy Reagan was referring to. I kid you not.

The piece was more of a generalized rant, with no particular point backed up by no particular reasoning, and both reinforced by particularly bad writing. But I did suspect that -- who else, what else? -- Bill Clinton grounded it all, since the very first sentence about Sen. Larry Craig found Reagan recalling how the former president had said he "did not have sex with that woman." Perhaps this was the hypocrisy mentioned in the title?

Who knows, because Reagan swiftly proceeded to other irrelevancies. Maybe the Clinton thing was merely a kind of pro forma rant. Having gotten it out of the way to his readers' satisfaction and giddy expectations, the author leapt to attacking (I think?) the media, whose principal sin seems to be that they covered the story. They "jumped on" it "as if the senator were Paris Hilton in drag," we're told with great amusement.

Ain't it just like the liberal media? -- covering this as a big story, when we heard nary a word about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal?

Reagan failed to fully exploit this tsk-tsk opportunity, however -- if in fact that was his purpose. For he was soon off to noting for our edification that "When they involve politics, scandals such as this one are certain to find partisanship rearing its head." Make a note of that.

But he enlightened us on that, only after this: "Aside from the ribald comments it has provoked, such as Jay Leno's remark to Sen. John McCain -- who had said that his colleagues don't socialize with one another -- that his lonely fellow senators could always find companionship in airport men's rooms."

Go ahead. Read that passage again; read it a third time or fourth. I defy you to decipher the damn thing.

Finally I came to what was maybe the point of Reagan's article? "Because Larry Craig is a staunch conservative from a staunchly conservative state, Democrats and their leftist allies are dancing in the streets over his embarrassment, busily reminding every sympathetic reporter" -- members of "the overwhelmingly pro-gay media," of course -- "who will listen to them that the Idaho Senator not only espouses family values, but has been a staunch foe of gay marriage."

So Craig is the hypocrite, right? Is that the point? Well, not really. I think. You see, I'm not really sure. Because Reagan immediately treats us to his insight that "Democrats and the media define Craig as a hypocrite. By their twisted logic, therefore, anybody who espouses traditional Judeo/Christian values must also be a hypocrite." They do?

Muddled in that is some sort of argument or another, I think, that Democrats and the media are the actual hypocrites, because they're attacking a gay man -- an orientation they defend. Says Reagan: "most of the media have avoided any hint that in reporting on the scandal they find Craig's suspected homosexuality objectionable." Right. OK. So what's your point? Is that it? There's hypocrisy in that?

I was lost, as I'm sure you are as well. What one had to do with the other, I couldn't say.

The scandal, dear Mr. Reagan, had nothing to do with homosexuality itself. But this seems so bloody obvious, I'm unsure if I should correct you on a point that perhaps you weren't even making. At any rate, all this should give you, the reader, some idea of what passes for High Reasoning and Clear Thinking in right-wing circles.

I know this has been hard on you. It's been hard on me, too. I'm not usually so sadomasochistic as to put anyone through an ordeal like trying to make heads or tails of what a right winger is trying to articulate. But I hope it's been instructive. If the right's thinking process is this garbled, it leaves little doubt as to the whys and wherefores of its garbled political ideology.

With Alberto's ouster, why things could get even worse (if you can imagine that)

What made the news coverage of Alberto's departure worth reading, and finally commenting on, was less his departure than the far-ranging observations offered on the lessons to be drawn from his squalid tenure. We've had controversial attorneys general resign in disgrace before, but none quite like Alberto.

From the 20th century's Harry Daugherty to John Mitchell, the injudicious sort seemed to flock to Justice. From their tenures we learned valuable lessons, of course -- so naturally quite early in the 21st century we suffered capo-regime Fredo.

But I don't really blame Alberto Gonzales. He was a small man with narrow aims -- the aggrandizement and protection of his patron -- too innately small not to be overwhelmed. One telling observation was this: "Former colleagues say that what they originally took for discretion, when Mr. Gonzales would say little in major policy meetings, they later concluded was disengagement."

I wouldn't be surprised to learn from historians years from now that Alberto really didn't know, for instance, who slated various U.S. Attorneys for removal, or why. Like a good little crime-family captain, he just took orders, and he was delighted he ever made it that far.

As Daniel Marcus, a Clinton-administration Justice official and now a constitutional law professor, said, "He was not the intellectual father of those positions [of unitary-executive supremacy], but he shaped and articulated them at the White House, and he continued to take a very strong position on executive power as attorney general."

From this Mr. Marcus concluded "What this whole episode illustrates": that of the "problem of having a close confidant, a close friend of the president -- particularly someone who worked first in the White House -- going over to the Justice Department to serve as attorney general in the first place."

I disagree profoundly. Other presidents have had close confidants serve as their attorneys general (hell, one was the president's brother), yet those personal connections were not the responsible agent or catalyst for the launching of lawlessness. That starts at the top, and you-know-what runs downhill.

For my money, Stanley Brand, the "ethics lawyer" (no oxymoronic jokes here), summed things up the best: "You can’t just change government through strong-willed policy. People who ride into Washington on a high horse of ideology or ignorance" -- or, in Mr. Bush's case, ignorant ideology -- "are inevitably headed toward a blow-up."

Call it overconfidence, call it karma, call it whatever you like, but Alberto's downfall was as inexorable as Bush's collapse. Given the man at the top's willful ignorance, ideological hubris and inner corruption, Al's days were numbered from the start.

I have a hunch, however, that we haven't yet seen the worst of Mr. Bush & Co., even as the White House empties itself of some very bad boys. And it was Mr. Bush's bizarre, otherworldly reaction to Alberto's departure that leads one to this frightful suspicion.

Political scientist Calvin Jillson set the scene: Newer and less personal White House advisors could now lead Bush to "more of a middle ground ... but whether he has the mental and ideological flexibility to take advantage of that chance, I’m quite skeptical of that." Said the professor: "If you just listen to what he said ... in defense of Gonzales [the day of the resignation], his back is so up and his heels are so dug in, I’m not sure he can do it."

Well, professor, I'm sure he can't. I'd bet money on it. The president is a mental infant with a child's emotions. He won't let this go, he won't let it drop. He'll throw a monstrous temper tantrum in the form of ... something monstrous ... just to show Congress and the press that no one can kick George W. Bush around.

Fred Thompson's curious course

The Politico's story contradicted itself with the first three words: "Fred Thompson thinks...."

OK, a cheap shot for a cheap laugh. The sentence did go on, as my ellipsis indicates. But when one reads the full article, the first impression resonates throughout: The gentleman from Tennessee is as demagogically shallow as they come.

The Politico's complete line was this: "Fred Thompson thinks the country faces a tough road ahead and he's not glossing over the problems we face." That assessment derived from a speech the former senator gave to the Midwestern Republican Leadership Conference in Indianapolis last week, in which he "offered a stark assessment of what he described as America's perilous condition."

Said Fred: "I simply believe that on the present course that we're going to be a weaker, less prosperous, more divided nation than what we have been. I do not say that lightly, but I think it's the truth. And I think the American people are ready for the truth."

Having apprised the crowd of the sterner and more honest stuff of which he is made, Thompson then sketched our perilous condition on three fronts. National security: "Our country's in danger; it's going to be that way for a long time to come." The economy: "We are doing steady damage to our economy, that if we don't do things better it's going to result in economic disaster for future generations." And the mess in Washington, specifically the White House: "In order to have leadership you got to have somebody who's going to follow; our people follow, but they don't have any confidence in what's being said or who's saying it."

My, this is indeed stern stuff -- or, real oddball stuff, given that Thompson has been generally supportive of the Bush administration's national-security and economic policies that brought us to this perilous cliff.

But that's ancient history. Mr. Thompson promised straight talk and tough remedies at the Republican conference -- yet this, in a nutshell, was as straight and tough as his talk and remedies got:

He courageously applauded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. He praised federalism. He supports the rule of law. He likes free markets in a free marketplace. He respects private property.

Somewhere in all those sentimental generalities was Fred's way forward -- from them, he would avert us from the precipice; he would seize the mantle of Republican leadership and issue a call to all Republicans to follow in revitalizing the nation: "We know how to do that, we've done it so many times before."

But if Fred had in mind any specific courses of action, he wasn't saying. Instead, he opted for the hurrahs and harrumphs of broad, good old-fashioned Republicanism.

He did so in large part, however, in the oddest of ways. Before a Midwest segment of the conservative base, he implicitly knocked the hell out of his party and theirs. In effect, he trashed twelve years of Republican legislative rule and two terms of Republican presidential rule as having led us on the path to "a weaker, less prosperous, more divided nation."

Fred, here's some advice. Yours is a demagoguery that won't fly; not with Republicans, anyway. Yours is an Independent-ticket demagoguery, perhaps, but not a Republican demagoguery. You can't energize the base by accurately portraying their party of the last decade or so -- by pointedly noting, that is, that their party has brought us to ruefulness and ruination. In short, you're asking them to admit they were wrong.

Republicans don't like that, Fred. You're presenting the right synopsis -- weakness, division, etc. -- to the wrong crowd. You can sell fundamentalist Republican platitudes -- free markets, federalism, etc. -- to independents and conservative Democrats by saying Republicans have strayed, but fundamentalist Republicans won't want to hear it.

On the other hand, you've botched your quasicampaign in every conceivable manner so far, Fred, so it's only fitting you'd now unveil precisely the wrong strategic approach. At least you're consistent. And for that, we salute you.

A Colossal Contradiction

Yesterday the Washington Post recounted the bewildering tale of a congressional delegation's recent fact-finding trip to Iraq, as experienced and told by antiwar Democrat Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. In singularly describing the story as bewildering I'm being somewhat imprecise, since the story's content is unencumbered by facts, findings, or anything at all new that might occasion bewilderment. What did bewilder, however, was that which was absent: the story left a massive contradiction hanging like a stuffed pinata.

At the core of Rep. Schakowsky's Iraq visit was the obligatory boosterism sponsored and mostly tutored by Gen. David Petraeus, which, as the Post painted it, "left her stunned." I'm not sure why. His act was the the usual dog-and-pony show: bedecked with "charts and a laser pointer," the general laid the familiar on thick.

"Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus's words in a small white notebook.... She flipped through to find the Petraeus section. 'We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,' Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: 'Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.'"

Just enough progress, but not quite enough progress: the same spectacular legerdemain the administration performs with the "war on terror." We're winning, we're winning, we're winning the war -- on the other hand, we're not quite winning the war. We've some distance to go. Not far, but far enough to justify the steady rollback of civil liberties at home.

As for withdrawal? "They painted a very dire picture," said Schakowsky, who again quoted Petraeus: "If you don't like the humanitarian crisis, the refugees and the internally displaced people, you can't draw down [my emphasis]. If you are concerned about these people, the humanitarian crisis, you should be for our staying here."

It is unextraordinary that the Republican Congresstrolls who accompanied Schakowsky to Petraeus' matinee foppery were duly impressed and remained supportive of an extended tour of "just enough progress." Remarkably, and depressingly, however, Democrat Brian Baird, for one, "announced that he will no longer support a timetable for withdrawal, warning of a 'potentially catastrophic effect' on the region."

Gee, Brian, you little independent thinker you, wherever did you get that idea? But, at least, from Brian we can also get an idea of Congress' fuller bedazzlement next month, when Petraeus will once again lay it on thick.

To her credit, "the lack of political progress among Iraq's rival factions and Petraeus's estimate of the time needed to stabilize the nation left Schakowsky all the more convinced that Democrats must force Bush to begin bringing troops home." Yet the Congresswoman added something startling, which led to my bewilderment, which led to my thinking of the aforementioned, gaping contradiction.

"You would get these organizational charts that were all acronyms -- I mean like, 30 of them," said Schakowsky. "And the danger of asking a question about them is it would add another 10 minutes" to the meeting.

I, too, would recoil at the thought of another 10 minutes of prepackaged propaganda. But there was one question -- a huge one -- I would have felt compelled to ask and eager to have answered, even at the expense of a 10-minute slice of my life, considering others' whole slices at stake.

To wit, while Petraeus was droning on about how "you can't draw down," U.S. intelligence agencies and top military commanders were saying with pointed emphasis last week what intelligence agencies and military commanders have been saying for months: "that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq"; "American commanders say they will have to begin to cut troop levels in Iraq ... to ease the burden on military personnel."

So, there was Petraeus, saying one thing, while virtually the entire military establishment was saying something quite opposite. And the latter's irrefragable conclusions left no room for fudging: the crunch requires a reduction, they have to cut troop levels. That, in turn, will expose the remaining troops even more.

How this escaped the congressional delegation's notice is simply beyond me. Then again, unquestioned contradictions and negligent legislators are but two of this war's shepherds.

The serendipity of strategic mayhem

All this antiwar disgruntlement, much of which is based on the critical needling of the Bush administration for its lack of a real strategy in Iraq, should now be laid to rest. For it appears we do indeed have a strategy to pacify Iraqis: We're either locking them up or tossing them out. Given enough incarceration and forced relocation, few will be left to fight on -- us or each other.

Pure genius: the "nation building" of inmates and refugees.

As for the first group, the New York Times reports "the number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February." A whopping eighty-five percent of the luckless are those pesky Sunni Arabs. While about 1,800 claim affiliation with Iraq's Qaeda franchise, roughly 6,000 others say they're "takfiris" -- rabid antiShiite warriors and future Christiane Amanpour interviewees.

U.S. officials say "those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order ... and has become religious and ideological." But that would be wrong, they further say, and no one would know better the internal workings and motivations of Iraqis than culturally tuned-in U.S. officials.

No, the Sunnis plant bombs and shoot at others because they're unemployed and broke; inventive but hapless subjects of the capitalist vision we've bestowed on what was once a troubled nation.

Said naval captain and jailer John Fleming: "Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government.... The primary motivator is economic -- they’re angry men because they don’t have jobs. The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education."

Let us look past the good captain's self-contradiction -- that of asserting limited ideological hatred for the (Shiite) Iraqi government while noting the extremists' ideological success -- and go straight to the nut of it all: I don't know about you, but if my father had been shot, my brother beheaded, my wife had no food to cook and my children had no school, it wouldn't take much propagandizing to inspire me to take up arms and start taking out my enemies. But it's not like we could have foreseen this foreseeable eventuality, right?

Yet, at least that's 24,500 Iraqi Arabs off the violent streets. And we're working on the other 25 million, one heartbroken family at a time.

While a couple million Iraqis have fled their homeland altogether -- mostly the educated and professional; precisely the demographics required to rebuild a nation after someone rudely dismantles it -- "the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000 ... since the American troop increase began in February."

So, the real-life "surge" effect has been that of "American-led operations ... driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before," resulting in the de facto "partition of the country into sectarian enclaves."

The serendipitous upside, of course, is that there are now fewer Sunnis to shoot at Shiites in Shiite districts, and fewer Shiites to shoot at Sunnis in Sunni districts. Still, there remains the problem of what these relocated refugees and eventually released jailbirds will do for a living in their new digs.

Perhaps McDonalds can launch a franchise on every corner of every street of every bombed-out hamlet, and Iraqis can all flip burgers for each other. Their purchases can go on American vouchers; Iraqis will form the world's first, literal "Fast-Food Nation"; and their worrisome ranks can be further thinned to disappearance from diabetes.

I probably shouldn't submit the absurd. The idiots in the White House might be inspired to new strategic heights.

American power: A culture of mindlessness

As Iraq burns, all is perfectly normal with the arsonist in chief. He's on vacation, of course, pausing only long enough to dispatch a spokesman to assure spectators that everything there is "headed in the right direction."

And just how was that sunny assessment made possible? Why, because yesterday virtually every U.S. intelligence agency collectively reported that the White House has managed the creation of "a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year."

This latest and perhaps gloomiest National Intelligence Estimate "casts strong doubts on ... the Bush administration strategy in Iraq." It also "gives a dim prognosis on the likelihood that Iraqi politicians can heal deep sectarian rifts before next spring." That seasonal mention is important, for spring is "when American military commanders have said that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq."

So, one reasonably asks, what is the right direction? Or at least a better direction? Rapid troop withdrawal, maybe?

Not exactly, for their "report also implicitly criticizes proposals offered by Democrats ... who have called for a withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by next year and for a major shift in the American approach."

That strategic move, say the agencies, would likely "erode security gains achieved thus far" and "return Iraq to a downward spiral of sectarian violence."

As for Iraq's political leadership, it "remain[s] unable to govern effectively" -- a nice, tidy and euphemistic way of saying "not at all." Furthermore, if we think things are bad now, just wait, for Iraq's Potemkin government will go the way of the rest of the country "over the next 6 to 12 months" and become even "more precarious."

Yes -- "headed in the right direction" indeed.

So, short of packing tonight and leaving in the morning -- which of course can't be done anyway -- what is to be done? The answer is contained above; but it's not a choice, it's not an option, it's not even a decision to be made.

To repeat, the NIE's "assessment concludes that there is little reason to expect that Iraqi politicians will achieve significant gains before spring, when American commanders say they will have to begin to cut troop levels in Iraq [my emphases] ... to ease the burden on military personnel."

The assessment might as well have "concluded," therefore, that the writing is on the wall: Our routine indecisiveness is over in the spring. What 160,000 American troops can't accomplish will be even less accomplishable with 159,999 troops -- and so it will go, more steeply downhill, piece by piece, troop by troop, with the fewer and fewer remaining troops more of a vulnerable target every bloody day.

With a confidence level somewhere in the high 90s, that's how it will play out. The U.S. denouement in Iraq will be as mindless as its entry.

American antiwar politicians can posture and maneuver and jostle and jockey all they want, but if they can't or won't remove a flagrant criminal from the highest seat of American power, they'll prove just as incapable of putting a quicker end to his mindless war. This thing will simply stagger well into 2009 -- American death by American death -- in all its ignoble stupidity.

It will then end, but only because we won't have the manpower to continue.

We won't even have to think about what to do. Choices and decisions are superfluous, as democracy itself has been for six years. It'll just happen -- unavoidably, passively, mindlessly, a product of necessity and nothing more.

What a way to run a country -- a "superpower," no less.

I smell a rat

In 2004, as Iraq was mutating from desert to quicksand, George W. Bush flatly rejected the Vietnam analogy. Yesterday he went over the top to seize it, to claim it as his own.

He argued before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that ending our ill-conceived and dreadfully executed occupation would amount to "pull[ing] the rug out from under" our troops -- as, presumably, we did in Vietnam -- and urged "today’s generation of Americans [to] resist the deceptive allure of retreat." Taking yet more historical license, he said "Then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence, and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.... The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be."

The New York Times reported that "Mr. Bush’s speech was interrupted frequently by cheers from the crowd and by occasional standing ovations." Yes, and odds are, next week the cheers and ovations from the American Legion crowd will be even greater, as this vulgar hysteria feeds on itself.

The pundits are stumped. What could Bush be thinking? Why this Vietnam-analogy argument, now? Why the 180? What's the sense of it all?

Well, as one is so justifiably inclined to do with this endlessly scheming White House, I smell a rat. A big, ugly one.

First a little background, as dangled by the Times: "With his comments, Mr. Bush tried something that few leading politicians of either party have tried in a generation: Reopening the national argument over the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional national touchstone.

"And he was giving rare political voice to the views of those who -- like many in the [VFW] hall today -- believe that the American pullout from Vietnam was a mistake, and who reject the popular view among Baby Boomers that America should never have sent troops there in the first place."

And therein, I suspect, lies the aforementioned rat.

Bush Inc. originally wanted to muscle its way into Iraq to demonstrate American power; specifically, to undo the damage that Vietnam's legacy had done to America's superpower image. The administration was, in a sense, refighting Vietnam in 2003. This time we would win -- quickly, easily, cleanly -- and thus restore our superpower status in full. And with the Soviet Union gone, that status would be a lone one.

But, of course, nothing went according to plan. So now, the Bush administration has made the conscious and calculated decision to refight Vietnam at home as well -- partially as an arm-twisting tactic against a disgruntled Congress, but principally as a political strategy that goes far beyond that.

Which is to say, the administration may be hoping to violently divide this nation at large -- much as Vietnam violently divided us -- and, above all, put that violence and divide on the streets. It seeks to reawaken Nixon's hardhats-and-veterans crowd as its visible cadre. It longs for a reissuance of right-wing "America: Love it or leave it" sloganeering in action.

Perhaps this, finally, will prod the antiwar crowd to take to the streets -- to protest and make rude, loud, and "unAmerican" noises. Nothing would please the White House more. With a little luck, the antiwar crowd will emerge as ill-clad youth; the media can then have a grand time portraying them as the benighted, menacing face of all antiwar Americans. Many still sitting on the ideological fence would side with the clean cut, and others with mild antiwar inclinations might retreat out of disgust.

In short, the administration's seemingly bizarre reversal on the Vietnam analogy might very well come down to nothing more than a sociopolitical do-over at home. In seeking that bloody division of old -- which the political right then cynically cast as the dividing line between the patriotic and unpatriotic, the American and unAmerican -- it can at least buy some time, if not remake America, at long last, in its right-wing image.

Today's b.s. on parade, courtesy our b.s.er in chief

Call it a profile in courage.

Today, our plucky president will deliver a prowar speech to none other than the VFW; next week, another to the American Legion. I was a tad too young to appreciate Catholic John Kennedy's daring address to Southern Baptists, but I'm sure glad I'm still here, with all my adult faculties, to witness today's fine example of presidential boldness.

But back to the real world. I suppose it does take some courage for Bush to show his face anywhere these days. On the other hand, he's going well armed, chocked full of tortured historical analogies sure to please the blindly patriotic Veterans of Foreign Wars, many of whom are still blindly fighting the lost conflict that Kennedy helped get us into.

We had Vietnam won, you see -- until we were stabbed in the back by irresolute politicians at home. (This vein of argumentation is also memorable to those of you who were around in the 1930s and followed transatlantic news.) The argument is perfectly logical, as long as you don't read the actual history of the Vietnam conflict.

And that will be Bush's thrust today: Let us not countenance another stab in the back. Our boys are winning. Our boys always win. Our boys cannot lose.

Or, as Bush will put it, which comes to us in the form of prereleased text from the White House: "Our troops are seeing this progress on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?"

I'm not sure who borrowed from whom. I've been hearing this ahistorical crappola on talk radio for at least a couple years, but only now is Bush bringing it sharply into focus. And the talk-radio talking point is always coupled with this insincere concern for the indigenous population, which Bush, also, will echo today: "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'"

That thrust seems to be that although we've botched things almost beyond human comprehension -- but let's not discuss the incompetents who brought that about -- if we stay even longer, things will improve -- and at the very hands of the incompetents who screwed things up to begin with. It's the familiar, "How do you say 'f. u.' in BushSpeak?" Answer: "Trust us."

Mr. Bush will deliver this gem as well: "There are many differences between the wars we fought in the Far East and the war on terror we are fighting today. But one important similarity is that at their core, they are all ideological struggles."

What he won't specify is that at the core of his speech the ideological struggle, for now at least, is not between us and them; it's between us and us -- and that's just how he wants it.

Other than trying to hang on till January 2009, I'm not sure what Bush thinks he'll accomplish with this rhetorical falderal. But there's one thing I do know. If I were Prime Minister Maliki, I'd never go to sleep without first placing crinkled newspapers around the bed.

Because with Bush admitting "a certain level of frustration" with Iraq's leadership, and with Bush's own ambassador publicly saying how "extremely disappointing" he finds it, Maliki is starting to look a lot like Vietnam's rudely dismissed President Diem.

The Campaign Circus

Adam Nagourney has a revealing piece on the banal diurnal doings of merely one presidential wannabe in Iowa. I often feel sorry these hopefuls -- both Democrat or Republican -- on the campaign trail, and Nagourney's article captures their ritualistic agony perfectly. Enduring the grind, uttering the same platitudes over and over, forcing robotic answers to simplistic questions -- all are part of the deadly dull but perhaps unavoidable process of getting oneself to the White House.

In this instance, the NYT reporter followed Rudy Giuliani in and out of diners in western Iowa, where the candidate had planted himself to "field the usual mix of questions. Taxes and terrorism. Iran and Iraq." We don't learn from the article what Rudy would do about these, but probably because we already know: he'd whip 'em all, and all with virtually no federal revenue. The impossible is easily doable on the campaign trail.

Rudy also fielded this question from farmers Betty Schuler and husband: "When you get back to the big city, are you going to forget the little guys out here who are farming to feed you?"

Right there, at that very instant, is when I would lose the race. Because the urge to answer with some honesty would be too great: "First, madam, the premise of your question is flawed. You're not farming to feed me, just as my car mechanic doesn't bust up his knuckles so I can get to the grocery store. You farm for an income. And by asking me not to forget the little guys, are you in so many words asking by how much I'll swell your subsidy checks?"

Crash. Bang. End of the Carpenter campaign.

The pros aren't so stupid. They know how to grin it, bear it, and cough up the emptiest of soothing answers: "Oh, I’m not going to forget the little guy anywhere," said Rudy to Betty. "When I got elected mayor of New York City, I didn’t forget anybody. The place that kind of won the election for me was Staten Island. It’s the closest thing that New York City has to -- I wouldn’t call it rural, but suburbs."

No, we wouldn't call it rural, either, Rudy. But with that, he considered himself as having comforted the denizens of greater Greenfield, Iowa, and was moving on to the next question.

"Have you spent any time on a farm?" asked another farmer, this one in Cumberland.

Rudy hesitated, for this required some unthoughtful originality. "Have I ever worked on a farm? No. I mean, I’ve visited a farm. But you know there are no farms in New York City." However, "People in Staten Island feel like they are part of their own community. You get the same feeling you get in smaller-town America."

By next week, Rudy may recall that he did, in fact, once live and work on a farm. Staten Island just doesn't cut it.

But I've got to admit, it's better than what I would have come up with: "Have I spent any time on a farm? Sure, lots of it, groveling for your votes. And odds are, if elected, I won't see another farm for four years." Nothing nasty, mind you -- just an honest statement of the way things are, and will be. Naturally, though, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to proffer this honesty, since I'd still be swinging vertically back in Greenfield.

Yet Rudy, as every top-tier presidential candidate must, oozed with accolades as he traveled the flatlands -- "marvel[ing] at what he described as the 'complex political' queries he was encountering": "Aren’t these questions great? This is terrific," observed Rudy. "We could be at the Kennedy School of Government."

Pathetic. But it does offer insight into how much honesty went into his other comments to the good citizens of Iowa and tag-along journalists.

What would I suggest as merely one campaign-trail alternative to diner encounters? Knowledgeable panels, perhaps formed from area universities, in town to town addressing subjects from agricultural problems to international relations -- grilling the candidate like it was a dissertation defense (which in a way, it is), and televised locally.

These panels might at first be a bit cowered in the presence of such noted notables, but after hearing a few minutes of the vast shallowness that spews from the politically esteemed and very available, the intimidation would end rather abruptly, I should think. Then we could hear if there's anything actually up there in the cerebral sections.

Almost any alternative would be better than what's in place. Lord, what a farce.