Tom Engelhardt, at his bog (Nov. 19, 2004):

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of The American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.]

Here was our tactical kindness: By threatening the invasion of Falluja for months and launching a bombing campaign against parts of the city long before the assault was to begin, the Bush administration managed to turn an unknown but staggering number -- up to 90% -- of that city's 250,000-300,000 residents out of their homes and into refugees living off relatives elsewhere or in the most pitiful of makeshift camps often without enough food, or clean drinking water, electricity, or medical aid. The first mainstream account of such a camp finally appeared Friday in the New York Times (Robert A. Oppel, Jr., Refugees: Fallujans in Flight: Transit Camps Are Not Much Safer Than Siege They Left), even though some of the residents described in it had been relocated there weeks, if not months before.

It's not simply a matter of journalistic lack of concern. Most non-Iraqi journalists have little choice but to be"embedded," whether in actual U.S. military units (allowing for movement into"no-go" parts of Sunni Iraq but only where the military is conducting operations, not exactly the best perspective from which to get an Iraqi view of things) or essentially in their hotels. Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder Newspapers, for instance, writes:

"The hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece. Baghdad has never been tougher for journalists. Treacherous roads and kidnapping squads restrict travel. 'Embedding' with the military or going with Iraqi government officials is the safest way to leave the capital. Our ability to uncover and tell the truth about Iraq -- good and bad -- has suffered terribly… As the close calls grew, the Iraq we knew shrank. The northern mountains and southern marshes are off-limits now because the roads out of Baghdad are lined with bombs and gunmen. Even a jaunt to the grocery store is a meticulously planned affair. Do you have a radio? A flak vest? A second car to watch for kidnappers?"

A recent piece in the Washingtonian magazine on-line about the return of the Washington Post's superb Anthony Shadid to Iraq after months out of the country, described the situation of Western correspondents in Iraq this way:

"[S]ome television news crews have hired security firms with armed Americans to follow their teams. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post prefer former British military or armed Iraqis in vehicles that follow their cars. 'They could lay down cover fire,' says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who recently returned from 18 months as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Baghdad. 'It's a matter of improving your odds.'"

While journalists in Iraq narrowed their scope and improved their odds, the American military, after a fashion, did the same. Military commanders gathered 12,000-15,000 American troops and a couple of thousand questionable Iraqi ones and then pulled up the artillery, the planes with their 500-to-2000 pound bombs, the helicopters armed with Hellfire missiles, the lethal AC-130 gunships, the tanks, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, the mortars, and the heavy machine guns. After months of careful planning in the wake of last April's aborted attempt to take Falluja, they then launched these forces against relatively small numbers of reasonably well-prepared insurgents, a few thousand at most, scattered in a significant-sized city.

In recent years, the American military has paid a great deal of attention to the matter of urban warfare -- much feared by our commanders before the invasion of Iraq. The question then was: Would the American army be caught in a final block-by-block urban battle for Baghdad? (Given the way things are going, the answer may still be yes.) Cities are considered great levelers of the playing field between otherwise asymmetric military forces. The Iraqi rebels are armed largely with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, some mortars, and, of course, those car bombs and IEDs; but in Falluja as elsewhere in urban Iraq, they know the terrain intimately, the warren of city streets, and street fighting has a notorious reputation for cutting down on sight lines and negating technological advantages. As it happens, our military seems to have dealt with this in Fallujah largely by bringing asymmetric amounts of firepower to bear on the slightest signs of resistance even by lone snipers; in other words, as far as can be told, they responded to the challenge of urban warfare in some areas of Falluja by quite literally leveling the playing field.

Rubblizing the Neighborhood

News about the resulting devastation grows worse by the day, though the announced body counts of dead insurgents -- 1,200 or more -- can't be trusted. (I'm reminded of the informal"Mere Gook Rule" of the Vietnam War when it came to body counts:"If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC [Vietcong].") But the main point no one will make in the American news mainstream -- where U.S. military self-constraint tends to be emphasized and military claims about efforts to avoid civilian casualties are printed without significant comment -- is simple indeed: The levels of destruction in Falluja were not a by-product of the campaign, but the product itself. The rubblizing of whole neighborhoods was meant.

The Bush administration may indeed have invaded Iraq on a theory, not a plan, but the assault on Falluja itself was planned with great care over significant periods of time. So what remains of that city in which hardly a building evidently emerged unscathed (among those that remain standing) must be considered the Falluja that was supposed to be. The brief shots on the nightly news are breath-taking (or breath-stopping) in the visible levels of destruction whenever the camera bothers to pull back for a few seconds. You have to return to 1968 and the old Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue to find a city flattened in anything like this manner by the American war machine; and in that case, the Americans were responding to Hue's surprise seizure by the other side in the midst of the nationwide Tet Offensive.

As I've argued in the past, it was in the Vietnamese countryside -- where we instituted free-fire zones and bombed at phenomenal levels -- that similar planning and results could be found. The free-fire zone that was much of rural Vietnam, including in some cases literal"jungle," has been replaced in Iraq by the"urban jungle." Veteran journalist Simon Jenkins made just this point in a striking piece recently in the British Sunday Times (A wrecked nation, a desert, a ghost town. And this will be called victory)."In Vietnam," he wrote,"the Americans destroyed the village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it."

Some of you may remember that Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong famously compared guerillas to fish swimming in the sea of the people. During the Vietnam era, there was much talk among American counterinsurgency strategists about how to"drain" that sea. In Vietnam, what this turned out to mean in practical terms was grim indeed -- the forcible removal of Vietnamese peasants from rebel-controlled areas (and so their lands), their resettlement in government-controlled"strategic hamlets" (or as refugees in the South's then swelling cities) and the creation of"free-fire zones" in large swaths of the countryside which was devastated by a bombing campaign of almost unparalleled fierceness (Laos was worse), involving record tons of bombs dropped per square inch of territory. This bombing campaign in the South, unlike the one against North Vietnam, went largely unreported in our media at the time.

This was, of course, a punitive strategy leveled collectively against a population without reference to what any individual peasant might have thought or done. It gave the counterinsurgency strategy of"draining the sea" a bleakness beyond words. It also, not unsurprisingly, alienated the rural population from both the South Vietnamese government and the Americans in ways that seem all too repetitively familiar in Iraq today, and it created an especially atrocity-conducive environment for young Americans sent into an alien and hostile landscape, knowing nothing of Vietnamese culture or history, unable to communicate, and generally having no way to separate friend from foe. Does this sound the least bit repetitive to anyone?

In such circumstances acts of war grow ever more brutal. Just the other day, for instance, Tom Lasseter, a fine reporter for Knight Ridder wrote a small piece about a Marine company in Falluja whose commander had been"shot through the torso" by an RPG. In grief and anger here's what they did, according to Lasseter:"In the surrounding neighborhood, troops furious at the news of their fallen leader called in revenge, in the form of a 2,000 pound bomb airstrike and a storm of 155 millimeter artillery shells. A mosque lost half a minaret, its main building smoldering in fire and smoke." This is what you tend to do, and do ever more of, under conditions of war in an alien and increasingly hostile land.

Much of this, though not yet on a Vietnamese scale, is already taking place, not in Iraq's" countryside," but in its heavily populated cities. Just as we dropped leaflets warning residents to depart the free-fire zones of Vietnam, so we seem to have dropped endless leaflets on Falluja. (It would be interesting to have some reporter tell us just what these actually said.) It seems that, as in Vietnam where napalm and white phosphorus -- unbearably gruesome weapons -- were commonly employed, American troops have already used white phosphorus in Falluja. ("Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.") Similarly, they seem, at least informally, to have declared parts of Falluja the equivalents of"free-fire zones."

Imagine in any case simply pouring artillery fire into a cityscape. For example, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who flew out to"Camp Falluja" with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen Richard Myers (now, there's high-class embedding for you) to"inspect the toughest problems in Iraq firsthand" had this throwaway line in a piece about -- what else? -- how we've arrived at the"tipping point" in Iraq:"Most of the fighting in Falluja was over by the time we arrived at this headquarters compound, although the tom-tom beat of 155-millimeter howitzers, still pumping rounds into the city, was constant." Remind me one more time about that definition of"over..."

Draining the Swamp

Nor is the media doing a better job of covering the air war in Iraq than they did in South Vietnam. As I've written numerous times, while individual air strikes may be reported daily -- all those"targeted" bombings of"terrorist safe houses" in Falluja, for instance -- the loosing of air power against urban Iraq has now gone on for almost a year with increasing ferocity (as overstretched American troops, lacking any serious support from Iraqi troops or police, have to deal with an ever-widening rebellion). And yet no significant account of the overall use of air power in Iraq or of the military or political calculations behind it has yet appeared. There's a special irony here, since early in the last century the British first tested the punitive abilities of air power on rebellious Iraqi villages.

Iraq may indeed not be"Vietnam," and there may be many other more plausible historical analogies for what's happening in Iraq to draw on, but let's face it, Vietnam is unavoidable. When we train Iraqi troops with hopes that someday they will replace American ones, military officials and reporters naturally speak about "'Iraqifying' security and politics" (as once such officials and reporters talked about"Vietnamizing" them). Similarly when our military men on the ground express"disappointment" in the Iraqi troops we're training and a sneaking respect for the willingness of those they oppose to fight and die ("The insurgency has shown 'outstanding resilience'"), Vietnam will naturally come to mind.

The fact is that"Vietnam = Iraq" will never go away as long as we occupy Iraq. As a start, Vietnam (or avoiding the subject) has been obsessively on the collective brain of the Bush administration for years now; but it's been no less on the minds of others around the world. And that makes good sense. Vietnam was, after all, the last great moment before this one of American imperial overstretch and the last great American defeat. How can people everywhere not be amazed to see so many of its elements uncannily reappear, even after U.S. leaders have spent over three decades trying to obliterate that era from American memory. (It was, after all, the elder Bush at the time of Gulf War I who exulted:"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!")

If the people of the world in some sense cannot help but be focused on the last remaining superpower and its catastrophic encounter with Iraq, then how could they not help but think about Vietnam as well. It's not a mistake that Saddam's military officers studied the Vietnam experience and evidently considered it in planting the seeds of a post-war insurgency before our invasion even began; nor that rebellious Shiites in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City last June were writing "Vietnam Street" on walls along their embattled avenues ("This is called Vietnam Street because this is where we kill Americans."); nor that a rebellious Sunni cleric in Falluja this week spoke about drawing the Americans into the"quagmire of Fallujah." Even giving some leeway for translation, the reference has to be to Vietnam, just as thoughts of the Vietnam"quagmire" never quite depart from the minds of Americans, top to bottom, assigned to Iraq. (As one American soldier in Samarra recently put it to a French reporter:"I don't think we're going to win this place. It's going to be like another Vietnam. We'll be here for a long time.")

"Quagmire" (or its cognates swamp, quicksand, bog, morass, sinkhole, bottomless pit) was, of course, the single most famous image of the Vietnam war -- we were being drawn in step by step and couldn't extricate ourselves -- and a strange one it was, as I've written elsewhere. After the September 11th 2001 assaults, it was, I believe, the first Vietnam image to come to mind in official Washington and in a curious form that combined the quagmire environment with the counterinsurgency idea of draining the sea. The phrase was"draining the swamp" (assumedly so that the mosquitoes and other evil creatures there would have no place left to propagate), and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used it within days of 9/11. Tony Karon of Time magazine reported on September 20, 2001 that earlier in the week Rumsfeld had said of Bin Laden and his followers in Afghanistan,"[T]he campaign would combine military, political, intelligence and diplomatic initiatives to ‘drain the swamp they live in.'"

A week later, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz addressed a meeting of NATO ministers in Brussels saying,"While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp" -- and, though he didn't quite point a finger at Iraq by name, his references were clear. Everyone there had to know, even then, just two weeks after 9/11, that in his mind the snake of snakes was Saddam, and the swamp of swamps, Saddam's Iraq.

One, two, three, many Fallujas?

In Iraq, the phrase is still"drain the swamp." Falluja was actually our second attempt to drain the Iraqi"swamp" by obliterating it -- our first having been in the Old City of Najaf -- which meant of course draining out of it those hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of whom may have felt little sympathy for the Talibanization of Falluja but undoubtedly now feel great anger at the brutal actions of their occupiers. Unsurprisingly, the process of draining the swamp in Iraq has had the effect of turning what were previously cities into the equivalent of swamps, places fit only for those"snakes."

Parts of Falluja were evidently quite literally turned into"swamps," according to Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times who wrote of"[s]hattered water and sewage pipes have left pools of sewage-filled water, sometimes knee-deep." It seems that our memorial, thus far, in Iraq is a"swamp" where a city once stood. And this is supposed to be, as Jonathan Schell pointed out at Tomdispatch recently, the prelude to a democratic vote. Now that the Falluja solution is in place (actually the Najaf-solution done far more methodically), administration planners will naturally find themselves considering "Fallujah-type solutions" for Sunni Iraq's other rebellious cities. Another lesson of Vietnam was that there's a kind of grim momentum to such things.

And here's the present black humor punch line to the Iraqi joke, as McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times wrote,"Reconstruction of Fallouja is on hold as the fighting persists." There is now much press-talk about the reconstruction of Falluja, the difficult task ahead, and the challenges we face, but imagine for a minute that after nearly two years, under far better circumstances, we haven't been able to bring 24-hour a day electricity or clean water to much of Baghdad and then think about just what kind of reconstruction we can possibly do in a destroyed but not fully subjected city in the heart of the inflamed Sunni Triangle. Subject closed.

In the meantime,"draining the swamp" in such wars, it's worth remembering, is hardly a unidirectional activity. As the London Times' Jenkins comments, reaching back to Napoleon's 19th century invasion of Russia (and an early version of the quagmire image),"The Russian general, Kutusov, called Moscow ‘the sponge that will suck Napoleon dry.' Sunni Iraq is taking on the same function for the Americans." And the rebels of various factions are intent on hastening the process by performing their own grim"draining" activities -- draining away all support for the occupiers. The horrific murder of Margaret Hassan of CARE was heavily reported here. Hers was the death of an innocent and the act of brutes, but of course it only hastened the withdrawal of aid organizations from the country (which, though certainly harmful to the American effort, is undoubtedly devastating to the lives of many ordinary Iraqis).

Yet more brutal (if such things can even be measured) has been the remarkably coordinated campaign to"drain the swamp" of anyone willing to associate with the Americans, even laundrywomen on American bases, for instance, no less translators, truck drivers, or policemen. Assassinations, beheadings, the slaughter of innocents via car bombs and roadside bombs, kidnappings, murders of every sort are met on the American side, as on Friday, by the raiding of mosques and hospitals, by the use of weapons that are, by their very nature, indiscriminate in the neighborhoods of great cities. These surely are the gates of hell. It's difficult even to remember a time when Americans could have dreamt about"liberating" Iraqis. That might as well have been in another world.

Our gamblers in Washington cast the die in March 2003 and invaded Iraq based on a"theory." Now, the game is being played out ever more extremely and murderously by others on the ground. In the penultimate paragraph of a recent piece -- oh, those last, seldom-read paragraphs of news reports in our imperial press where reporters can finally slip in their hunches and opinions, usually through the words of others -- Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post quotes a"Special Forces veteran, who speaks Arabic" as summing up the situation this way:"Across Baghdad, Latifiyah, Mahmudiyah, Salman Pak, Baqubah, Balad, Taji, Baiji, Ramadi and just about everywhere else you can name, the people absolutely hate us. . . . The Iraqi people have not bought into what the Americans are selling, and no amount of military activity is going to change this fact."

Simon Jenkins writes this:

"No statement about Iraq is more absurd than that ‘we must stay to finish the job.' What job? A dozen more Fallujahs? The thesis that leaving Iraq would plunge it into anarchy and warlordism defies the facts on the ground. Iraq south of Kurdistan is in a state of anarchy already, a land of suicide bombings, kidnapping, hijackings and gangland mayhem. There is no law or order, no public administration or police or proper banking. Its streets are Wild West. The occupying force is entombed in bases it can barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara."

But perhaps the simplest way to sum up where matters may rest in Iraq today I ran across in the final lines of a recent long New York Times piece by Edward Wong and James Glanz (Rebels Attack in Central Iraq and the North):" [T]he violence [in Mosul] had calmed since then, and children could be seen playing in some parks. At one playground, Amin Muhammad, 10, and his friends raced around with plastic guns. 'We divide ourselves into two teams,' he said, 'the mujahedeen versus the American forces.'' And in their battles, he said, the mujahedeen always win."

Copyright C2004 Tom Engelhardt

Howard Zinn, in the Progressive (Nov. 2004):

Mr. Zinn's latest book is Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) with co-editor Anthony Arnove

I am calling it "our" war on terrorism because I want to distinguish it from Bush's war on terrorism, and from Sharon's, and from Putin's. What their wars have in common is that they are based on an enormous deception: persuading the people of their countries that you can deal with terrorism by war. These rulers say you can end our fear of terrorism--of sudden, deadly, vicious attacks, a fear new to Americans--by drawing an enormous circle around an area of the world where terrorists come from (Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya) or can be claimed to be connected with (Iraq), and by sending in tanks and planes to bomb and terrorize whoever lives within that circle.

Since war is itself the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory. Is it strange, or normal, that no major political figure has pointed this out?

Even within their limited definition of terrorism, they--the governments of the United States, Israel, Russia--are clearly failing. As I write this, three years after the events of September 11, the death toll for American servicemen has surpassed 1,000, more than 150 Russian children have died in a terrorist takeover of a school, Afghanistan is in chaos, and the number of significant terrorist attacks rose to a twenty-one-year high in 2003, according to official State Department figures. The highly respected International Institute for Strategic Studies in London has reported that "over 18,000 potential terrorists are at large with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq."

With the failure so obvious, and the President tripping over his words trying to pretend otherwise (August 30: "I don't think you can win" and the next day: "Make no mistake about it, we are winning"), it astonishes us that the polls show a majority of Americans believing the President has done "a good job" in the war on terrorism.

I can think of two reasons for this.

First, the press and television have not played the role of gadflies, of whistleblowers, the role that the press should play in a society whose fundamental doctrine of democracy (see the Declaration of Independence) is that you must not give blind trust to the government. They have not made clear to the public--I mean vividly, dramatically clear--what have been the human consequences of the war in Iraq.

I am speaking not only of the deaths and mutilations of American youth, but the deaths and mutilations of Iraqi children. (I am reading at this moment of an American bombing of houses in the city of Fallujah, leaving four children dead, with the U.S. military saying this was part of a "precision strike" on "a building frequently used by terrorists.") I believe that the American people's natural compassion would come to the fore if they truly understood that we are terrorizing other people by our "war on terror."

A second reason that so many people accept Bush's leadership is that no counterargument has come from the opposition party. John Kerry has not challenged Bush's definition of terrorism. He has not been forthright. He has dodged and feinted, saying that Bush has waged "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time." Is there a right war, a right place, a right time? Kerry has not spoken clearly, boldly, in such a way as to appeal to the common sense of the American people, at least half of whom have turned against the war, with many more looking for the wise words that a true leader provides. He has not clearly challenged the fundamental premise of the Bush Administration: that the massive violence of war is the proper response to the kind of terrorist attack that took place on September 11, 2001.

Let us begin by recognizing that terrorist acts--the killing of innocent people to achieve some desired goal--are morally unacceptable and must be repudiated and opposed by anyone claiming to care about human rights. The September 11 attacks, the suicide bombings in Israel, the taking of hostages by Chechen nationalists--all are outside the bounds of any ethical principles.

This must be emphasized, because as soon as you suggest that it is important, to consider something other than violent retaliation, you are accused of sympathizing with the terrorists. It is a cheap way of ending a discussion without examining intelligent alternatives to present policy.

Then the question becomes: What is the appropriate way to respond to such awful acts? The answer so far, given by Bush, Sharon, and Putin, is military action. We have enough evidence now to tell us that this does not stop terrorism, may indeed provoke more terrorism, and at the same time leads to the deaths of hundreds, even thousands, of innocent people who happen to live in the vicinity of suspected terrorists.

What can account for the fact that these obviously ineffective, even counterproductive, responses have been supported by the people of Russia, Israel, the United States? It's not hard to figure that out. It is fear, a deep, paralyzing fear, a dread so profound that one's normal rational faculties are distorted, and so people rush to embrace policies that have only one thing in their favor: They make you feel that something is being done. In the absence of an alternative, in the presence of a policy vacuum, filling that vacuum with a decisive act becomes acceptable.

And when the opposition party, the opposition Presidential candidate, can offer nothing to fill that policy vacuum, the public feels it has no choice but to go along with what is being done. It is emotionally satisfying, even if rational thought suggests it does not work and cannot work.

If John Kerry cannot offer an alternative to war, then it is the responsibility of citizens, with every possible resource they can muster, to present such an alternative to the American public.

Yes, we can try to guard in every possible way against future attacks, by trying to secure airports, seaports, railroads, other centers of transportation. Yes, we can try to capture known terrorists. But neither of those actions can bring an end to terrorism, which comes from the fact that millions of people in the Middle East and elsewhere are angered by American policies, and out of these millions come those who will carry their anger to fanatic extremes.

The CIA senior terrorism analyst who has written a book signed "Anonymous" has said bluntly that U.S. policies--supporting Sharon, making war on Afghanistan and Iraq--"are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world."

Unless we reexamine our policies--our quartering of soldiers in a hundred countries (the quartering of foreign soldiers, remember, was one of the grievances of the American revolutionaries), our support of the occupation of Palestinian lands, our insistence on controlling the oil of the Middle East--we will always live in fear. If we were to announce that we will reconsider those policies, and began to change them, we might start to dry up the huge reservoir of hatred where terrorists are hatched.

Whoever the next President will be, it is up to the American people to demand that he begin a bold reconsideration of the role our country should play in the world. That is the only possible solution to a future of never-ending, pervasive fear. That would be "our" war on terrorism.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.

Amid the left's general dismay, a major anniversary just came and went without much notice. Thirty-five years ago last week Richard Nixon delivered his famous "Silent Majority" speech. In deep doo-doo after the biggest anti-war march in American history—a march in which middle-class squares far outnumbered wild-eyed hippies—Nixon went on TV before the largest audience ever for a presidential address. A treacherous minority wanted to get out of Vietnam at any cost, he explained (he mentioned a protest sign he saw in, of course, San Francisco: "Lose in Vietnam, Bring the Boys Home"). But the "great silent majority" knew better: that "the minority who hold that point of view and try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations in the street" were not really moral.

We have "values," they do not: The message was Nixon's most enduring contribution to Republican politicking.

Something else happened that week. Telegrams of approval poured into the White House, glowing letters to the editor appeared in newspapers across the nation. Nixon proudly displayed them to reporters, who duly reported a grassroots outpouring of support for the president.

Only later, during the Watergate investigations, was it revealed that the White House ran a sophisticated operation to produce fake telegrams and letters to the editor after major presidential addresses. That's the difference between then and now. Now, the media tell the stories the White House needs told without any external prompting.

The idea that last week's election results show that there is a great silent majority of Americans who vote first and foremost on their moral values, which means that they vote for the Republicans, has become gospel on our nation's airwaves by now. It is nonsense on stilts. Bush didn't win this election on "moral values." It turns out he didn't do any better among strong churchgoers, or rural voters, than he did in 2000. What was it that actually put him over the top? It's the wealth, stupid.

Pundits blow hot air. Political scientists crunch numbers. On his blog Polysigh, my favorite political scientist, Phil Klinkner, ran a simple exercise. Multiplying the turnout among a certain group by the percent who went for Bush yields a number electoral statisticians call "performance." Among heavy churchgoers, Bush's performance last time was 25 percent (turnout, 42 percent; percentage of vote, 59 percent). This time out it was also 25 percent—no change. Slightly lower turnout (41 percent), slightly higher rate of vote (61 percent).

Where did the lion's share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? "Two of those points," Klinkner said when reached by phone, "came solely from people making over a 100 grand." The people who won the election for him—his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago—were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.

Their portion of the electorate went from 15 percent in 2000 to 18 percent this year. Support for Bush among them went from 54 percent to 58 percent. "It made me think about that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11," says Klinkner, the one where Bush joked at a white-tie gala about the "haves" and the "have-mores": "Some people call you the elite," Bush said. "I call you my base."...

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Nov. 9, 2004):

"I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly as news reports were leaking Yasser Arafat's demise.

The combination of Mr. Bush's stunning new mandate and Mr. Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to massive dangers to Israel.

The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Mr. Arafat as the main impediment to achieving its vision - articulated above by the president - of achieving a"Palestine" living in harmony side-by-side with Israel. As Mr. Arafat exits the political stage, taking with him his stench of terrorism, corruption, extremism, and tyranny, Washington will jump to make its vision a reality, perhaps as soon as this Thursday, when the British prime minister ("I have long argued that the need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today") comes to town.

This observer expects that the president's efforts will not just fail but - like so much prior Arab-Israeli diplomacy - have a counterproductive effect. I say this for two reasons, one having to do with his own understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the other having to do with the situation on the ground in the Palestinian territories.

Mr. Bush's understanding: The president's major statement of June 2002 remains the guideline to his goals vis-à-vis this conflict. In it, he outlined his vision for a"provisional" Palestinian state and called on Israel to end what he called its"settlement activity in the occupied territories." As these two steps make up the heart of the Palestinian Arab program, the president was effectively inviting the Palestinian Arabs to behave themselves for an interval, long enough to collect these rewards, and then go back on the warpath.

Instead, the president should have told the Palestinian Arabs that they need unequivocally and permanently to accept that Israel is now and will always remain a Jewish state; in addition, they need to renounce violence against it. Furthermore, this change of heart must be visible in the schools, press, mosques, and political rhetoric before any discussion of benefits can begin.

But Mr. Bush did not make these demands, so, as Eli Lake has reported in The New York Sun, his approach translates into likely pressure on Israel.

Situation on the ground: There will be no successor to Mr. Arafat - he made sure of that through his endless manipulations, tricks, and schemes. Instead, this is the moment of the gunmen. Whether they fight for criminal gangs, warlords, security services, or ideological groups like Hamas, militiamen grasping for land and treasure will dominate the Palestinian scene for months or years ahead. The sort of persons familiar from past diplomacy or from TV commentaries - Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qurei, et al. - lack gunmen, and so will have limited relevance going forward.

The Palestinian territories have already descended into a hellish anarchy and circumstances will probably worsen as the strongmen struggle for power. Eventually, two of them will emerge with the ability to negotiate with the Israelis and Americans.

Note, two of them. The geographic division of the West Bank and Gaza, of only minor import until now, looms large upon Mr. Arafat's passing. As Jonathan Schanzer has suggested, whoever rules in the one unit is unlikely to gain traction in the other, making the notion of a"Palestine" that much more difficult to promote.

Two Palestines, anyone?

In conclusion, Israel has been spared from unremitting American pressure during the past three years only because Mr. Arafat continued to deploy the terrorism weapon, thereby alienating the American president and aborting his diplomacy. Thanks to growing anarchy in the Palestinian Arab territories, Israel will probably remain"lucky" for some time to come.

But this grace period will come to an end once clever and powerful Palestinian Arab leaders realize that by holding off the violence for a decent interval, they can rely on Israel's only major ally pressuring the Jewish state into making unprecedented concessions. I doubt this will happen on Mr. Bush's watch, but if it does, I foresee potentially the most severe crisis ever in U.S.-Israel relations.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch.com (Nov. 4, 2004):

[Mr. Engelhardt is the author of THE END OF VICTORY CULTURE and co-editor of HISTORY WARS, THE ENOLA GAY AND OTHER BATTLES FOR THE AMERICAN PAST.]

How can I not start on a personal note today? Election night was a roller coaster. I had written http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1967 a piece a day earlier in which I had expressed guarded optimism about the prospects of experiencing 2005 without George Bush. By Tuesday evening, with hopeful exit polls pouring in, I was pumped. Optimism surged. Phone calls with friends, exchanging bits of half-baked information, only added to the effect. My children arrived; the TV went on; friends began to drop by. I actually found a bottle of champagne, probably years old, and put it on ice. A moment of madness -- and hope.

And then, worst of all, I realized I was experiencing a startling surge of relief, of happiness, of well-being. Whatever it was, it coursed through my body and made me realize how deeply George Bush and his cronies had gotten under my skin. And then, of course, slowly, ever so slowly, it began -- with me saying again and again as one state after another turned red on various TV channels: That was expected; that was expected; that was expected.

This morning, a wonderful young friend, guessing my mood, e-mailed me to say that, even if I felt terrible, at least the election results would be good for Tomdispatch. He may be right. Four more years of Bush folly and horror, how perfect for an oppositional blog. But unfortunately there's a problem, since Tomdispatch, as it happens, is just me, and I feel mighty drear today. If the news isn't good for Tom Engelhardt, how can it be good for Tomdispatch?

Now, I look at my son and I imagine a draft. I look at him and I think of the young Americans who should never have been but are desperately in harm's way in Iraq. I think of the Iraqis and try to wrap my brain around the next 100,000 of them who will die in the urban killing fields of that country, while the second Bush administration pursues its mad, murderous policies. I think about those northern glaciers and the polar ice, and try to imagine them gone in a globally warmed world. I think about being in the heart of the heart of a vast (possibly failing) empire and my heart sinks -- and so, unfortunately, does Tomdispatch's.

I think of the possibly dying Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has held on these extra years by the skin of her teeth, and I remember all too well what it meant in the years of my young manhood to search for a back-alley abortionist, and then I wonder what the Bush court of 2006 will say when the next set of Guantanamo-like cases reach it, or when other U.S. citizens, even perhaps some without names like Hamdi, find themselves jailed on the President's whim. I think of the hideous and useless new weapons systems on which our money will now be squandered. I think of the administration's race to militarize space, as if there weren't enough advanced weapons on our own planet. I think about the neocons, hidden away these last months, who will undoubtedly return oh-so-eager to take a whack at Syria or Iran or North Korea or who knows where else.

I think about the very concept of governing checks and balances -- inexorably slipping away these last decades -- in a world in which the Bush administration controls the White House, Congress, and the courts, and in which the President now has his own political people running his own secret armed intelligence agency, the CIA. And I think about that greatest check and balance of all, the one between our government and a country which, in its relatively short history, has often enough been convulsed by spiritual awakenings and -- yes, what other word can we use -- crusades of every sort, now that the political and religious are increasingly combined in the body of a single man, our President.

In the meantime, a little over half of voting Americans -- and there were a lot of voting Americans this time around -- have now signed on to the rashest presidency in our history (short perhaps of that of Jefferson Davis); they have signed on to a disastrous crime of a war in Iraq, and a losing war at that which will only get worse; they have signed on to whatever dangerous schemes these schemers can come up with. They have signed on to their own impoverishment. This is the political version of the volunteer Army. Now, they have to live with it. Unfortunately, so do we.

My small guarantee. Much of this will change over the years to come. This world of ours already spins on a dime, economically, politically, militarily, environmentally. (Just wait, for instance, until the tactic being developed in Iraq, thanks to our President, the blowing up of oil pipelines, spreads beyond that country's boundaries, as it certainly will, and then check out oil prices and the stock market.) But, to sound a small note of hope, as the world spins on a dime, so often do administrations. And you just never know when one of them will indeed implode. Take Richard Nixon, who sailed through a disastrous war in Vietnam and into office as second time in 1972 on a veritable landslide of votes, and then slide slowly into Watergate and disgrace. These will not be quiet years and, I suspect, they will not prove good ones for George Bush.

I noticed a tiny piece today. Not 24 hours after the election, the Hungarian government announced that, with one more three-month extension, it would, by the end of March, withdraw its 300 troops from our mighty coalition in Iraq. It's a miniscule statement. Easy to miss. No one here is even likely to notice. But consider it a tiny, polite omen. The United States is obviously the 800-pound gorilla in any global "room," but in the coming years much of the rest of the world will have little choice, distaste aside, but to do its best to figure out how to turn backs on, or work ways around, or cut out of the mix this country and its aggressive, treaty-eating, go-it-alone rulers -- its "Moolas" (as George Bush called the Iranian mullahs in one of the presidential debates, as you might speak of "simoleons").

I predict that, within a short space of time, we will find ourselves -- if I can coin a phrase -- an imperial pariah. The Bush administration demanded the right to go it alone. Now they may have no choice but to do so, and the "tribute" any empire can demand of its allies and subject nations may trickle into our economy far too slowly for anything but terrible times, just as the world's oil economy begins to spring endless leaks.

There can be no comfort in predicting bad times, and only small comfort, given what will certainly lie ahead, in the impressive surge of activism that accompanied this election even if, matched from the other side, it could not win it. But we should all take modest heart, not in the pious babble of John Kerry in concession and George Bush in triumph talking about healing the wounds and bridging the splits in our polarized land. No, we should remember that they -- the Republicans -- had decades to organize themselves, and they've had power as well. We've had only the barest few years since George Bush conjured us up from quiescence. How can we really be surprised?

In some ways it's already remarkable what's occurred. The war the President started has chased him to the polls. He wasn't a sitting war president, he was a fleeing one -- even if, thanks to Karl Rove and others, a fleet enough one as well. Now, he's elected but soon enough he'll find out that he's going to have to keep on running.

In the meantime for us, for me, there's the hangover from an election -- many elections -- lost. Tomorrow, or in the days or weeks or months thereafter, an antiwar movement of growing power will undoubtedly come into being. Is there really a choice? In the meantime, there's always the present to deal with.

Deep into election night, my wife wept in her sleep, and I arose in the morning with my jaw locked tight and the mood-hangover of a lifetime. But we're a protective species. I got up, skipped the television news, took a desultory few-minute wander around the Internet, got dressed, grabbed my usual breakfast, went out and bought my hometown paper. I glanced at the headline, "Bush Holds Lead," already knowing he had done more than that, and then I did the protective thing. I found "the Arts" section, triple folded the paper in that identifiably New York way at the crossword puzzle, pulled out a pen, and while walking down Broadway toward the subway, began to fill it in.

A small, ordinary, everyday pleasure. And it did calm me. Tonight, I'll go home and watch the Knicks season opener. (I start all New York sports seasons -- Knicks, Mets, Giants -- with hope but always prepared to follow my team right to the end, right into fan hell.) Ordinary life, it's what we all want most of the time. And we try always to hang onto it, most of the time, under the worst of circumstances, however mild or horrific they might be, in New York or Dayton or Baghdad or Beijing.

Here in New York City, we don't exactly specialize in starry skies. And the other night when the moon was actually in eclipse and you could see it, miraculously, from our street corner (as my wife did), I'm embarrassed to say I was tired and caught it from the couch on TV instead. But I'm still capable of conjuring a sky-worth of the universe, the sort of sky that stretches from horizon to horizon and leaves you feeling awed, and oh so very small. Sometimes that can be a scary feeling, but sometimes -- as now -- it's worth remembering anyway. Sometimes, on the nights when everything imaginable goes wrong, it's worth reminding yourself that we're just one species -- the whole lot of us -- on a tiny planet at the edge of a not so grandiose galaxy, one of only god knows how many. It's worth remembering that it's not, as they say, the end of the world. Tom

Jack Rakove, in the LAT (Oct. 31, 2004):

Part of me perversely hopes that Tuesday's election is a replay of 2000.

Three years ago, I undertook a fool's errand to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta to urge the National Commission on Federal Election Reform to recommend altering or even abolishing the electoral college. The former president, host and honorary chairman, received me graciously, but when Carter heard my message, he said: "It is a waste of time to talk about changing the electoral college…. I would predict that 200 years from now, we will still have the electoral college."

The conventional wisdom that Carter voiced has an obvious source. Any effort to replace our state-based electoral system with a national popular vote would require a constitutional amendment, and its ratification could easily be blocked by a coalition of the 13 smallest states, which would naturally resist their presumed loss of political influence.

This is a formidable obstacle. But I also believe that Carter got the basic point backward. If we never talk about the electoral college, we will remain stuck with it for another two centuries. But if we discuss it, the arguments made in its defense can be exposed for the fallacies they are.

Logic alone would never be sufficient. Compelling evidence of the need for change would also be needed. This requires hoping that the electoral college misfires another time, as it did in 2000, when it gave an electoral majority to George W. Bush and a popular plurality to Al Gore.

The conditions for chaos in Tuesday's election already exist. Turnout will be decisive, and a good dozen states appear in play. It's plausible for Sen. John Kerry to gain an electoral victory while President Bush carries the popular vote. Electoral numerologists also have scenarios for an electoral tie (269-269), which would throw the decision into the House of Representatives.

But my own preferred if perverse formula for chaos involves Colorado.

Appearing on that state's ballot is Amendment 36, which would divide Colorado's nine electoral votes proportionally, based on statewide results, and take effect immediately. So consider this wild scenario:

The amendment passes and the election turns on Colorado. Give Kerry 269 electors, Bush 260, allow Bush to carry the state's popular vote, even while its confused citizens approve Amendment 36. Presto, we're back in Florida. Kerry picks up four electors, surpasses the magic electoral number of 270, and Republicans immediately go to court. They argue that when the Constitution says that electors in each state are to be appointed "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct," it means the "legislature" as an institution, not legislation enacted by popular referendum. Democrats reply that the people also act as a legislature when they approve a referendum, and that in 18th century usage, legislature meant the supreme law-giving power within a state, and not merely the people's elected representatives. You make the call.

As the campaign comes to an end, public opinion and turnout may still move decisively in favor of one candidate, sparing the nation its second electoral debacle in a row. Yet whatever its fate and effect, Amendment 36 nicely exposes the problematic nature of our electoral college. It recognizes that one effect of the winner-take-all rule that has prevailed since the early 19th century is to disfranchise the minority within any state....