Mr. Halpern is professor of history, Henderson State University and the author of Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century.

Ralph Nader has a long and distinguished career of public service but his 2000 presidential campaign divided progressives.  Will the 2004 be a repeat of 2000? 

Nader’s failure to listen to what he acknowledges was the unanimous opposition of his many progressive friends to a presidential race this year reminds one of the man in the midlife crisis who believes he has to “do what he has to do” and abandon his family.  Marriages get rocky and many people’s feelings were hurt in the 2000 election.  Nader appears to have nursed his hurt feelings to the point that he is ready to abandon the associations of a lifetime.  Like the man in a mid-life crisis, he appears to have been listening to and becoming intimate with someone else.  The indications are that Nader is finding new, conservative allies for his independent candidacy as he dispenses with his old progressive friends. 

In an extended interview on National Public Radio on the day of his announcement, Nader reported on his conversations with Democratic leaders.  He said his focus would be on attacking Bush and that if the Democrats don’t criticize him, he won’t be criticizing them.  He made reasonable points on many important issues, but he couldn’t get through the interview without criticizing the leading Democrat candidates.

Initial commentaries by progressive pundits, the New York Times, and many Democrats were very negative toward Nader’s bid.  On the second day into his 2004 quest, in a wide-ranging interview at the National Press Club, Nader advised liberals and Democrats, to “relax,” I’ll surprise you as an ally in the fight to oust the Bush administration. 

Time will tell, but the evidence from the National Press Club interview point to 2004 being very different from 2000, but not in a good way for progressives.  Nader lauded resolutions of the Texas Republican party convention that he said were critical of Bush policies and called on Ross Perot to speak out as he did in 1992 on trade and the deficit.  Nader responded positively to the enthusiasm of a conservative electoral activist.  Perhaps most telling was his response to a question from a New York Times reporter about whether Iraq would be better off today if the Bush administration had left Saddam Hussein in power.  Instead of mentioning the alternative of working through the United Nations, Nader asserted it was a false question because the first Bush administration had a coalition in 1991 and should have finished off Saddam Hussein then.  This, of course, was the line of thinking among Bush’s conservative base and the argument undercut Nader’s other assertion that it’s all about oil. 

Nader said he hopes to draw most of his votes this time from independents and Republicans, but is he pulling conservatives out of the Republican party or is he himself being captured by conservative thinking?  What Nader neglects to mention, moreover, is that those Republicans and independents opposed to Bush on the war, civil liberties, the deficit, or the jobless recovery have a choice of voting for the Democrat.

In the 2000 election, Nader ran as the candidate of the Green party, a party of the left.  He ran a progressive campaign that highlighted the issue of corporate power and brought many young people into the political process, but his campaign also had an ultra-left tinge because it mistakenly saw no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.  The prediction here is, that while still rhetorically progressive and anti-corporate on many issues, in 2004 Nader’s campaign will resemble the independent campaigns of former Republicans John Anderson and Ross Perot and will play a center-right role between the two major parties. 

The wisest response of progressives, Democrats, and grass roots activists is to focus on mobilizing voters on the issues of peace, jobs, a living wage, establishing universal health care, restoring civic harmony and preserving access to abortion and the rights of all.   They can praise Nader’s good ideas and criticize his bad ones without getting caught up in the negative game of attacking him as a spoiler.  Most important, they can coalesce around electing a Democratic president and Congress and ridding the country of the most reactionary administration in our modern history. 

Joel Beinin (Stanford), writing for the Interhemispheric Resource Center (March 30, 2004):

A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to Israel have mounted a campaign against American scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University, has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing to warn the American public about the dangers of radical Islam, claiming they bear some of the responsibility for what befell us on September 11. In 2003, proponents of this position took their complaints to Congress. The Senate is expected to review them soon, as it discusses the Higher Education Reauthorization bill.

The neocons initially urged Congress to reduce the appropriation for Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Since 1958 this legislation has provided federal funding to universities to support study of less commonly taught languages, such as Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Now they want to set up a political review board to discourage universities and scholars from tolerating bad thoughts.

Last year 118 international area studies centers, including 17 Middle East centers, received about $95 million for graduate fellowships, language training, and community outreach. The Middle East studies centers train the great majority of Americans who are competent in difficult Middle East languages. No other institutions are now able to do this job on the required scale. Lack of Arabic speaking agents hindered the FBI from understanding some of the pre-September 11 clues that might have prevented the attacks. Fortunately for our safety, Congress rejected the neocon proposal to reduce support for foreign language study.

Having failed in their first effort, the neoconservatives are now attempting to assert political control over teaching, research, and public programs of the international area studies centers. In June 2003, Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor of National Review Online and a fellow of the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located on the campus of Stanford University, testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. His testimony summarized the arguments of Martin Kramers attack on American Middle East studies. Kurtz asserted that"Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy." He urged legislators to take action to ensure"balance." Kurtz, Kramer, and other neocons such as Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum who have written on this subject are concerned that Middle East scholars often say things American politicians dont want to hear--including criticism of U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israels policies toward the Palestinians. Some might conclude that perhaps scholars who study the modern Middle East know something worth listening to. But the neocons already know what they want to hear. They have not been able to win in the marketplace of ideas. Critical and inconvenient thoughts continue to be expressed. So the neocons want the government to help crush wayward ideas.

Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) obliged by introducing the International Studies in Higher Education Act, designated H.R. 3077. The bill passed the House of Representatives, after a suspension of the rules, by a voice vote in October 2003. The bill was then referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which is now taking up the issue.

H.R. 3077 calls for establishing an International Higher Education Advisory Board with broad investigative powers"to study, monitor, apprise, and evaluate" activities of area studies centers supported by Title VI. The board is charged with ensuring that government-funded academic programs"reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views" on international affairs."Diverse perspectives," in this context, is code for limiting criticism of U.S. Middle East policy and of Israel.

Under the proposed legislation, three advisory board members would be appointed by the Secretary of Education; two of them from government agencies with national security responsibilities. The leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate each would appoint two more.

This proposal represents a dangerous threat to academic freedom. The advisory board could investigate scholars and area studies centers, applying whatever criteria it pleases. The criteria almost certainly would be political. The whole point of the legislation is to impose political restraints on activities of Middle East centers.

The legislation, if passed, could actually diminish our national security. No first-rank university would accept direct government intrusion into the educational process. Such institutions would likely refuse to accept Title VI funding if it were subject to political oversight. The already dangerously low number of Americans competent in Middle Eastern languages would then be reduced.

Neocons believe it is better for the government to control teaching and research rather than to allow established policy to be questioned. But we are more likely to understand"why they hate us," and what we can do about it when old ideas can be challenged without fear. Freedom, including academic freedom, is the best way to make Americans safe.

For more information about Middle East Studies:

Steven Heydermann,"Warping Mideast Judgments," Chicago Tribune,

March 14, 2004, online at: http://www.campus-watch.org/pf.php?id=1070

Martin Kramer,"Title VI: Turn on the Defogger," March 17, 2004, online at:
http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/index.htm

Daniel Pipes,"Defund Middle East Studies," New York Sun, February 24, 2004, online at: http://danielpipes.org/article/1581

"Middle East Forum," Right Web Profile, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), March 2004, online at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/mef.php

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (March 30, 2004):

The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the"airship" -- these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe's burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance. And they continued to do so for a long, long time. Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is considered to have taken off at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rush of European powers to build ever larger, ever more powerful,"all-big-gun" battleships -- the"dreadnoughts" (scared of nothings).

In "Exterminate All the Brutes," a remarkable travel book that takes you into the heart of European darkness (via an actual trip through Africa), the Swede Sven Lindqvist offers the following comments on that sixteenth century sea-borne moment when Europe was still a barbaric outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:

"Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tatars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.

"Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns… Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them."

For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their ship-borne cannons and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa as well as on the Asian mainland, the Europeans moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits as indicated by a well-known passage about a French warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad's novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness :

"In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech - and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight."

Well, maybe it wasn't quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point is made. Of course, sooner or later (sometimes, as in Latin America or India, sooner) the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process was often the naval vessel -- as at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 when somewhere between 9,000 and 11,000 soldiers in the Mahdi's army were killed (with a British loss of 48), thanks to mass rifle fire, Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of the gunboats floating on the Nile.

Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force and here's part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):

"The white flags [of the Mahdi's army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dance mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery… About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks… It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply."

And -- Presto! -- before you knew it three-quarters of the world was a colony of Europe (or the United States or Japan). Not bad, all in all, for a few floating centuries. In the latter part of this period, the phrase"gunboat diplomacy" came into existence, an oxymoron that nonetheless expressed itself all too eloquently.

2. Our little"diplomats"

Today, gunboat diplomacy seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past (despite our thirteen aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making"friendly" house calls from time to time). But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out"armed diplomacy" -- and, as we all know, under the Bush administration the Pentagon has taken over much that might once have been labeled"diplomacy" -- then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the"platforms" are upon which we"export force," upon which we mount our" cannons."

What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the Earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more"mobile" versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to what they've come to call the"arc of instability," a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia and the former SSRs of Eastern Europe down deep into Northern Africa and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartland of the planet. What the Pentagon refers to as its"lily pads" strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions -- the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the"flies" as they go.

Thought about a certain way, the military base, particularly as reconceived in recent years, whether in Uzbekistan, Kosovo, or Qatar, is our"gunboat," a"platform" that has been ridden ever deeper into the landlocked parts of the globe -- into regions like the Middle East, where our access once had some limits, or like the former Yugoslavia and the 'stans of Central Asia, where the lesser superpower of the Cold War era once blocked access entirely. Our new military bases are essentially the 21st century version of the old European warships; the difference being that, once built, the base remains in place, while its parts -- the modern equivalents of those 16th century cannons -- are capable of moving over land or water almost anywhere.

As Chalmers Johnson has calculated it in his new book on American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire , our global Baseworld consists of at least 700 military and intelligence bases; possibly -- depending on how you count them up -- many more. This is our true"imperial fleet" (though, of course, we have an actual imperial fleet as well, our aircraft carriers alone being like small, massively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we've left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several of the former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq after last year's invasion.

The process has speeded up under the Bush administration, but until recent weeks, if you read our press, you would have had almost no way of knowing this; on Iraq, since in April 2003 the New York Times front-paged Pentagon plans to build four permanent bases there, none at all unless you wandered the Web reading the foreign press. Basing is generally considered here either a topic not worth writing about or an arcane policy matter best left to the inside pages for the policy wonks and news junkies. This is in part because we Americans -- and by extension our journalists -- don't imagine us as garrisoning or occupying the world; and certainly not as having anything faintly approaching a military empire. Generally speaking, those more than seven hundred bases, our little"diplomats" (and the rights of extraterritoriality that go with them via Status of Forces Agreements) don't even register on our media's mental map of our globe.

Only recently, however, a few basing articles have suddenly appeared and, miracle of miracle, Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune has actually written one about our permanent Iraqi bases, endearingly referred to in the military as"enduring camps." Such bases were almost certainly planned for by the Pentagon before the 2003 invasion. After all, we were also planning to withdraw most of our troops from Saudi Arabia -- Osama bin Laden had complained bitterly about the occupation of Islam's holy sites -- and they weren't simply going to be shipped back to the U.S.

But the numbers of those potential enduring camps in Iraq are startling indeed. The title of Spolar's piece tells the tale: 14 'enduring' bases set in Iraq and it begins with the line:"From the ashes of abandoned Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are overseeing the building of an enhanced system of American bases designed to last for years."

Think about 14 bases"for years," and keep in mind that some of these bases are already comparable in size and elaborateness to the ones we built in Vietnam four decades ago. Spolar continues:

"As the U.S. scales back its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq provides an option for an administration eager to maintain a robust military presence in the Middle East and intent on a muscular approach to seeding democracy in the region. The number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, between 105,000 and 110,000, is expected to remain unchanged through 2006, according to military planners.

"'Is this a swap for the Saudi bases?' asked Army Brig. Gen. Robert Pollman, chief engineer for base construction in Iraq. 'I don't know. ... When we talk about enduring bases here, we're talking about the present operation, not in terms of America's global strategic base. But this makes sense. It makes a lot of logical sense.'"

And keep in mind as well that all of this construction is being done to the tune of billions of dollars under contracts controlled by the Pentagon and, as Spolar writes, quite"separate from the State Department and its Embassy in Baghdad" (which, after June 30, is slated to be the largest embassy in the world with a"staff" of 3,000-plus).

As the Pentagon planned it, and as we knew via leaks to the press soon after the war, newly"liberated" Iraq, once"sovereignty" had been restored, was to have only a lightly armed military force of some 40,000 men and no air force. The other part of this equation, the given (if unspoken) part, was that some sort of significant long-term American military protection of the country would have to be put in place. That size Iraqi military in one of the most heavily armed regions of the planet was like an insurance policy that we would"have" to stay. And we've proceeded accordingly, emplacing our"little diplomats" right at a future hub of the global energy superhighway.

But we've made sure to cover the other on and off ramps as well. As James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote recently in a rundown of some of our post-9/11 basing policies ( After 9/11, U.S. policy built on world bases ):

"One year after U.S. tanks rolled through Iraq and more than two years after the United States bombed the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, the administration has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.

"The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls 'lily pads.' They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries -- the traditional Cold War role of such installations -- but as jumping-off points for future 'preventive wars' and military missions."

In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all"gunboats," no colonies. The combination of bases we set down in any given country is referred to in the Pentagon as our"footprint" in that country. It's a term that may once have come from the idea of"boots on the ground," but now has congealed, imagistically speaking, into a single (and assumedly singular) bootprint -- as if, as it strode across the planet, the globe's only hyperpower was so vast that it could place only a single boot in any given country at any time.

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith has been the main Pentagon architect of a plan to"realign" our bases so as to"forward deploy" U.S. forces into the"arc of instability." (On a planet so thoroughly garrisoned, though, what can"forward" actually mean?) In a December speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies ( Transforming the U.S. Global Defense Posture ), he offered a Pentagon version of sensitivity in discussing his forward deployment plans:"Realigning the U.S. posture will also help strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical US 'footprint' to suit local conditions. The goal is to reduce friction with host nations, the kind that results from accidents and other problems relating to local sensitivities." (Moccasins, flip-flops, sandals anyone?)

In the meantime, to ensure that there will be no consequences if the giant foot, however enclosed, happens to stamp its print in a tad clumsily, causing the odd bit of collateral damage, he added:

"For this deployability concept to work, US forces must be able to move smoothly into, through, and out of host nations, which puts a premium on establishing legal and support arrangements with many friendly countries. We are negotiating or planning to negotiate with many countries legal protections for US personnel, through Status of Forces Agreements and agreements (known as Article 98 agreements) limiting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court with respect to our forces' activities."

Bradley Graham of the Washington Post recently offered a more precise glimpse at Feith's realignment strategy, which would move us away from our Cold War deployments, especially in Germany, Japan and Korea ( U.S. May Halve Forces in Germany ):

"The Pentagon has drafted plans to withdraw as many as half of the 71,000 troops based in Germany as part of an extensive realignment of American military forces that moves away from large concentrations in Europe and Asia, according to U.S. officials… U.S. officials have said before that they intended to eliminate a number of large, full-service Cold War bases abroad and construct a network of more skeletal outposts closer to potential trouble spots in the Middle East and along the Pacific Rim."

In fact, the structure of major bases and"forward operating sites" in the arc of instability and, from Eastern Europe to the Central Asian 'stans, inside the former Soviet empire, is already in place or, as in Iraq, in the process of being built or negotiated. As Michael Kilian of the Chicago Tribune writes :

"[T]he United States now has bases or shares military installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

"Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. military 'footprint' on the rest of the world. The plan is expected to include a shift of resources from the huge Cold War-era bases in Western Europe to new and smaller ones in Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South Korea."

In the meantime, Pentagon strategic planning for ever more, ever more aggressive future war-fighting is likely only to intensify this process. Los Angeles Times ' military analyst William Arkin recently wrote of the unveiling of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's plan for a new military map of the globe ( War Plans Meaner, not Leaner ):

"The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a '1-4-2-1 defense strategy,' in which war planners prepare to fully defend one country (the United States), maintain forces capable of 'deterring aggression and coercion' in four 'critical regions' (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia), maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and be able to 'win decisively' - up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country - in one of those conflicts 'at a time and place of our choosing'.… In the Clinton era, the Pentagon planned for fighting two wars simultaneously (in the Middle East and Northeast Asia). Under the new strategy, it must prepare for four….

"The planning model Rumsfeld and company have embraced is certainly more ambitious. It covers domestic and foreign contingencies and favors preemption over diplomacy, and military strikes over peacekeeping operations. The plan signals to the world that the United States considers nuclear weapons useful military instruments, to be employed where warranted."

Or just consider another kind of footprint -- the tap dancing kind. The Pentagon's website informs us that at Lackland Air Force base in Texas, the Air Force has just held auditions in a"worldwide talent search" that even included a Robert de Niro impersonator. All of this was for the Tops in Blue (TIB) 2004 tour. Let me emphasize that we're not talking about an"All-American" talent contest, but a worldwide one. And, in fact, according to the Air Force press release , the winner of the"male vocalist" spot on the tour was Airman 1st Class Antonio Dandridge from the 35th Civil Engineer Squadron at Misawa Air Base, Japan. A recent TIB tour managed to hit 27 countries (read military bases), including Bagram Air Base in embattled Afghanistan.

We're talking a globe-girdling Baseworld here. Assumedly, the show's finale will be a rousing chorus of"We Are the World." ...

Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (Random House, 2003), in the LAT (March 24, 2004):

... In research for my latest book, I found Clarke to be one of the few heroes in the Bush White House. He was a career bureaucrat who served under four presidents and one of the first officials to recognize the seriousness of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalists. But it is disappointing to see Clarke pick on only one of the four administrations under which he served; after all, there were decades of American incompetence and inaction, and they all deserve a share of the blame.

Clarke, almost more than any other past or present federal official, should be aware of the failures of every Republican and Democratic administration since Ronald Reagan. Not a single president should boast of his work and commitment to fighting terrorism prior to 9/11.

When George W. Bush took office, he and his aides talked tougher than their Clinton counterparts but often seemed more preoccupied with ambitious military projects like missile defense than with chasing Al Qaeda. On Sept. 10, the day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He requested funding increases for 68 departments but rejected the FBI's requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism agents, 54 extra translators and 200 additional analysts.

That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney said he needed six months more to study a draft of homeland security legislation; he considered other matters more pressing.

As infuriating — and politically damaging — as these miscues are, the Democratic record for the previous eight years is every bit as frustrating, both for mistakes and policy failures. From not appreciating the importance of the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993, to sending the wrong signal to Al Qaeda when the U.S. hastily withdrew from Somalia after 18 troops were killed, to failing to go after Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1996, to a weak retaliation after hundreds were killed in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, to no retaliation at all after the 2000 assault on the destroyer Cole, there is little the Clinton administration can boast about regarding steps that might have prevented a 9/11-type attack.

President Clinton seemed curiously uninterested when it came to terrorism. His former political advisor, Dick Morris, has said:"You could talk to him about income redistribution and he would talk to you for hours and hours. Talk to him about terrorism and all you'd get was a series of grunts."

The word"terrorism" was barely mentioned during the 2000 presidential campaign. It was not an issue that either party thought was important to voters in staking out reasons why a candidate deserved the White House.

Clarke knows better than to blame any one administration. And so do most of the partisans now pointing fingers at each other.

Quote of the day: As Richard Clarkee, former White House counterterrorism"tsar," tells it in his new book Against All Enemies, on September 12, 2001, he returned to the White House to find Iraq, not al-Qaeda, the subject of the day:"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq…"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.' " (From Barton Gellman, the Washington Post)

Fathers and sons:

Millions of dollars have already fled the Bush campaign treasury chest (though perhaps some image like a horn of plenty might better capture its capacious nature) in a fierce attempt to"define" Senator Kerry as a flip-flopping, nogoodnik, no-defense wuss. And yet strangely, it seems the President's the one in the process of being redefined, and it's clearly driving the White House nuts. Only recently the presidential spokesman claimed George was such a desperately busy man that he had, at best, an hour -- no more -- to spare in which selected members of the 9/11 commission could privately ask him questions. Now, it turns out that this administration has so much time on its hands that it can be emptied out en masse onto the airwaves to try to slice-and-dice former counterterrorism"tsar" Richard Clarkee, the insider's insider, for his new kiss-and-tell book on the administration and 9/11.

From the vice-president on down, it seems that just about everyone in this administration took time off from their"war on terrorism" and its" central front" in Iraq (talk about making your own fantasies come true!) to launch something like a full-scale national anti-book tour. Can there be any greater evidence that Clarke's appearance on Sixty Minutes Sunday night staggered the"war president"? It was a dismantling the likes of which this White House had never experienced and they were on the attack so fast that they beat Clarke to the airwaves, appearing on the Sunday night news shows before he could even make it on camera. You couldn't be faster off the mark.

In rebuttal on Sixty Minutes, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley (and longtime Dick Cheney associate) actually had the temerity to suggest that Clarkee's meeting with George at which he claimed the president tried to intimidate him into linking September 11 to Saddam Hussein never took place -- only to be stunned when Leslie Stahl informed him that they had dug up another witness to the meeting.

"HADLEY: We can not find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarkee and the President ever occurred.

"STAHL: Now can I interrupt you for one second. We have done our own work on that ourselves and we have two sources who tell us independently of Dick Clarkee that there was this encounter. One of them was an actual witness.

"HADLEY: Look, the -- I -- I stand on what I said. But the point I think we're missing in this is of course the President wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9/11."

And then, of course, he just chugged on. Like a hutch of Energizer Bunnies, nothing stops them for long.

As Bill Gallagher, former city councilman and now columnist for the Niagara Falls Reporter, commented before Clarkee's appearance (When Ignorance Becomes Mendacity):

"When they're caught in their lies, they just keep on lying. George W. Bush and his gang find the truth about the war in Iraq so troubling they avoid it at whatever cost, knowing that making their lies live is the only possible way they can stay in power."

Of course, there's nothing new in this. It's what we've been living with since AD 2000. Administration defenders even attacked Clarke for injecting himself into the presidential race at an especially opportune moment for himself – he was supposedly"auditioning" for a role in a future Kerry administration. It hardly matters that he's flatly denied he'll accept a post from Kerry and, as on Charlie Rose last night, that he's pointed out his book would have come out significantly earlier if it hadn't been held up for months for"vetting" by this administration. It would be all-too-fitting if it turned out that the White House had vetted itself directly into the presidential bone yard.

This morning's New York Times' op-ed page had yet another of Paul Krugman's powerful columns (Lifting the Shroud) -- on how this administration's programmatic secrecy and lies are finally being shredded by insiders like Clarkee, and on the administration's attempt to strike back at their characters since they can't actually challenge the facts. ("It's important, when you read the inevitable attempts to impugn the character of the latest whistle-blower, to realize just how risky it is to reveal awkward truths about the Bush administration.") Krugman made only one small mistake. He spoke of the"few hours of shocked silence" from the administration after the 60 Minutes interview. He obviously wasn't watching the prime-time news shows beforehand. Hadley, when challenged by Stahl, had a split-second of shocked silence on camera. Otherwise it's been into the cacophony for all of us.

More curious yet, Krugman seems to be at war with his own newspaper which gave the Clarke story -- a front-pager if there ever was one -- to the now infamous Judith Miller, their very own journalistic weapon of mass destruction. On Monday, she wrote a piece, Former Terrorism Official Faults White House on 9/11, that was but another embarrassment for the paper of record; and so the hottest tale in town was tucked away in the upper right corner of page 18. Miller, it seems, could hardly wait to get through Clarke's part of the story -- so obviously boring -- to make it to the fourth and fifth paragraphs (the third being but a one-liner), which read:

"In an interview Sunday evening, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, dismissed Mr. Clarkee's charges as ‘politically motivated,' ‘reckless' and ‘baseless.'

"'If Dick Clarkee had such grave concerns about the direction of the war on terror, why did he stay on the team as long as he did, and why did he wait till the beginning of a presidential campaign to speak out?' Mr. Bartlett said. He said the book's timing showed that it was ‘more about politics than policy.'"

This, mind you, before she quoted a line from the book itself -- no less anything from the 60 Minutes appearance.

(As a sideline note, according to Editor & Publisher magazine on-line, Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, jr. responded to a question on Miller's deplorable WMD-reporting record this way:"The publisher defended Miller, saying he had known her 'for decades,' adding that she 'has fabulous sources.' Then he added: 'Were her sources wrong? Absolutely. Her sources were wrong. And you know something? The administration was wrong. And when you're covering it from the inside like that you're going to get things wrong sometimes. So I don't blame Judy Miller for the lack of finding weapons of mass destruction.' This produced a few laughs from audience members. 'I blame the administration for believing its own story line,' he continued, 'to such a point that they weren't prepared to question the authenticity of what they were told.'"

I guess we're talking"fabulous sources" -- as in"fabulously wrong.")

The Clarkee story only hit the Times' front page this morning and then, following the Miller lead of the previous day, as an administration-response piece ("Ex-Bush Aide, Finding Fault, Sets Off Debate"). For this one, Miller (who is seldom left to write on her own for long any more -- as close as the paper of record comes to an apology) was teamed up with another White House embed, Elisabeth Bumiller, who has been throwing warm sponges at the White House for… oh, let's say, at least the last few minutes. The piece began:"As the White House opened an aggressive personal attack against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarkee, a furious debate broke out on Monday about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after the Sept. 11 attacks to see if there was a link with Saddam Hussein." A furious debate or a furious White House? FedEx to Judy and Elisabeth, there's a difference.

And interestingly, just to complete this little account of Times reportage, though important"analysis" is often given a place of honor on the paper's front page, Todd S. Purdum's strong piece, labeled"assessment" (a curious and weak word for what he wrote, by the way -- though it's called"news analysis" in the on-line version), was tucked away below the carry-over of the Miller/Bumiller piece on p. 18. It began (An Accuser's Insider Status Puts the White House on the Defensive):

"John Kerry himself has never dared to make such a bald charge: That President Bush failed to adequately grasp the threat of Al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, then followed up with 'an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.'

"But that is the stinging indictment of Mr. Bush's own former top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarkee, published this week in a memoir. At the worst possible moment, it undercuts Mr. Bush on the issue that he has made the unapologetic centerpiece of his administration and a linchpin of his re-election campaign: his handling of the global war on terror…

"Just as Mr. Bush appeared to be gaining the upper hand over Mr. Kerry in the fledgling general election campaign after weeks on the defensive over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Mr. Clarkee has put the White House squarely on the defensive again. He paints a scene that it is easy to imagine turning up with spooky music in a Kerry commercial as evidence of Mr. Bush's determination to invade Iraq."

In the meantime, away from the grey lady of the American press, over at a paper where someone thought a little actual reporting was in order, the Wall Street Journal front-paged a staggering piece of reportage yesterday by reporter Scot J. Paltrow on the questions that still surround the administration's version of September 11, 2001. It's long and detailed. Here's just a small sample of one of the many administration tales that doesn't stand up in the light of day, according to Paltrow. The President, as you may remember, was in a Florida classroom when he got news of the 9/11 attacks (Detailed Picture of U.S. Actions On Sept. 11 Remains Elusive):

"In a CNBC television interview almost a year later, [White House Chief of Staff Andrew] Card said that after he alerted Mr. Bush, 'I pulled away from the president, and not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.'

"But uncut videotape of the classroom visit obtained from the local cable-TV station director who shot it, and interviews with the teacher and principal, show that Mr. Bush remained in the classroom not for mere seconds, but for at least seven additional minutes. He followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat. Then he stayed for at least another two minutes, asking the children questions and explaining to Ms. Rigell that he would have to leave more quickly than planned.

"[White House Communications Director Dan] Bartlett confirmed in an interview that the president stayed in the classroom for at least seven minutes."

It's a small but revealing moment in a piece not to be missed. The only question, of course, is why it took almost 2 1/2 years to reach the daylight in our mainstream media?

To offer just a small summary of what Paltrow manages to imply if not quite say: More or less nothing of the President's account of the day, of the orders he supposedly gave or the actions he supposedly took, tallies with what other knowledgeable witnesses experienced. It seems that he largely did nothing, that he remained unbelievably passive, as in that classroom, and let himself be bundled around like a rag-doll version of a president. Far more interesting, though, is Paltrow's account of the actions of Vice President Cheney that day. It seems that Cheney, among other things, may have lied to the President, possibly fabricating a threat to Air Force One out of whole cloth and so dispatching George for his own"safety" to air bases far from Washington, while he took control of matters in DC.

Paltrow's piece ends by noting that the 9/11 commission is"examining whether the White House should have had its own internal plan in place" for the President and staff in the even of a major terrorist attack. However, in the March issue of the Atlantic magazine, James Mann, author of The Rise of the Vulcans, The History of Bush's War Cabinet, suggests that, in fact, there was an Armageddon Day plan in place (for nuclear war against Russia), introduced in the Reagan years and practiced repeatedly by -- guess whom? -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, even in the years when they weren't in government. The magazine sums the piece up this way (The Armageddon Plan):"During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new 'President' in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11."

Mann himself writes:

"Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of 'undisclosed locations'; and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises…

"[Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States--inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting."

It's also a reminder of how panicky the vice president may have been. In his mind, he evidently was truly at"ground zero." Who knows? Perhaps it was at that moment when, as his training kicked in -- he had been a team leader in the Armageddon drills -- he first imagined himself as president.

At the moment, it's possible that George, despite his best efforts, may find himself redefined not by the Kerry campaign but by ex-associates like former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former counterterrorism tsar Clarkee, or by other Republicans notables, who feel themselves betrayed by the most radical and extreme administration in our history. Check out, for instance, the comments of former Secretary of the Navy and conservative Republican James Webb:

"Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace….

"There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment he deserves.

"At the same time, those around Bush, many of whom came of age during Vietnam and almost none of whom served, have attempted to assassinate the character and insult the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. Some have impugned the culture, history and integrity of entire nations, particularly in Europe, that have been our country's great friends for generations and, in some cases, for centuries."

A final note on events so far. Despite the dismal performance of the New York Times, this may be the first moment since September 11, 2001 when much of the mainstream media has taken hold of significant news about this administration and pursued it more or less fully wherever it led.

Iraq: One year later than what?

Quote of the week, Iraq branch:"In [an interview with an unidentified soldier just back from Iraq, he] was asked what Arabic he had been taught in order to do his job. He said, 'They teach us a few words and phrases."Stop. Get down. Kneel. Shut up."" (Karen Kwiatkowski, Assessing the Bush Doctrine Experiment, One Year Later)

Now that we know what we already knew, but this time from Clarke, the insider of all insiders -- that the war against Iraq began at the very moment the war against"terrorism" began and that the one war quickly superseded the other, I think we have to re-evaluate all those"one year after" pieces that just flowed by us. Shouldn't it have been"Iraq: two and a half years later"?

Anyway, last week, being"one year later," was proclaimed"Iraq Week" by the White House, and a sunny picture of reconstructed Iraq was launched with all administration hands on deck (à la the USS Abraham Lincoln), saluting smartly, even as within days the good ship Iraq (as presented by the Busheviks) hit your basic iceberg and almost immediately began to sink. But it all started so strongly and upbeatly.

The President, who was instructed -- after his one great slip way back when -- never again to use the word" crusade" in a world with so many Muslims with TV sets, switched to" calling" and so he called upon all of us to take up not a crusade exactly but a war-like" calling." As the editor of the the War in Context website wrote aptly:

"If the war on terrorism is not a crusade, why dub it a 'calling'? The American Heritage Dictionary defines a calling as 'an inner urge or a strong impulse, especially one believed to be divinely inspired to accept the Gospels as truth and Jesus as one's personal savior.' George Bush has refrained from describing this war as a crusade ever since it was pointed out to him that his cause would not be well served if it was perceived as a war on Islam. Yet his insistence on treating the issue as a matter of conviction betrays a stubborn unwillingness to exercise reason, to weigh up competing arguments, and to modify both tactics and goals in the light of new experience. The neutral ground that Bush refuses to acknowledge lies not between civilization and terror but between two conflicting convictions whose only method of argument is violence."

Soon after the President spoke, our CEO at the Pentagon Don Rumsfeld chimed in sweetly indeed, using an image to describe post-Saddam Iraq that I've seen quoted only in a piece by Neil McKay and Trevor Royle of the Glasgow Sunday Herald (The War on Four Fronts):

"Getting Iraq straightened out, [Rumsfeld] said, was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.'"

I've been a dad myself. I've done this -- not for all of Iraq, of course, but for my own children once upon a time, and that was plenty. I almost lost the use of my back in the process. So I was suitably charmed. There we were trying to launch young Iraq on its path to success. ("Peddle harder little Iraqi democracy! Peddle harder!…. Arrgh…") Of course, Rumsfeld had also picked up something of a classic colonial image -- not that we're colonialists, I hasten to add! But it does sound just a tad familiar, us as the adults and our"wards" as the slightly thick but eager children. The idea is, of course, that sooner or later they'll get the hang of it. In the meantime, being fatherly types, we're not about to take our hands off that seat; in fact, we're in the process of building a few extra seats just in case (and maybe flying the odd Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone overhead just in case junior gets all tangled up -- or the kid down the block tries to blow up his bike. Well, I guess it's an image you just don't want to push too far.

(Oh by the way, on the matter of children, let me return for a moment to that Niagara Falls Reporter column by Bill Gallagher mentioned above because he makes a point of how much our President loves to don military jackets at all those military bases to which he's constantly shuttled for speeches greeted by all those enthusiastic"hoo-ahs." Gallagher writes:

"Bush also slipped on a military jacket for his speech. This sends the wrong constitutional message… When he had a chance to wear a uniform for real, the evidence shows he kept it off as much as possible… I don't see anything offensive with the president slipping on a military jacket or baseball cap when on a ship, plane or tank. But when giving a formal speech, it's important that the commander in chief's apparel affirms, especially for the troops, civilian leadership of the military.

"It's interesting to note that the three post-World War II presidents who most experienced the horrors of war firsthand -- Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy -- never dressed up like soldiers to suck up to the military."

But, as I've long argued, this administration is filled not with the young men of the Vietnam era -- which most of them experienced largely in absentia -- but of the glorious post-World War II war-film era that preceded it. It's not, I suspect, the Iraqis who are the children, but our own leaders who seem not to have made it out of the flickering darkness of those movie theaters. War for them is fun. Good, solemn, thrilling fun. Dressing up for war: even more fun. Being resolute: best yet.

George, donning his military outfits, always looks to me strangely like one of those old G.I. Joe dolls. This time around, it's just starting to look like dad wasn't holding the bike seat for him at all. In fact, dad wasn't anywhere in sight. After all, for him it seems, dad -- his own dad – has been the Oedipal enemy in this drama that's managed to convulse the world.)

Anyway, try this for translating Rumsfeld's bike image into reality. It's the start of a piece by Jim Krane of AP, a no-nonsense reporter who's been following the money trail in Iraq (U.S. will retain power in Iraq after transfer of sovereignty):

"The United States says Iraq will be sovereign, no longer under military occupation, on June 30. But most power will reside within the world's largest U.S. Embassy, backed by 110,000 U.S. troops. The fledgling Iraqi government will be capable of tackling little more than drawing up a budget and preparing for elections, top U.S. and Iraqi officials say… [L. Paul] Bremer is also in the midst of appointing inspectors general for Iraq's ministries that, under current rules, can't be replaced by an incoming Iraqi government."

Even Krane, though, can't resist a version of Rumsfeld's imagery, though here the Iraqis have been demoted to babyhood and the U.S. ambassador promoted to the role of nurturing Mom:

"The U.S. ambassador will hoard a large measure of influence on Iraq, and the fledgling government will wean itself only slowly from American money, troops and advisers, whom Pachachi said will be tutoring Iraq's rulers on governance issues across the board."

Paul McGeough of the Australian publication The Age puts the matter even more bluntly in a thoughtful piece, Can Iraq embrace democracy?:

"The US is sticking to its plan to return sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30, but there is still no agreement on how the country will be governed for the following six months. Maybe it doesn't matter; Washington intends to have long-term military bases in Iraq and a US civilian staff of thousands will still hunker in Saddam's former presidential compound in the heart of Baghdad."

No kids or babies in his piece, but then again he's a foreigner. And, by the way, any version of the phrase"long-term military bases in Iraq" is evidently patented by foreigners and not available to American reporters. Search high and low, but you're not likely to find it in the American mainstream press, though it couldn't be more crucial to the discussion of Iraq"one year later."

Oh, and even skipping the eleven dead Iraqi policemen today, the two Finnish businessmen who were shot in Baghdad yesterday, and the spiking U.S. casualty rate, let me just put fast-biking little Iraq in context by citing a couple of examples of the Iraqi"security situation" as Iraqis experience it. Here, for instance, is a passage from the same McGeough article:

"Some of the Sunni faithful at this mosque put down their weapons before washing and slipping out of their sandals for noon prayers but others remain alert, standing guard on the roof of the mosque. The blood on the floor is that of their imam, Ali Hussein Mizher.

"He died when a hand grenade was thrown into his office as a staged car accident on a busy intersection at the front of the mosque diverted the attention of those who usually hang around. The previous week, another al-Qubasi imam was assassinated in his home and a prayer leader was gunned down as he walked to the mosque."

And this is from"Riverbend," the"Baghdad Burning" blogger, who points to a distinctive local"brain drain" we're not likely to have heard much about during"Iraq Week" in America. She writes:

"We also heard that one of the assistant deans of the college of engineering in Baghdad University was assassinated recently. It's terrible news and the subject has been on my mind a lot lately. I don't know why no one focuses on this topic in the news. It's like Iraq is suffering from intellectual hemorrhaging. Professors and scientists are being assassinated right and left- decent intelligent people who are necessary for the future of Iraq. Other scientists are being detained by the Americans and questioned about- of all things- Al-Qaeda…

"And it doesn't stop with the scientists. Doctors are also being assassinated by some mysterious group. It started during the summer and has been continuing since then. Iraq has some of the finest doctors in the region. Since June, we've heard of at least 15 who were killed in cold blood. The stories are similar- a car pulls up to the clinic or office, a group of men in black step down and the doctor is gunned down- sometimes in front of the patients and sometimes all alone, after hours."

Or, closer to home, how about journalist John Lee Anderson, who covered the war from Baghdad for the New Yorker magazine and recently returned to discover that"Baghdad is a much more dangerous place than it was a year ago… Just being around foreigners has become hazardous. In most of the recent killings of Americans and Europeans, Iraqis died with them--their drivers, guards, and interpreters. A couple of weeks ago, assassins in Baghdad ambushed the car of an Iraqi translator who worked for the Voice of America, killing him, his mother, and his young daughter. Many foreigners are starting to move out of the little family hotels that seemed so charming, and others are giving up the comfortable and civilized neighborhood houses they were renting. The Palestine, with its reinforced-concrete perimeter walls, razor wire, armed guards, and bomb-sniffing dogs, is getting crowded."

Of course, a flood of Iraq-one-year-later pieces just washed over us. Most of the American ones made an attempt to offer a"balanced report card" on reconstruction. Okay, democracy may be up for grabs and the insurgency is roiling along, yet as Dan Murphy wrote for the Christian Science Monitor from Baghdad (Better and Worse: A Progress Report on Iraq):

"[C]oalition officials continue to describe the attacks as strategically insignificant and insist they don't overshadow progress towards returning Iraqi sovereignty, planned for June 30. A recent poll seems to back up that position. Conducted by Oxford Research International and commissioned by a group of broadcasters, the poll found that 56 percent of Iraqis said their lives were somewhat or much better since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

"In part this may reflect coalition successes. According to the CPA, oil production capacity is up to 2.5 million barrels a day from 2 million before the war….Electricity production is averaging about 4,200 megawatts a day, slightly lower than before the war. Fixed telephone lines are now at about 700,000 from 833,000 before the war, though lines are now supplemented by roughly 300,000 phones in Iraq's new cellphone system. Cellphone possession was illegal under Hussein. But there remain large pockets of dissatisfaction and resentment, particularly among the estimated 25 to 45 percent of Iraqis who are unemployed."

Forget that the opinion poll figures are questionable for a variety of reasons and the unemployment rate soars in foreign reports, it seems strange to me that our press regularly considers a return to close to, not quite, or just beyond the prewar economic levels of sanctions-devastated Iraq as any kind of"success." After all, billions and billions of our dollars have been thrown at the country (or at least the massive corporations supposedly"reconstructing" it). Prewar levels after a year of American efforts? I would call that a dismal failure.

Personally, based on the record so far, based on what we know of this administration, I think just about all official assessments of Iraq should simply be chucked out the window. But you generally have to go abroad or to the fringes or onto the Web to get more realistic assessments of the Iraqi situation --"balance"-no-matter-what being the byword of our press when facing a powerful administration like this one. It would be rare, for instance, to read here the following assessment of the administration's position vis-à-vis Iraq from Rupert Cornwall of the British Independent:

"A year to the day after going to war to topple Saddam Hussein, President George Bush is politically weaker at home, widely disliked abroad, and struggling to hold together the fraying 'coalition of the willing' which now occupies Iraq… . To a large extent, Mr. Bush's electoral prospects are now prisoner of what happens in Iraq."

Indeed, twist and turn as he might, the President does seem a"prisoner" of Iraq, at least until November. He is, for instance, embarrassingly at the mercy of Shiite Ayatollah al-Sistani (who has just "intensified his opposition to the country's interim constitution, threatening to withhold cooperation with the United Nations during the transition to Iraqi sovereignty if the document is endorsed by the Security Council"). This is a scenario that once would have inhabited only the worst night sweats of this administration.

Or you need to go to the British Guardian to hear what a former UN official thinks of the situation in Iraq one year later. Begins Salim Lone, former director of communications for the UN Mission in Iraq (Anniversary of disaster):

"The anniversary week of the Iraq war had been carefully choreographed by the Bush administration to highlight its successes. Instead, it highlighted the inherent weaknesses of an occupation that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The devastating blow dealt by Spain has undercut the US line that there is a core commitment to the occupation by its allies. The subsequent reservations by the Netherlands, Poland and South Korea demonstrated that the coalition is not so willing. The visit by the secretary of state, Colin Powell, to Baghdad was designed to be a triumphal affirmation of US control, but it unravelled in negative coverage when Arab and some international correspondents walked out of his press conference over the killings by US troops of two al-Arabiya TV journalists. And while there were millions around the world again marching against US occupation, no crowds in Iraq took to the streets to show support for the US."

Or you need to slip onto the Web where, at Salon.com, historian Juan Cole tells us bluntly that Iraq is truly becoming this administration's quagmire" (Welcome to the Quagmire):

"Imposing solutions by force of will has proven impossible. Bremer struck temporary compromises with the Shiites, who make up a majority of Iraq's population, and with the Kurds, who have been longtime allies, but all the difficult decisions have been put off because of weakness or fear. And now, as the administration looks for a way to resolve the quagmire before it turns into an election-year debacle, it must seem to Bremer that even with superlative diplomacy, the U.S. risks extraordinary turmoil no matter whether it pulls out or stays...

"If acceptable compromises cannot be reached among the major players, the country could easily fall into chaos. All the leading factions, including the Kurds and the more militant Shiites, have large, well-armed militias at their beck and call. The low-grade guerrilla insurgency of the Sunni Arabs also is likely to continue for some time. It may not, however, be the most challenging issue Iraqis face as they attempt to hammer out a new destiny -- a destiny not imposed on them by the will of the Bush administration."

For an even grimmer summary of Iraq"one year later," check out the American Conservative magazine, where Eric Margolis, who regularly writes for the Toronto Sun -- and so over the last two years has been able to offer his thoughts with a bluntness largely unfamiliar here -- suggests that the Bush administration"is faced with a basic contradiction between its claims of forging a truly democratic Iraq and U.S. strategic ambitions in the region… The Pentagon plans three major military bases in Iraq from which to control the oil-producing Mideast and to protect the new 'Imperial Lifeline,' the pipelines bringing crude westward from the Caspian Basin. Britain used Iraq for the same purpose. In all but name, the U.S. has become heir of the old British Empire."

Antonio Feros, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, in the NYT March 20, 2004):

While rescue crews were still picking through the rubble from the devastating explosions in Madrid last week, Spanish commentators were already making comparisons, not to 9/11, not to other terrorist attacks that had occurred in Europe over the last couple of decades but to the unrest in 1934 through 1936, the bloody period preceding the bitter Spanish Civil War.

Some on the left, for example, warned that Jose Maria Aznar's ruling center-right Popular Party was using the tactics of the Francoists and preparing a coup d'etat to prevent the Socialist Party from winning Sunday's national election. Later, critics on the right claimed that the Socialists had used illegal, antidemocratic tactics to win the vote -- as the left was accused of doing before and during the civil war. Thousands of Popular Party supporters chanted, "This is a robbery" in Madrid last Sunday night, after the results had been announced.

Regardless of the accuracy of such rumors, the fact that a 70-year-old conflict should so quickly come to mind indicates just how deeply ingrained the civil war is in the collective memory of the country and how it continues to have a profound influence on the ways Spaniards speak about national politics.

Federico Jimenez Losantos, a conservative journalist at Radio COPE and a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Aznar, said that the only precedent in the history of Spain to such violence against innocent civilians occurred in 1936, in Paracuellos del Jarama, a little town close to Madrid, "where several hundred of conservative political prisoners were executed by leftist militants." (This comment was made soon after the March 11 attacks, when many Spaniards thought the Basque Separatist group ETA was responsible.)

Just this last Wednesday, during a press conference to present his new film, Pedro Almodovar, the celebrated Spanish director, referred to rumors that blamed the Popular Party government for "planning a coup d'etat on Saturday night to prevent the victory of the Socialists."

That the civil war should remain a searing political reference point more than 25 years after democracy was established is not as odd as may at first seem. Some of Spain's main political parties, including the Socialist, the Communist and some nationalist parties, played substantial roles before and during the civil war, and analysts believe that their ideologies, tactics and goals have not changed substantially since then.

The Popular Party did not exist during the civil war, but it was originally founded in the late 1970's by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a minister of Francisco Franco during the 1960's; and on occasion it has been regarded as the offspring of Francoist ideology and tactics. Therefore, to understand the real intentions of each political party, the argument goes, one must look at what happened before and during the civil war.

Yet just what happened during that period -- when 300,000 people died in action, 400,000 were forced into exile and another 400,000 were imprisoned by Francoists during and after the war -- has become the subject of increasingly bitter dispute.

Pio Moa, a journalist and historian, is probably the best known of the recent crop of revisionists. His several books on the Republic (1931-1936) and the civil war have been enormously popular. "Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil" ("The Myths of the Civil War"), published last year, sold more than 100,000 copies in a few months. In it Mr. Moa systematically questions the main thesis accepted by a majority of Spanish historians: that Franco overthrew the democratically elected government. In the words of Stanley Payne, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Mr. Moa disputes "the notion that leftist politics under the Republic were inherently democratic and constitutionalist and the idea that the civil war was the product of a long-standing conspiracy by wealthy reactionaries rather than a desperate response to stop a revolutionary process that had largely destroyed constitutional government."

Juan Cole, in his blog (March 21, 2004):

In the speech he used to inaugurate his reelection campaign on Saturday, Bush boasted that the US had"liberated" 50 million persons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is the problem with political rhetoric that it lacks all nuance or ambiguity. It is true that the Bush administration overthrew two harsh regimes, the Taliban and that of Saddam in Iraq. But in Afghanistan they only overthrew the Taliban because the latter stood in the way of getting at al-Qaeda. They accomplished the task by allying with the Jami`at-i Islami, or"Northern Alliance," the anti-Taliban Islamist movement among Tajiks, with which the pro-Iranian Hizb-i Vahdat of the Hazara Shiites was allied. Two years later, Afghanistan does not have an elected government (the so-called Loya Jirga or tribal council doesn't count for lots of reasons). Elections are scheduled for summer of 2004, but President Karzai is talking of postponing them. Afghans won't be"liberated" until they have an elected government and a sovereign parliament. At the moment, Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. Warlords like Ismail Khan rule provinces like Herat harshly, with Taliban-like restrictions on girls and personal liberties. The Taliban are resurgent in some Pushtun provinces in the south. 2/5s of gross domestic product is generated by drug production, raising fears of narco-terrorism.

As for Iraq, Bush was contradicted on Saturday by the Minister of Electricity, Ayham al-Samarrai. He is in Beirut for a conference, and a Kuwaiti newspaper (as reported by AFP asked him if the Interim Governing Council is an"imposed" body.

He replied"Absolutely . . The members of the Governing Council and the cabinet think they represent 70 per cent of the Iraqi people. How can they be sure? We have been imposed on the Iraqi people by America . . . Of course, most of the members are known in Iraqi society ... by their opposition to the former regime and also by their democratic thinking . . . However, we don't represent the people. No one chose us. Saddam was not chosen by anyone and neither were we." He said that the Governing Council takes few formal votes and is deeply divided."I think they have applied the vote once or twice when they have made more than a hundred decisions. . . Most of the essential decisions made by the council were cancelled by the (US) civil administrator (Paul Bremer) for lack of harmony among the members."

So, it is just premature to declare Afghans and Iraqis"liberated." Al-Samarra'i is an appointee of the Governing Council which in turn was named by the Americans, and even he is talking this way.

It is disturbing that the Afghan and Iraqi elections may both be postponed past the US presidential elections. The likelihood is that both parliaments will be dominated by Islamists, which would be a public relations problem for Bush in the campaign. By cleverly postpoining the elections, he ensures that no embarrassing poll results emerge from his two"liberated" projects.

I don't deny that the Taliban and Saddam were horrible for their people. It is a good thing they are gone. But the Taliban were removed pursuant to NATO and United Nations resolutions, i.e., with full international legality. The war in Iraq was an illegal one, and weakened international law and institutions, threatening us with the jungle. Ironically, Iraqis seem to me to have a better shot at a representative government with some real liberties than do Afghans, in the near future (assuming the security situation does not continue as it is, or deteriorate). Reality is like that, not black and white but shades of grey. Unfortunately for the next 6 months we are only going to hear the black and the white, not the nuances. I can't imagine that will be good for the people in the Middle East, or for Americans.

Surely we should move the US presidential process forward and start it in June or something, so we don't have all this dead time for half a year, and campaign rhetoric cheapens our discourse.

Henry Kamen, the author of Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763, in the LAT (March 21, 2004):

More than any other Western country, Spain has lived on intimate terms with Islam. For 700 years, from the 8th century to the 15th century, Muslims ruled the greater part of the country. They profoundly changed its culture, its food and its art. But they gradually lost their political hold and by the 13th century were in retreat. The last Muslim king in Spain left his capital, the city of Granada, in 1492, the year that Christopher Columbus set out on his voyage of discovery to the New World. That was the end of Muslim power, but hundreds of thousands of Muslims continued to live in Christian Spain until they were expelled in the 17th century. Spaniards thought that it was the end of their experience of Islam. The ancient Moorish palaces were allowed to crumble into rubble.

Spanish interest in the Muslim past was awakened in the 19th century, and then, quite improbably, by an American. Washington Irving had already attained considerable success with his books in the United States. His visit to Spain in 1815 so inspired him that he remained in Europe for 17 years, publishing first a history of the"Conquest of Granada" (1829) and then"Alhambra" (1832), which was about the history and legends of Moorish Spain. When Irving visited the palace of the Alhambra in Granada, it was nothing but a ghostly ruin. But his romantic evocation of its past caught the imagination of the public everywhere and stirred the Spanish authorities to take a renewed interest in their heritage.

Realizing that they had once had a Muslim destiny, Spanish writers, artists and, above all, politicians set out to recover it. Their view was a wholly idealized one. Writers of the Romantic school produced plays and novels about a past that had never really existed, in which Christians and Muslims lived together like brothers, frequently warring but always respecting each other. Historians represented Spain as a crucible of civilizations, in which the coexistence of Christians and Muslims set an example of a tolerant society. In their annual celebrations, still seen today, towns staged mock combat of Christians against Moors.

There was, however, an aggressive side to this historical re-creation, because Spaniards were always taught that they had" conquered" the Muslims. Politicians started looking for territories to conquer, and the closest candidate was Muslim Africa. Since the 15th century, Spain had occupied a couple of small towns on the African coast. In 1859, Spanish generals led a military campaign into Morocco to give Spaniards pride in their imperial prowess. The commitment to war against the Muslims absorbed Spanish leaders for more than 50 years but came to an abrupt end when the army was annihilated by Muslim tribesmen in 1921."Morocco," a politician wrote,"was our last chance to hold our heads high in Europe."

Morocco did not retain good memories of the Spaniards, which must be borne in mind when assessing why the terrorists chose Madrid as a target....

Historian Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com (March 21, 2004):

Yesterday, I took my small sign -- "Lies!" -- out onto the streets of New York City for several hours. If you're not a cop in a copter looking down on a demonstration, or a journalist covering it from the sidelines, or a spectator watching it flow by, a march is invariably like a neighborhood in some city whose horizons are beyond sight. All you get to see is your own block or two as you're swept along. I was, like any marcher, "embedded" yesterday, though of my own sweet choice, unlike our reporters in Iraq. On arrival I soon found myself next to a giant green human peapod (protesting what I wasn't sure); by a pram with a "Babies for Peace" sign over its blanket (and a baby under it) pushed by a "Mommy for Peace"; and near a woman in overalls sporting a "Farmers for Peace" sign (northern Vermont branch, she told me as we passed).

Heading downtown, the first hand-made sign I noticed, though, was on cloth attached to the back of a backpack toted by an exceedingly young woman. It said plaintively: "Dad come home," and when I asked, she admitted that her father was indeed in Iraq. The last sign I caught before I slipped out of the march several hours later, was on a shivering dog, perched by some miracle on top of a man's backpack and wearing a little, grey "Stop Bush" sweater.

In between, I noted, among so many other, lovingly produced, hand-drawn signs: "Morning in America" (with a red "u" in the process of being slipped between the "o" and "r"); "Give Martha's cell to Cheney"; "Unmanned Drone" (with George's head looming over the White House); "Bring Em On -- Home"; "Our boys died for Halliburton"; "The point is Bush sucks!"; "Elect a madman, You get madness"; "Hey New Yorker!!! Commit to a swinger!!!" (with swing states in which to work against Bush listed below); "Regime change now, impeach Bush"; "We support our troops, we don't support their mission"; "It's not collateral damage, it's 10,168 dead civilians"; "If you're not outraged, you're not listening"; and so many more – all indicative of the fact that, in the year since the last major antiwar demonstrations, no one's creativity or verve had fallen off greatly.

My personal home-made favorite was a tiny sign, hardly bigger than your hand, attached to a tiny stick. It said on one side, "The emperor," and on the other, when twirled, "has no clothes." The woman twirling it assured me: "It's a happy sign. People always smile. It's in its third demonstration." And then she smiled winningly and walked on.

When it came to "Lies!" (one of the reported cries of Spanish demonstrators after their government tried to blame the Madrid attacks on the Basque organization ETA), I was in good company. Among the variations I happened to notice were: "Bush lied, they died"; "Who dies for Bush lies?"; "Bush lies, who dies?"; "Bush lied, Spaniards died."

Giant puppets seemed to be a dime-a-dozen in my neck of the woods, ranging from a huge, garlanded Ma Nature ("stop the internal combustion of earth," it said a bit mysteriously) to the row of enrobed, masked mothers holding charred grey (ragdoll) bodies and backed up by a line of dark-suited men, all in blood-stained white gloves.

In our vicinity, along with a set of vigorous drummers, we had a band of cheerleaders, who called themselves "the Syracuse System Shakers," and vigorously shook their pompoms for hours while performing robust numbers with lines like "Cheney is an oil hog." Passing us were the members of R.E.V.E.R.E with their mounted-rider signs labeled "The Republicans are coming." I asked one, dressed in a Salvation-Army used-clothing version of colonial garb ("And I have no idea where my friend got the hat") what their acronym stood for, and he confided that it meant "the Revolutionary Ensemble Vanquishes Evil Republican Extremists," which wasn't, he confessed, really an organization, "just a group of friends." Then he returned to banging out a rhythm on two not-so-colonial (imagine perhaps Herman Melville in the South Seas) coconut-shell halves. And not far away were the Zapatistas del Mundo Unidos and de Nueva York, as their giant banner announced, some in elaborate feather headdresses, and one holding an exceedingly modest, pleading, hand-lettered sign: "Please, no war."

That sign and the button I noted a young woman wearing -- "still against the war" -- seemed to catch something of the moment. In the media, the marches, organized worldwide from Sydney to Tokyo to Rome to San Francisco, not to speak of so many points between, were compared to the massive demos of February 15, 2003, the last prewar moment, and often found lacking. They were "small," or at least "smaller," and "tame," or at least "tamer," which indeed was generally true. But the comparison is perhaps not such an appropriate or enlightening one.

The crisis moment before the war began brought huge hunks of the world piling into the streets, hoping against hope somehow to stop a war that the Bush administration -- we know now oh-so-clearly (though many of us knew it then) -- had no intention of letting anything on earth stop. The world was to be an audience for our global dominators; the people of the planet, or their "ineffectual" representatives at the United Nations, were to watch and ratify, but certainly not to vote against. When it looked as if the vote at the UN might actually go against the administration, despite the bribing, bugging, and imperial arm-twisting, as if there might be governments not capable of being stampeded like our Congress by fear, then the resolution was simply withdrawn and the die cast anyway.

Now, the antiwar movement is back. As the recent impressive Spanish vote indicated, it never fully demobilized (and in the U.S. in the intervening year took much of its energies elsewhere -– into the Dean or Kucinich campaigns, into organizations like MoveOn.org, or onto the internet, and so on. Just over a year "later" -- though with so many "one year later" pieces flowing by, I keep wondering a year later than what? Maybe, given our world of intimidation, threat, and violence, it's a year "sooner"-- it's impressive that some sizeable portion of the world turned out again in smaller but still surprising numbers. At least 30,000-plus thousand in New York (if you believe our mayor), upwards of 100,000 or more if you believe the organizers; 500,000-1,000,000-plus in Rome; 25,000-100,000 in England; and so on.

All this despite the fact that today we're at a murky, quagmire moment, not one of absolute, immediate crisis as we were then. The war has happened; Iraq is a mess and the Middle East possibly almost as bad, but casualties remain limited, if horrible, and for most of us (though not the demonstrating military families) still far away; policy options are unclear; neither presidential candidate is for withdrawal; protestors are sure to disagree about what's to be done; a presidential campaign (much influenced by the last round of antiwar demos) is just gearing up; and terrorism is clearly on the increase and the world, a distinctly less safe place to be, but the United States has not been attacked at home since September 11, 2001. These demonstrations, at least here in New York, were also less widely and well publicized than those of a year ago, and the moment clearly less mobilizing, and yet …