Already climate change--in the form of a changing pattern of global rainfall--seems to be affecting the planet in significant ways. Take the massive, almost decade-long drought in Australia's wheat-growing heartland, which has been a significant factor in sending flour prices, and so bread prices, soaring globally, leading to desperation and food riots across the planet.

A report from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia makes clear that, despite recent heavy rains in the eastern Australian breadbasket, years of above normal rainfall would be needed"to remove the very long-term [water] deficits" in the region. The report then adds this ominous note:"The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."

Think a bit about that phrase --"without historical precedent." Except when it comes to technological invention, it hasn't been much part of our lives these last many centuries. Without historical precedent. Brace yourselves, it's about to become a commonplace in our vocabulary. The southeastern United States, for instance, was, for the last couple of years, locked in a drought -- which is finally easing --"without historical precedent." In other words, there was nothing (repeat, nothing) in the historical record that provided a guide to what might happen next.

Now, it's true that the industrial revolution, which led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at historically unprecedented rates, was also, in a sense,"without historical precedent"; but most natural events -- unlike, say, the present staggering ice melt in the Arctic -- have been precedented (if I can manufacture such a word). They have been part of the historical record. That era--the era of history--is now, however, threatening to give way to a period capable of outrunning history itself, of outrunning us.

Just as this week begins, scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have released new information on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--and it's at a record high of 387 parts per million (ppm),"up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years." 650,000 years. Think of that. The historical era is well less than 10,000 years old. According to a recent study by renown NASA climatologist Jim Hansen published in Science magazine,"if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed," we need to create the necessary conditions that will return us to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere--and soon. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has started a new website called 350.org calls that 350 "the most important number on Earth."

The planet in its long existence may have experienced the extremes to come, but we haven't. The planet, unlike much life on it, may not--given millions or tens of millions of years to recover--be in danger, but we are.

When you really think about it, history is humanity. It's common enough to talk about some historical figure or failed experiment being swept into the"dustbin of history," but what if all history and that dustbin, too, go… well, where? What are we, really, without our records? Once we pass beyond them, beyond all the experience we've collected, written down, and archived since those first scratches went on clay tablets in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates--now being stripped of their cultural patrimony -- at least two unanswerable questions arise. Once history has been left in the dust, where are we? -- and, who are we? If Hansen, McKibben, and other scientists are correct, can we stop just short of the cliff of the post-historical era?

In 2002, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic nominee for governor in my home state of Maryland, declined to make a path-breaking choice for Lieutenant Governor on her ticket by tapping an African-American nominee. She instead chose a conservative white male. This decision drained the enthusiasm from her campaign. It cost her crucial support within the Democratic base vote and contributed to her upset defeat by RepublicanRobert Ehrlich in the general election.

Barack Obama, who is nearly the presumptive Democratic nominee, should not make the same mistake of choosing a conventional, white male running mate. Rather, he should complete the Democratic dream ticket by making Hillary Clinton his vice presidential choice. Likewise, if Clinton should pull off an improbable upset and gain the nomination, she should choose Obama as her running mate.

It is unusual but not without precedent for presidential nominees to tap a competing candidate as their choice for vice president.

In 1960, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas campaigned vigorously against Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for the Democratic nomination for president. The struggle continued to the convention, where Kennedy and Johnson took part in an unprecedented debate in front of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. John Kennedy and Johnson didn’t especially like one another and Bobby Kennedy and Johnson detested one another. But Kennedy still chose Johnson as his running mate to put together a dream North-South ticket.

In 1980, conservative Ronald Reagan and moderate George H. W. Bush waged a bitter struggle for the Republican presidential nomination and the ideological soul of their party. Still, Reagan picked Bush as his running mate to unite his party, even though Bush had derided Reagan’s economic plan as “voodoo economics” and opposed Reagan on issues such as abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

I am not suggesting that the Democrats should put together their dream ticket in order to help the party beat John McCain. Given that the Republican opposition is suffering from an unpopular war, a sour economy, and a president with the highest disapproval rating in the history of scientific polling, the Democrats should be able to win with a vice presidential candidate plucked from the phone booth.

Rather, I think the Democratic dream ticket would be good for the party and even better for the nation. So far the intense primary contest has yielded many benefits for Democrats. Millions of new voters have signed up with the Democratic Party, Democratic primary turnout has hit record levels, and Democrats have attained their largest lead in decades in party identification. A ticket that includes both Obama and Clinton would help sustain this momentum and produce a record Democratic turnout in November.

The two candidates also appeal to different segments of the electorate. Obama is strong among African-Americans, young voters, and more affluent and educated voters. Clinton appeals to older voters, women, and blue-collar voters. Of course, some Clinton backers have said that they would not vote for Obama and vice versa. But those heat-of-the-battle sentiments will surely change once the general election campaign begins, especially if their first choice for president is on the ticket.

The Democratic dream ticket would also inspire young people and demonstrate convincingly that no one is excluded from the American dream of opportunity and success. The ticket might even contribute to expanding the representation of women and African-Americans in the second highest set of offices in the land: governorships and US Senate seats. At present there is but one African-American Senator (Obama) and two governors, including David Paterson of New York, who assumed the office after the resignation of Eliot Spitzer. There are only 16 women Senators and 8 women governors.

Six years ago in a small place called Maryland the Democratic Party failed to present the voters with a ticket that included both a woman and an African-American. Democrats can only hope that their party will not make the same mistake on a much larger stage in 2008.

[The author is the general counsel of the non-profit, non-governmental National Security Archive (the Archive) at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The Archive was a plaintiff in American Historical Ass’n v. Nat’l Archives and Records Admin., Civ. No. 01-2447 (D.D.C.), which challenged Bush Executive Order 13,233 regarding the Presidential Records Act, resulting in invalidation of a portion of the executive order. It is also a plaintiff in National Security Archive v. Executive Office of the President (EOP), Civ. No. 07-1577 (D.D.C.) (challenging the destruction of White House e-mails).]

The president of the United States is often called the leader of the free world. It is no wonder that historians and political scientists consider the records related to presidential activities, policy, and decisionmaking so valuable for analyzing U.S. government policy at home and abroad. But over the last seven years there have been a series of moves by the current administration that may ensure that the records of the White House and the federal offices and agencies that work closely with the White House will not be available to historians.

The problem is twofold. First, the Bush administration does not value (or may even be hostile to) the preservation and disclosure of records. Second, we have seen advances in technology that have transformed the way in which we all communicate. The juxtaposition of these circumstances may mean that primary sources on the most important decisions and activities in the government may be lost, destroyed, or closed to the public.

This administration’s hostility towards public access to records has deep roots. Soon after becoming governor of Texas in 1995, George W. Bush signed a law that newly permitted former governors to send their records to institutions other than the Texas State Library and Archives, which had received the records of every former Texas governor since 1846. When the time came for Governor Bush to make use of the law at the end of his term, he sent his gubernatorial records to his father’s presidential library at Texas A&M University. That move would have delayed and limited access to the records under Texas law. It was necessary for then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn to rule that the records belonged to the state of Texas and remained subject to Texas open-government laws. As a result, the records were returned to the Texas State Archives in Austin to prepare them for research use.

Other senior administration officials have exhibited a similar attitude about the records of the presidency. In a tribute speech in honor of former President Gerald R. Ford, delivered at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum on September 14, 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney told an audience that

this Museum, and the Ford Library in Ann Arbor, mean a great deal to me--not just personally but from the standpoint of history, because I was chief of staff in the Ford White House. I'm told researchers like to come and dig through my files, to see if anything interesting turns up. I want to wish them luck--(laughter)--but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just don't write any.

The decision not to create records documenting government decisionmaking is in itself troubling. Its impact is compounded by the proliferation of BlackBerries, instant messaging, and other new means of communication that often do not leave traces unless specific efforts are made to preserve the communications. This issue came to light most prominently in news stories about White House officials’ use of BlackBerries and e-mail accounts issued by the Republican National Committee. But the problem is not limited to hot-button controversies at the White House. The use of BlackBerries, voicemail, instant messaging and other emergent technologies is spreading, while records management policies may not be keeping pace.

The risk of disappearance and destruction has also arisen with electronic communications that most people think are safely recorded and maintained for future disclosure—e-mails. The apparent large-scale loss of White House e-mails was first publicly disclosed on January 23, 2006, when prosecutors investigating the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent informed “Scooter” Libby’s defense attorneys that “not all email records from the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 were preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.”  In April 2007, it became clear that the problem was much larger, with potentially as many as five million e-mails deleted from the Executive Office of the President servers. These may include e-mails from the Office of Management and Budget, the United States Trade Representative, the Council on Environmental Quality, and others, including the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the National Security Council.

For records that may have survived these poor information management policies, there is a significant risk that they may never be accessible to historians because of a concerted campaign to impede the release of the remaining records with various hurdles, any one of which may prevent them from being subject to disclosure. For instance, records marked as classified—whether properly or improperly—will be less likely to be released, or their release will be delayed by the need to conduct declassification reviews, and there is evidence that at least within the OVP, classification-like markings were routinely used on materials that may not have merited classification under the terms of Executive Order 12,958, as amended by Executive Order 13,292.

In addition, this administration is attempting to transform agencies and records that would ordinarily be subject to disclosure laws into non-agencies and non-federal records that are no longer subject to requests under the principle public disclosure law, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). For example, the White House Office of Administration has long been acknowledged as a federal agency subject to the FOIA. It has processed FOIA requests for many years, has published its own FOIA regulations since 1980, had—until recently—an FOIA website, and submitted annual FOIA reports to Congress. Yet when the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Office of Administration under the FOIA for records about the White House e-mail system, the office changed its tune and argued that it was not even an “agency” under the terms of the FOIA, so the suit should be dismissed. The tactic of redefining a government entity’s status is not entirely new. During the Clinton administration, the White House successfully took the position that the National Security Council (NSC) was not an “agency” under the Federal Records Act or the FOIA, resulting in NSC records being thereafter considered presidential in nature and managed under the requirements of the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA).

The OVP is also attempting to redefine itself. After traditionally reporting data about its records classification practices to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which is charged with oversight of the government-wide national security classification system, the OVP stopped providing the data in 2003 and refused to subject itself to an onsite audit by the ISOO. The rationale for evading records management oversight? The OVP contended it was not a part of the executive branch of government.

A similar tactic has been attempted with respect to categories of records. In response to suits brought by the Washington Post and CREW, the administration has taken the position that Secret Service visitor logs, which are created and maintained by the Secret Service and have traditionally been considered agency records, instead should be considered presidential records.

White House records that are not missing, destroyed, misclassified as secret, or withdrawn from federal record status should eventually be considered for disclosure under the terms of the PRA. The administration, however, has set up new hurdles for those records as well. This article addresses only one of these hurdles in depth—the undermining of the Presidential Records Act. The PRA merits particular attention now because, mere months away from a presidential transition, the time left to preserve remaining records is limited. Moreover, this issue has been raised in relation to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the presidency and her view about the release of presidential records from President Bill Clinton’s term. Finally, at the time this article was written, a bill to return the PRA to its original standards for release of presidential records was pending in Congress. Despite overwhelming support in the House of Representatives, however, the bill has been subject to three holds, the most recent by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), thus preventing a vote in the Senate.

These controversies should matter to historians. As time marches on, the documentary records that reflect agency decisionmaking may be the best evidence of how decisions were reached, who made those decisions, whether they were good or bad decisions, and how they impacted the nation and the world. Without original source materials concerning the White House role in instituting a war or transforming intelligence policy and military policy, the only story to tell will be the one the politicians in office choose to share with the public. That story is not the one that will help future leaders learn how to make better decisions or that will give the American public the information it needs to be informed voters.

Background: Executive Privilege

Although the phrase “executive privilege” does not appear in the Constitution of the United States, presidential administrations often use it to explain why the president and his advisors have the right to withhold information from the courts, the Congress, and the public. It was used by our first president and in all administrations since, including the current one. It is the basis for the White House resisting subpoenas, refusing to testify in Congress, and refusing to disclose records of who visited the White House and when. And it lies at the heart of disputes regarding presidential records.

According to Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University who has authored two books on executive privilege, the term “executive privilege” was first used during the Eisenhower administration, when the president had an expansive view of its reach. Most scholars describe the privilege as implied by Article II of the Constitution, although at least one scholar, Raoul Berger, has called it a myth. Today, with the privilege entrenched in case law, statutes and executive orders, it has become a potent weapon for the White House and high-level executive branch officials to fight off inquiry into their conduct.

It is, however, a conditional privilege, so it can be overridden if there is a strong reason to dispense with it, such as when the president is under investigation for a crime. Thus, when President Nixon sought to protect the Watergate tapes that had been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor, the Supreme Court turned him down. The Court acknowledged “the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties.” Nevertheless, it held that the privilege is neither absolute nor strong enough to withstand the needs of the government and the defendants in a criminal prosecution. The tapes were turned over, and President Nixon resigned soon afterward.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA)

The fallout from the Watergate scandal changed the nation in many ways. Among congressional reactions to the scandal was the passage of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. The PRA alters the practice that had been in place for much of our nation’s history, which left the documentary materials generated during a president’s term in office largely subject to the president’s control both during and after his presidency. The PRA makes it clear that the records of the presidency belong to the public and must be turned over to the Archivist of the United States at the end of the president’s term. It limits a president’s control over White House records and provides for public access to them after the president leaves office.

Although the PRA does not provide any public access for the first five years after the presidency, after that period the records become subject to information requests through the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The outgoing president has the right to restrict certain categories of information for up to an additional seven years (twelve years in full). These categories include:

1. Classified national security information

2. Information about federal appointments

3. Information exempt from disclosure by statute

4. Trade secrets and confidential commercial or financial information

5. Confidential communications between the president and his advisors

6. Information that would invade personal privacy

If the president extends the restriction on disclosure for these categories of information, then those records become subject to the provisions of the FOIA after twelve years. Though subject to the FOIA, the records are not subject to withholding under Exemption (b)(5) of the FOIA, which protects against disclosure of deliberative process or privileged information. Thus, after twelve years, presidential materials—including confidential communications between a president and his advisors or among his advisors—may not be withheld as deliberate executive branch communications, but instead must be released to the public unless the FOIA provides a different basis for withholding them (such as the national security classification of the materials).

The PRA does not leave former presidents without any safety valve concerning the release of information, however. It requires the Archivist of the United States to notify the former president if any planned disclosure of records might “adversely affect any [of his] rights and privileges.” To implement its notification function, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued a regulation allowing the former president or his designated representative thirty days to assert any rights or privileges regarding the records. Under the regulation, as under the PRA, the Archivist is not bound to withhold the records on the basis of the former president’s assertion of rights or privileges. However, the regulation requires written notice to the former president if the Archivist rejects the assertion and provides time for him to seek judicial review. It also requires notice to the incumbent president.

The PRA took effect on January 20, 1981, making the records of President Ronald Reagan the first to be subject to its rules. Shortly before his term ended in 1989, President Reagan issued Executive Order 12,667, which set forth additional procedures regarding implementation of the PRA. That order required the Archivist to identify any possible executive privilege issues, gave the incumbent president the authority to extend the review time for the records of a former president and asserted the right of the incumbent president to block the release of the records unless otherwise ordered by a court or sitting president.

Applying the Presidential Records Act to the Records of Former Presidents

When President Reagan left office on January 20, 1989, the Archivist received his presidential records, which include almost forty-four million pages of documents, electronic records such as e-mail messages, and photographs and audiovisual materials. Before leaving office, Reagan exercised his right under the PRA to restrict for the maximum period of twelve years all materials falling within the restricted categories enumerated in the law. During the twelve-year period NARA opened up many records that did not fall into the categories of restricted information.

The twelve-year restriction period expired on January 20, 2001. By that time NARA had identified sixty-eight thousand pages of documents that were restricted solely because they were considered “confidential communications”—i.e., they were not classified or otherwise subject to continued withholding. Because the PRA provides that the “confidential communications” restriction only applies for twelve years, at the end of the twelve-year restriction period NARA notified both Reagan and the sitting president, George W. Bush, that the sixty-eight thousand pages were scheduled for disclosure.

NARA’s notice prompted then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to twice instruct the Archivist to postpone any action regarding the sixty-eight thousand pages. A third communication from Mr. Gonzales to NARA indicated that the White House was considering various “constitutional and legal questions” and that NARA should continue to postpone any action. Then, on November 1, 2001, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13,233 (the “Bush Order”), which superseded the Reagan executive order. The Bush Order sets forth procedures and standards governing the assertion of claims of executive privilege over “confidential communications” by both former and incumbent presidents following the expiration of the twelve-year restriction period. It specifically describes constitutional executive privilege as including the common-law attorney-client and work-product privileges, the deliberative process privilege, and the state secrets privilege. It also places a burden on individuals seeking such records to demonstrate their need for them.

Procedurally, the Bush Order permits former presidents and the sitting president to delay indefinitely their review of the records scheduled for release by NARA. Essentially, it grants the former president the power to make the decision to withhold records absent “compelling circumstances.” And even if the sitting president finds compelling circumstances for releasing the records, they still cannot be released unless the former president agrees or a court mandates their release. The sitting president also has the authority to independently prevent disclosure of the records. Not only can the public be denied access to the records under this scheme, but the Archivist is not permitted to provide the records in response to a congressional or judicial subpoena unless the former president and the sitting president agree or a court orders access. The Bush Order also stipulates that former presidents can pass along their power to prevent disclosure to family members or designated representatives, and it grants former vice presidents the right to claim executive privilege independently and to prevent access to vice-presidential records on that basis.

The Bush Order led to a storm of controversy in the historical community. A lawsuit was filed by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, Vanderbilt University Professor Hugh Graham, University of Wisconsin Professor Stanley Kutler, the National Security Archive, Public Citizen and the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press in November 2001. The lawsuit sought to challenge the Bush Order’s provisions permitting indefinite review of records that NARA determined were subject to release and the extension of authority to assert executive privilege to the heirs and designees of a former president and vice president.

Over many months, the original sixty-eight thousand records that NARA had scheduled for release were released, but it became apparent that additional records had been withheld from release. Parties to the lawsuit continued to seek access to these records. Eventually, the government announced that President Reagan’s representative had claimed a constitutional executive privilege to bar the release of seventy-four pages of the documents. The incumbent president concurred in the decision to assert privilege because there was no circumstance that would have compelled him not to do so.

Meanwhile, in addition to Reagan presidential records, the presidential and vice-presidential records of George H.W. Bush have been subject to review under Executive Order 13,233, as have the records of Bill Clinton. The effect of the reviews called for by the Bush Order has been to delay substantially the release of materials in response to such requests. For instance, the Reagan Library’s estimated completion time frames increased from eighteen months in 2001 to an estimated seventy-eight months (six and a half years) in 2007.

In October 2007, the court ruled that one part of the Bush Order is invalid. Specifically, the court held that the Archivist of the United States acts arbitrarily, capriciously, and contrary to law by relying on E.O. 13,233 in delaying the release of the records of former presidents. Unfortunately, the court did not consider the issue of whether it was permissible for President Bush to extend the authority over disclosure of presidential papers to a former president’s heirs or to former vice presidents, nor did it rule on the substantive changes effected by the Bush Order, such as its expansive notions of executive privilege. The court put those issues off for another court at another time, holding that they are not ripe for review. For historians and political scientists, this is bad news. It has long been understood that executive privilege is not only conditional; it also dissipates over time. Indeed, this is the basis for the PRA provision that allows confidential communications of the former president to be subject to release under the FOIA after twelve years. Furthermore, the possibility that some records could be withheld forever on the basis of private citizens asserting executive privilege is alarming, and the creation of vice presidential privilege dramatically expands the universe of potentially withheld records.

Challenging these provisions may have to wait until a former president, former vice president, or their children or grandchildren overreach and claim the privilege for materials that should not be protected. Until then, the Bush Order, like the law he signed in Texas that allowed him initially to send his records to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library instead of the Texas Archives, puts a gaping hole in the United States’ records disclosure mandates.

The Presidential Records Act was designed to ensure that the records of the presidency would ultimately be turned over to the American people and made available through the orderly procedures of the FOIA. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the law is not sufficient. President Bush’s executive order has delayed the release of presidential records, and Congress’s attempt to override it is stuck in the Senate because one senator objects to it being voted on. There are very limited controls on how presidential records should be maintained prior to the end of a presidency. The White House e-mail problems of the Clinton and now the Bush administration demonstrate that without some standards and oversight for the preservation of records, a critical part of the documentary history of the U.S. government may remain forever beyond reach.

“Interpretation of Texas Government Code section 441.201 concerning the official records of a former governor,” Opinion No. JC-0498 (May 3, 2002), available at HYPERLINK "http://www.oag.state.tx.us/opinions/op49cornyn/jc-0498.htm" http://www.oag.state.tx.us/opinions/op49cornyn/jc-0498.htm (all website references herein were last checked on February 11, 2008).

See Texas Archival Resources Online, Texas Governor George W. Bush: An Inventory of Executive Office Records at the State Archives, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/60007/tsl-60007.html" http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/60007/tsl-60007.html.

Text available at HYPERLINK "http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070914-3.html" http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070914-3.html.

Tom Hamburger, “GOP-issued laptops now a White House Headache,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-laptops9apr09,0,4563806.story?coll=la-home-headlines" http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-laptops9apr09,0,4563806.story?coll=la-home-headlines.

Letter of Patrick J. Fitzgerald to Libby Defense Counsel, January 23, 2006, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/fitz012306.pdf" http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/fitz012306.pdf.

“Without a Trace: The Missing White House E-mails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act, April 12, 2007,” available at HYPERLINK "http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/27607" http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/27607; see also National Security Archive, “White House Admits No Backups Tapes for E-mail Before October 2003,” January 16, 2008, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080116/index.htm" http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080116/index.htm.

Michael Isikoff, “Challenging Cheney: A National Archives Official Reveals What the Veep Wanted to Keep Classified—and How He Tried to Challenge the Rules,” Newsweek, December 24, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.newsweek.com/id/81883/output/print" http://www.newsweek.com/id/81883/output/print

“CREW Files Opposition Brief in Office of Administration Suit,” September 4, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/30038" http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/30038.

Michael Isikoff, “Challenging Cheney: A National Archives Official Reveals What the Veep Wanted to Keep Classified—and How He Tried to Challenge the Rules,” Newsweek, December 24, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.newsweek.com/id/81883/output/print" http://www.newsweek.com/id/81883/output/print. Similarly, it has been reported that the OVP has exempted itself from reporting travel and related expenses to the Office of Government Ethics. See HYPERLINK "http://www.publicintegrity.org/lobby/report.aspx?aid=760" http://www.publicintegrity.org/lobby/report.aspx?aid=760.

Michael Abramowitz, “Secret Services Logs of White House Visitors are Records, Judge Rules,” Washington Post, December 18, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121701397.html" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121701397.html.

Michael Isikoff, “Papers? I don’t see any papers,” Newsweek, Oct. 29, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.newsweek.com/id/57351" http://www.newsweek.com/id/57351.

“Senator Sessions Places Hold on Presidential Records Bill,” National Coalition for History, January 23, 2008, available at HYPERLINK "http://historycoalition.org/2008/01/23/senator-sessions-placest-hold-on-presidential-records-bill/" http://historycoalition.org/2008/01/23/senator-sessions-placest-hold-on-presidential-records-bill/.

United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 705 (1974).

44 U.S.C. §§ 2201-2207.

Those seventy-four pages included several duplicates. Among the unique records were: March 13, 1986, Alfred H. Kingon, “The White House, Washington, Memorandum for Donald T. Regan, ‘International Economic Issues’” (four pages); November 22, 1988 and December 1, 2988 memoranda, Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., Counsel to the President, Memorandum, for the President, “Pardon for Oliver L. North, John Poindexter, Joseph Fernandez” (two records, one totaling four pages and one totaling two pages).

“Court Rules Delay in Release of Presidential Papers is Illegal,” The National Security Archive, October 1, 2007, available at HYPERLINK "http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20071001/index.htm" http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20071001/index.htm.

See Nixon v. Adm’r of Gen’l Servs., 433 U.S. 425 (1977) (allowing the transmission of recordings to archivists less than three years after Nixon left office); Nixon v. Freeman, 670 F.2d 346 (D.C. Cir. 1982) (permitting Nixon recordings to be made available to the public eight years after he left office).

My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I “resigned” from the State Department in January 2003. Only two secretaries of state in the history of the republic have ever “resigned” over matters of principle: William Jennings Bryan because he opposed Woodrow Wilson’s policies in the run-up to World War I and Cyrus Vance because he was fundamentally against President Carter’s abortive hostage rescue mission in April 1980. One doesn’t resign from the Department of State easily. I left because I had concluded rightly—and nothing has changed my mind in the past five years—that the road to Arab-Israeli peace was going to be a long and bumpy one. It had come time for me to take a break after 25 years of providing varying degrees of advice, some good, some bad, to a number of secretaries of state. I have a new trope which is that there ought to be term limits imposed on former advisors to presidents and secretaries, particularly those whose advice perhaps doesn’t lead to success.

I went on to run Seeds of Peace, which brings young Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis together, to try to forge understanding and respect. As I watched over the past five years, I was disturbed by the fact that America, a country I care a great deal about, was failing. It was failing at a time and in a part of the world that made that failure extremely risky for our interests.

The primary threat to our national security will not come from an ascending China, however competitive and powerful it may be, or from an economically powerful and united Europe. It’s not even going to come from a former USSR seeking to regain its past glory. It’s going to come from an area of the world that is divided, dysfunctional, and angry, filled with rage and conflicts that cannot be resolved.

September 11 was the second bloodiest day in U.S. history, surpassed only by September 17, 1862 at Antietam. So what happens in the part of the world from which the 9/11 attacks emanated is critical to our national interests. Our interests there cannot be measured in terms of administrations. While serving in government, I divided my life in terms of administrations. That’s not the right way to calibrate time. That’s not the way our friends calibrate it, nor our adversaries. They calibrate time in terms of generations. We need to start thinking that way, too.

Both of the Democratic presidential candidates are willfully deluding either themselves or us if they believe that the road out of Iraq will be quick, easy, and fixed according to a neat time period. America has to assume responsibility for what it does. We invaded a country roughly the size of the state of California, with 28 million people. We ripped the lid off it and dismantled the army and other Baath institutions of governance. What makes us believe that somehow we can simply turn around and exit? Some would argue that that’s the morally and ethically right thing to do. But the question is, when the Republican or Democratic successor to the current administration confronts the reality of this investment trap into which this administration has put us, from which we cannot extricate ourselves or fix the situation, what is he or she going to do? Can we really leave Afghanistan and Iraq as failed states?

If Iraq over time ends up being a stable democratic polity, that would be great. But that’s not really the question, is it? The question is, what has Iraq cost us? My friend Thomas Friedman says, you don’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. Fair enough. But there are some tickets in life that just aren’t worth buying—they are too risky.

All of this prompted me to think about the reasons for both America’s success and primarily its failures in this region. For eight years under Bill Clinton, we stumbled at Arab-Israeli peacemaking; for eight years under President Bush we stumbled at how to make war, at least in this part of the world. What is it about America, the greatest power on earth, that accounts for this situation? Why can’t we seem to get it right?

When I say “get it right,” I don’t mean “fix this region.” Most of the problems there are not caused by America. And this region is not going to be “fixed” by us. The history of this region is the history of great powers who over 1,000 years, over the sweep and arc of history, have tried to impose their will on small tribes. Good luck! This region is littered with the schemes, dreams, ambitions of great powers who believed they could have their way and impose their will. We can’t for one simple reason: we don’t live in the neighborhood. However powerful we think we are, these small tribes, these tiny powers, will always have a greater stake in the outcome of their struggles than we ever will. Because for us it is not an existential conflict.

In light of all this, I came to two realizations. First, we don’t pay attention to the past. A.J.P. Taylor, the great British historian, said that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons. But do you want to ignore history? If you ignore it completely, history will be a very cruel and unforgiving teacher.

America occupied Japan for seven years, from 1945–52. How many Americans were killed by Japanese in hostile actions during that seven-year period? None. Japan was a defeated nation. Despite all his imperfections, General MacArthur understood the importance of preserving Japanese institutions that were very controversial, including the emperor himself. What were we thinking when we went to war in Iraq with insufficient forces to even have a chance of subduing an insurgency? And what did we expect would happen in the wake of our own incapacity and the determination of the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to settle scores?

So that was the first problem. As William Faulkner observed in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is certainly how Arabs and Israelis see it; we need to see it that way, as well.

Second, we don’t read the present correctly. We don’t see the world the way it is. We want to see the world the way we want it to be. Why? It’s related to where we are. We have attained a degree of physical security and detachment unprecedented, unparalleled, unrivaled in history for a great power. We have non-predatory neighbors to our north and south, and fish to our east and west. No other great power has ever had this kind of physical security. In my opinion, it explains why we behave the way we do. It explains our boundless optimism. Our political system was the first in the world to be founded on the basis of an idea—the primacy of the individual. We believe in individuals’ capacity to transform themselves and to change the world around them, with all the imperfections, deficits, and problems that America has.

I lived with this practical, we can fix anything, split-the-difference worldview for 20 years. The eighth day of the Camp David summit of July 2000, Jerusalem, this extraordinarily complicated city, was to become the focus. A piece of it: what to do about the Haram al Sharif, 35 acres, on which sit two mosques holy to Islam. Below are the remains of the first and second Jewish temples. Talk about overlapping sacred space, that’s what this is. Here we are trying to convince the Israelis and Palestinians, who both assert sovereignty, that we’ll take sovereignty from them and we’ll reposit it with God. That’s a logical fix—they’re holy sites, after all. Or, when they rejected that idea, “We’ll give you Palestinians sovereignty above ground, and you Israelis sovereignty below.” They rejected that as well. Jerusalem, history teaches us, is not to be shared, it’s to be possessed. In the name of God, and the tribe. It need not be so, but Americans need to understand the attachments of each side to it.

Where we are also explains our naivete and our capacity to believe that the rest of the world is like us. Twelve years ago, my daughter and I were at a movie theater outside of Washington, D.C. watching Sean Connery in The Rock. I noticed several muscular men in the theater talking into their lapels, a sure sign they were security and someone of real importance was there. Sure enough, eight rows in front of us were King Hussein and Queen Noor. He had on blue jeans, a blazer, and a polo shirt. We knew each other, so we chatted. I said later to my daughter, “Isn’t this great? It’s me and you and the King of Jordan in Washington watching Sean Connery in The Rock.” As if we were all part of the same family. We were not. When he was 12, this man saw his grandfather Abdullah murdered. He presided for forty-five years over one of the most fragile enterprises in the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and made it work. Or Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Madeleine Albright declared to be the Israeli Newt Gingrich. Netanyahu’s high school education in Philadelphia and his American mother gave him a superb capacity in the American vernacular. I remember on one trip being summoned, along with my colleagues, to be yelled at by him. When I closed my eyes, I heard my college tennis coach yelling at me. I didn’t hear Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, graduate of one of Israel’s elite paratrooper brigades, brother of Jonathan, who had been killed in the rescue mission at Entebbe; son of a prominent revisionist historian. I have nothing in common with Benjamin Netanyahu. We don’t understand what it’s like to live on a knife’s edge.

So I decided to try to apply these principles to the 20-plus years I participated in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. I did not write this book only for the Beltway crowd and policy wonks. I tried to make it accessible, building on anecdotes and stories from my experience. Then I set about interviewing everyone I could find who had participated in the earlier diplomacy. I interviewed all of our former presidents, even Gerald Ford before he died, with one exception: Bill Clinton. All nine secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Condoleezza Rice, national security advisors; there’s a chapter on domestic politics that seeks to answer the much misunderstood and hijacked question, how does domestic politics in America really influence our Arab-Israeli policy? For that I went out and interviewed all the evangelicals—the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Hagee—a lot of sitting senators, representatives, American Jews and Arabs. I tell the story of why America succeeds and why it fails in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, bearing in mind one basic fact. I borrow a line from Michael Jackson, not known as a great philosopher. But he got it right when he said that if you want to make a change, start with the man in the mirror.

I could cite a thousand reasons why Yassir Arafat was the primary obstacle, followed closely by Ehud Barak, in the failure of Camp David. But ultimately Bill Clinton and the rest of his advisors bear a measure of responsibility. We need not self-flagellate in some maudlin, gratuitous way, but we do need to identify our role in the summit’s failure and learn from it.

A few observations. First, as to objectivity, I argued with my editor for a week about how much personal information to include. He said, if you want people to believe you, you had better come clean. “Tell them who you are and where you came from, how your views changed.” I concluded that there is no objectivity. We are all sum totals of our experiences—our political, religious, and ethnic DNA. You can’t change who you are, but you can look to see where your predispositions, prejudices, and biases lie and set them aside in an effort to try to understand the needs, narratives, and requirements of both sides to a conflict. I’m from a wealthy Jewish real estate family in Cleveland, Ohio. My grandparents were on a first-name basis with David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. My parents were very close to Yitzhak and Leah Rabin as well as Menachim Begin. My story is an interesting one in terms of an evolution in views. It’s absolutely critical that some evolution occur, some learning about both sides’ needs, because this is not a morality play that pits the forces of goodness on one hand against the forces of darkness on the other.

Second, there can be no bricks without straw. No matter how much America wants Arab-Israeli peace, unless the raw material is there, the political will and the urgency among the Arabs and Israelis, we can try all day long without success. Every breakthrough that has occurred in this conflict—Egypt-Israel, Jordan-Israel, Palestinians-Israel, came as a consequence of secret diplomacy about which the Americans were informed afterwards. That is very instructive.

Third, you need a brickmaker. Every successful negotiation that has endured involved an American role at some point. In my book, I nominate for the “Peace Process Hall of Fame” three Americans, all of whom I interviewed: Jimmy Carter, who during his presidency delivered something extraordinary—an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty—that would not have happened without him; Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. They were all effective brickmakers, effective because they combined the 4 Ts of successful diplomacy: they were Tough; they gained the Trust, to a degree, of the Arabs and Israelis they were working with; they were incredibly Tenacious; and they had an exquisite sense of Timing. They knew how not to overengage (as Bill Clinton did) or underengage or disengage (George W. Bush). Not since 1991 have we seen, in my judgment, an effective policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Fourth, there is tremendous misunderstanding on the issue of domestic politics, where there is a dishonest debate. Too many American Jews want to believe that domestic politics are irrelevant to the case for Israel; too many of Israel’s detractors in America want to believe that it’s all attributable to domestic politics. Unlike professors Walt and Mearsheimer, I actually went out to talk to the lobby and the lobbied. Among the conclusions I reached is that the pro-Israeli community in America today (5.3 million American Jews, along with millions of evangelical Christians who for reasons of eschatology and value affinity have become stunningly pro-Israel) has a powerful voice. It’s time we stop deluding ourselves. But it does not have a veto.

The U.S.-Israeli relationship is not some sort of mushroom harvested in some dark closet by a handful of conspiratorially minded Jews and evangelical Christians who hold the American foreign policy establishment hostage. The U.S.-Israeli relationship has inculcated itself into American culture, psychology, politics and foreign policy. When we maintain the special relationship, which I think is in American interests, and not allow it to become exclusive, it actually can serve our interests. This is both because it is in our interests to support like-minded societies and because our special ties with Israel give us a primary role and ability to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Since 1950, only 22 countries in the world have maintained their democratic character continuously. The notion of an emerging democracy—Kenya, for example—is a concept that may be legitimate, but the ultimate arbiter of everything is time. Israel is a democracy. We can argue about the West Bank and Gaza, I’m a vocal critic of Israel’s policies there. But this is important, because supporting societies that share our values represents the broadest conception of what constitutes our national interests.

Fifth, regarding the Clinton years. Clinton was one of the most empathetic, talented, brilliant presidents and negotiators you’d ever want to meet. No one cared more or tried to do more on this problem. But empathy alone is not enough. Achieving the conflict-ending agreements he sought required a toughness he and we didn’t have during his tenure.

Sixth, regarding George W. Bush. Governing is about choosing. You come to Washington, you decide what’s important to you, you pursue it. Arab-Israeli peace wasn’t important to Bush throughout the first administration; he had another agenda. It may still not be that important to him. There’s a chance that between now and the end of the year something positive could happen between Omert and Abbas, but this is really no longer primarily an American story. My friend Larry Sommers, the former president of Harvard University, said that in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rental car. You only care about what you own. If a U.S. president doesn’t invest in this or whatever other issue he or she chooses, opponents both at home and abroad will quickly figure this out. That will make success impossible.

Finally, to end on an optimistic note, John F. Kennedy said something very important. He described himself as an idealist without illusion. That’s what America needs to be. I don’t care if it’s health care or the Arab-Israeli conflict. We can’t tell our young people never, we can’t mortgage the future and give in to cynicism and despair. But as you seek to change the world, you have to do so with your eyes open. Because the stakes now are much higher than they’ve ever been before.

The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already arguing about the next one.

Let's start with that"last war" and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated government of dictator Saddam Hussein and declaring Iraq"liberated." In the wake of the city's fall, after widespread looting, the new American administrators dismantled the remains of Saddam's government in its hollowed out, trashed ministries; disassembled the Sunni-dominated Baathist Party which had ruled Iraq since the 1960s, sending its members home with news that there was no coming back; dismantled Saddam's 400,000 man army; and began to denationalize the economy. Soon, an insurgency of outraged Sunnis was raging against the American occupation.

After initially resisting democratic elections, American occupation administrators finally gave in to the will of the leading Shiite clergyman, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and agreed to sponsor them. In January 2005, these brought religious parties representing a long-oppressed Shiite majority to power, parties which had largely been in exile in neighboring Shiite Iran for years.

Now, skip a few years, and U.S. troops have once again entered Baghdad in battle mode. This time, they've been moving into the vast Sadr City Shiite slum"suburb" of eastern Baghdad, which houses perhaps two-and-a-half million closely packed inhabitants. If free-standing, Sadr City would be the second largest city in Iraq after the capital. This time, the forces facing American troops haven't put down their weapons, packed up, and gone home. This time, no one is talking about"liberation," or"freedom," or"democracy." In fact, no one is talking about much of anything.

And no longer is the U.S. attacking Sunnis. In the wake of the President's 2007 surge, the U.S. military is now officially allied with 90,000 Sunnis of the so-called Awakening Movement, mainly former insurgents, many of them undoubtedly once linked to the Baathist government U.S. forces overthrew in 2003. Meanwhile, American troops are fighting the Shiite militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, a cleric who seems now to be living in Iran, but whose spokesman in Najaf recently bitterly denounced that country for"seeking to share with the U.S. in influence over Iraq." And they are fighting the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia in the name of an Iraqi government dominated by another Shiite militia, the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose ties to Iran are even closer.

Ten thousand Badr Corps militia members were being inducted into the Iraqi army (just as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was demanding that the Mahdi Army militia disarm). This week, an official delegation from that government, which only recently received Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with high honors in Baghdad, took off for Tehran at American bidding to present"evidence" that the Iranians are arming their Sadrist enemies.

At the heart of this intra-sectarian struggle may be the fear that, in upcoming provincial elections, the Sadrists, increasingly popular for their resistance to the American occupation, might actually win. For the last few weeks, American troops have been moving deeper into Sadr City, implanting the reluctant security forces of the Maliki government 500-600 meters ahead of them. This is called"standing them up,""part of a strategy to build up the capability of the Iraqi security forces by letting them operate semi-autonomously of the American troops." It's clear, however, that, if Maliki's military were behind them, many might well disappear. (A number have already either put down their weapons, fled, or gone over to the Sadrists.)

How the Reverse Body Count Came -- and Went

The fighting in the heavily populated urban slums of Sadr City has been fierce, murderous, and destructive. It has quieted most of the talk about the"lowering of casualties" and of"violence" that was the singular hallmark of the surge year in Iraq. Though never commented upon, that remarkable year-long emphasis on the ever lessening number of corpses actually represented the return, in perversely reverse form, of the Vietnam era"body count."

In a guerrilla war situation in which there was no obvious territory to be taken and no clear way to establish what our previous Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, once called the "metrics" of victory or success, it was natural, as happened in Vietnam, to begin to count. If you couldn't conquer a city or a country, then there was a certain logic to the thought that victory would come if, one by one, you could"obliterate" -- to use a word suddenly back in the news -- the enemy.

As the Vietnam conflict dragged on, however, as the counting of bodies continued and victory never materialized, that war gained the look of slaughter, and the body count (announced every day at a military press conference in Saigon that reporters labeled"the five o'clock follies") came to be seen by increasing numbers of Americans as evidence of atrocity. It became the symbol of the descent into madness in Indochina. No wonder the Bush administration, imagining itself once again capturing territory, carefully organized its Iraq War so that it would lack such official counting. (The President later described the process this way:"We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team.")

With the coming of the surge strategy in 2007, frustration over the President's unaccomplished mission and his constant talk of victory meant that some other"metric," some other"benchmark," for success had to be established, and it proved to be the reverse body count. Over the last year, in fact, just about the only measure of success regularly trumpeted in the mainstream media has been that lowering of the death count. In reverse form, however, it still held some of the same dangers for the administration as its Vietnamese cousin.

As of April, bodies, in ever rising numbers, American and Iraqi, have been forcing their way back into the news as symbols not of success, but of failure. More than 1,000 Iraqis have, by semi-official estimate, died just in the last month (and experts know that these monstrous monthly totals of Iraqi dead are usually dramatic undercounts). Four hundred Iraqis, reportedly only 10% militia fighters, are estimated to have died in the onslaught on Sadr City alone.

American soldiers are also dying in and around Baghdad in elevated numbers. U.S. military spokesmen claim that none of this represents a weakening of the post-surge security situation. As Lieutenant General Carter Ham, Joint Staff director for operations at the Pentagon, put the matter:"While it is sad to see an increase in casualties, I don't think it is necessarily indicative of a major change in the operating environment. When the level of fighting increases, then sadly the number of casualties does tend to rise." This is, of course, unmitigated nonsense.

In April, of the 51 American deaths in Iraq, more than twenty evidently took place in the ongoing battle for Sadr City or greater Baghdad. Among them were young men from Portland, Mesquite, Buchanan Dam, and Fresno (Texas), Billings (Montana), Fountain (Colorado), Bakersfield (California), Mount Airy (North Carolina), and Zephyrhills (Florida) -- all thousands of miles from home. And many of them have died under the circumstances most feared by American commanders (and thought for a time to have been avoided) before the invasion of Iraq -- in block to block, house to house fighting in the warren of streets in one of this planet's many slum cities.

For the Iraqis of Sadr City, of course, this is a living hell. ("Sadr City right now is like a city of ghosts," Abu Haider al-Bahadili, a Mahdi Army fighter told Amit R. Paley of the Washington Post."It has turned from a city into a field of battle.") As in all colonial wars, all wars on the peripheries, the"natives" always die in staggeringly higher numbers than the far better armed occupation or expeditionary forces.

This is no less true now, especially since the U.S. military has wheeled in its Abrams tanks, brought out its 200-pound guided rockets, and called in air power in a major way. Planes, helicopters, and Hellfire-missile-armed drones are now all regularly firing into the heavily populated urban neighborhoods of the east Baghdad slum. As Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Timeswrote recently,"With many of Sadr City's main roads peppered with roadside bombs and its side streets too narrow for U.S. tanks or other heavy vehicles to navigate, U.S. forces often call in airstrikes or use guided rockets to hit their targets."

Buried in a number of news stories from Sadr City are reports in which attacks on"insurgents,"" criminals," or"known criminal elements" (now Shiite, not Sunni) destroy whole buildings, even rows of buildings, even in one case recently damaging a hospital and destroying ambulances. Every day now, civilians die and children are pulled from the rubble. This is brutal indeed.

And it no longer makes any particular sense, even by the standards of the Bush administration; nor, in the post-surge atmosphere, is anybody trying to make much sense of it. That rising body count has, after all, taken away the last metric by which to measure"success" in Iraq. Even the small explanations (and, these days, those are just about the only ones left) seem increasingly bizarre. Take, for instance, the convoluted explanation of who exactly is responsible for the devastation in Sadr City. Here's how military spokesman Lt. Col. Steve Stover put it recently:

"'The sole burden of responsibility lies on the shoulders of the militants who care nothing for the Iraqi people…' He said the militiamen purposely attack from buildings and alleyways in densely populated areas, hoping to protect themselves by hiding among civilians. 'What does that say about the enemy?... He is heartless and evil.'"

Mind you, this comes from the representative of a military that now claims to grasp the true nature of counterinsurgency warfare (and so of a guerrilla war); and you're talking about a militia largely from Sadr City, fighting "a war of survival" for its own families, its own people, against foreign soldiers who have hopped continents to attack them. The Sadrist militiamen are defending their homes and, of course, with Predator drones and American helicopters constantly over their neighborhoods, it's quite obvious what would happen to them if they" came out and fought" like typical good-hearted types. They would simply be blown away. (Out of curiosity, what descriptive adjectives would Lt. Col. Stover use to capture the style of fighting of the Predator pilots who"fly" their drones from an air base outside of Las Vegas?)

By the way, the last time such street fighting was seen, in the first six months of 2007, the U.S. military was clearing insurgents ("al-Qaeda") out of Sunni neighborhoods of the capital, which were then being further cleansed by Shiite militias (including the Sadrists).

So, to sum up, let me see if I have this straight: The Bush administration liberated Iraq in order to send U.S. troops against a ragtag militia that has nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's former government (and many of whose members were, in fact, oppressed by it, as were its leaders) in the name of another group of Iraqis, who have long been backed by Iran, and… uh…

Hmmm, let's try that again… or, like the Bush administration, let's not and pretend we did.

In the meantime, the U.S. military has tried to partially "seal off" Sadr City and, in the neighborhoods that they have partially occupied with their attendant Iraqi troops, they are building the usual vast, concrete walls, cordoning off the area. This is being done, so American spokespeople say, to keep the Sadrist militia fighters out and to clear the way for government hearts-and-minds"reconstruction" projects that everyone knows are unlikely to happen.

Soon enough, if the previous pattern in Sunni neighborhoods is applied, they and/or their Iraqi cohorts will start going door to door doing weapons searches. As a result, the American and Iraqi prisons now supposedly being substantially emptied -- part of a program of"national reconciliation" -- of many of the tens of thousands of Sunni prisoners swept up in raids in Sunni neighborhoods, are likely to be refilled with Shiite prisoners swept up in a similar way. Call it grim irony -- or call it a meaningless nightmare from which no one can awaken. Just don't claim it makes much sense.

As in Vietnam, so four decades later, we are observing a full-scale descent into madness and, undoubtedly, into atrocity. At least in 2003, American troops were heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal, a city to take. Now, they are heading for nowhere, for the heart of a slum city which they cannot hold in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighborhoods is essentially beside the point. They are heading for oblivion, while trying to win hearts and minds by shooting missiles into homes and enclosing people in giant walls which break families and communities apart, while destroying livelihoods.

Oh, and while we're at it, welcome to"the next war," the war in the slum cities of the planet.

"There Are No Exit Strategies"

Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably distant past of perhaps 2002-2003. Afghanistan had been"liberated" in a matter of weeks;"regime change" in Iraq was going to be a" cakewalk," and it would be followed by the reordering of what the neoconservatives liked to refer to as"the Greater Middle East." No one who mattered was talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said about counterinsurgency (nor, as in the Powell Doctrine, about exits either). The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short order, and then, of course, we would stay. We would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically beg us to garrison their countries.

Every one of those assumptions about the new American way of war was absurd, even then. At the very least, the problem should have been obvious once American generals reached Baghdad and sat down at a marble table in one of Saddam Hussein's overwrought palaces, grinning for a victory snapshot -- without any evidence of a defeated enemy on the other side of the table to sign a set of surrender documents. If this were a normal campaign and an obvious imperial triumph, then where was the other side? Where were those we had defeated? The next thing you knew, the Americans were printing up packs of cards with the faces of most of Saddam's missing cronies on them.

Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and, in Afghanistan, are moving ever closer to the Afghan capital, Kabul. And even though the"last war" in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be transferred to the even older war in Afghanistan that is, now, spiraling out of control), inside the Pentagon some are thinking not about how to get out, but about how to get in. They are pondering"the next war."

With that in mind, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently gave two sharp-edged speeches, one at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, the other at West Point, each expressing his frustration with the slowness of the armed services to adapt to a counterinsurgency planet and to plan for the next war.

Now, there's obviously nothing illogical about a country's military preparing for future wars. That's what it's there for and every country has the right to defend itself. But it's a different matter when you're preparing for future"wars of choice" (which used to be called wars of aggression) -- for the next war(s) on what our secretary of defense now calls the"the 21st century's global commons." By that, he means not just planet Earth in its entirety, but"space and cyberspace" as well. For the American military, it turns out, planning for a future"defense" of the United States means planning for planet-wide, over-the-horizon counterinsurgency. It will, of course, be done better, with a military that, as Gates put it, will no longer be"a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force." (It was at the Fulda Gap, a German plain, that the U.S. military once expected to meet Soviet forces invading Europe in full-scale battle.)

So the secretary of defense is calling for more foreign-language training, a better"expeditionary culture," and more nation building -- you know, all that"hearts and minds" stuff. In essence, he accepts that the future of American war will, indeed, be in the Sadr Cities and Afghan backlands of the planet; or, as he says, that"the asymmetric battlefields of the 21st century" will be"the dominant combat environment in the decades to come." And the American response will be high-tech indeed -- all those unmanned aerial vehicles that he can't stop talking about.

Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way:"What has been called the 'Long War' [i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."

"There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying that the U.S. military is likely to be in one, two, many Sadr Cities for a long time to come. This is Gates's ultimate insight as secretary of defense, and his response is to urge the military to plan for more and better of the same. For this we give the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year.

The irony is that, in both speeches, Gates praises outside-the-box thinking in the military and calls upon the armed services to"think unconventionally." Yet his own thoughts couldn't be more conventional, imperial, or potentially disastrous. Put in a nutshell: If the mission is heading into madness, then double the mission. Bring in yet more of those drones whose missiles are already so popular in Sadr City. This is brilliantly prosaic thinking, based on the assumption that the"global commons" should be ours and that the"next war" will be ours, and the one after that, and so on.

But I wouldn't bet on it. John McCain got a lot of flak for saying that, as far as he was concerned, American troops could stay in Iraq for"100 years... as long as Americans are not being injured, harmed or killed." Our present secretary of defense, a"realist" in an administration of bizarre dreamers and inept gamblers, has just cast his vote for more and better Sadr Cities. In a Pentagon version of an old Maoist slogan: Let a hundred slum guerrilla struggles bloom!

It's a recipe for being bogged down in such wars for 100 years -- with the piles of dead rising ever higher. No wonder some of the top military brass, whom he criticizes for their bureaucratic inertia, have been unenthusiastic. They don't want to spend the rest of their careers fighting hopeless wars in Sadr City or its equivalent. Who would?

The rest of us should feel the same way. Every time you hear the phrase"the next war" -- and journalists already love it -- you should wince. It means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.

Vietnam… Iraq… Afghanistan… Don't we already have enough examples of American counterinsurgency operations under our belt? The American people evidently think so. For some time now, significant majorities have wanted out of Baghdad, out of Iraq. All the way out. In a major survey just released by the influential journal Foreign Affairs, similar majorities have, in essence, "voted" for demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy. In their responses, they offer quite a different approach to how the United States should operate in the world. According to journalist Jim Lobe, 69% of respondents believe"the U.S. government should put more emphasis on diplomatic and economic foreign policy tools in fighting terrorism," not"military efforts." (Sixty-five percent believe the U.S. should withdraw all its troops from Iraq either"immediately" or"over the next twelve months.") But, of course, no one who matters listens to them.

And yet, the path to Sadr City is one that even an imperialist should want to turn back from. It's the road to Hell and it's paved with the worst of intentions.

If Martin Amis is the self-styled bad boy of English letters, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the rabbinic scourge of"fine" writers who stray into public intellection. No surprise, then, that in the April 27 New York Times Book Review Wieseltier condemns Amis' The Second Plane, a collection of essays, reviews, and stories about September 11 written across six years and re-published in America now in a slim volume.

What is surprising is that Wieseltier's review is itself so preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack, showing mainly that it takes one to know one. Anyone who's read Amis' book as well as the review will know that Wieseltier isn't as brave or honest as his often-stumbling target. And thereby hangs a tale.

The faults in Amis' book are manifold, but Wieseltier's puzzling envy and all-too-explicable bad faith are borne of bad conscience about his own continuously bad judgment about how to respond to September 11. Amis has gotten under his skin, as bad boys will, because his very badness embarrasses Wieseltier, who actually shares many of his views but loathes and envies Amis' brazenness in flaunting them.

Wieseltier shows (as I did in the Los Angeles Times) that Amis is too often grandiloquent and preening, his virtuosity sometimes outrunning reason and even reporting.

But Amis has to be credited with two kinds of courage. First, by making few revisions in these pieces, he lets us watch him learning about September 11, fitfully, over time -- as we all did -- through under-informed, over-determined generalizations and contradictory, fragmentary insights that sometimes became hobby horses. His courage to be messy would seem exhibitionist only to the compulsively tidy and self-regarding.

Second, Amis is brazen as well as brave in shoving our snouts into harsh realities which he thinks too many readers (perhaps especially British readers, for whom most of these pieces were first written) have sanitized or ideologized away, in excesses of political correctness, or have simply forgotten with the passage of time.

So determined is he to make us taste suicide bombing's depravity, for example, that he sketches the perpetrators' psycho-sexual perversities, their"self besplatterment," the bloody"pink haze" forming above the bodies of World Trade Center victims plunged to their deaths. His review of"United 93" credits that film for making viewers feel the passengers'"state of near-perfect distress -- a distress that knows no blindspots. . . . the ancient flavor of death and defeat. You think: this is exactly what [the terrorists] meant us to feel." Amis makes you ashamed of trying to feel anything else.

Wieseltier, that dark prophet of unblinking confrontation with malevolence, is affronted."What is gained by preferring 'horrorism' to 'terroism', except perhaps a round of applause?" he complains. Surely there is answer enough in the paragraph just above. Yet Wieseltier insists that"Amis is the sort of writer who will never say 'city' when he can say 'conurbation.'".

Really? Read the book and the review, and decide who strains more for virtuosity. And if it's a more sober depth you're looking for, tell me whether the following wisodm about dealing with Islamist terrorists was offered by Martin Amis or by Leon Wieseltier:"We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason."

It is by Amis, actually. And Wieseltier nearly admits to feeling upstaged as much as affronted, but only after nearly 2000 words of insults:

"Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.""What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever.""Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right.""Amis seems to regard his little curses as military contributions to the struggle.""I wish only to suggest that the simpleton's view of the world that Amis is angrily promoting contributes not very much to the study of the passions that are scalding the planet."

Only after all that does Wieseltier acknowledge"the complication" that"there is considerable justice on Amis' side:

"[Amis] is correct in insisting upon the moral and historical primacy of the battle against theocracy and terror. He is correct that... that the defense of western conceptions of freedom and equality is not an exercise in ethnocentrism. He is correct that the skeptical discussion of religious ideas and practices must not be abrogated by the skinlessness of multiculturalism.... He is correct that opinions that seem not only spectacularly false, but also lethally false, do not have to be intellectually respected even if they have to be politically tolerated. He is correct that in Islamism the many doctrines of antimodernism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism are one doctrine.

"I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful," Wieseltier concludes - or nearly does, leaving himself room for a dig at the egregious and, here, irrelevant Nicholson Baker, whose Checkpoint drove Wieseltier into paroxysms of rage against anti-war liberals four years ago in a ranting review for the same New York Times.

Wieseltier allows that even"Martin Amis would despise" Baker's new book, Human Smoke, yet he finds the two writers"peculiarly alike" in that they treat"the most fundamental matters of politics and philosophy... as occasions for the display of artifice and the exhibition of temperament." But it is not only Baker and Amis who fill that bill. There is a third writer, the one who is obsessed with them.

Didn't Wieseltier just inform us that Amis has principles? Why, then, does he emphasize that Amis is"untouched by the atrocity" because"he is still busy with the glamorous pursuit of extraordinary sentences."? The problem is that Wieseltier, knowing that he's writing in bad faith, is even busier comforting himself with alliterative cadences:

Of Amis' writing, he insists,"the ingenuity of the image is an interruption of attention, an ostentatious metaphorical digression from the enormity that it is preparing to reveal, an invitation to behold the prose and not the plane." Here Wieseltier invites us to behold his prose and not his point.

Seldom has a reviewer hoisted himself on his own petard so shamelessly with so many grasps at faux paradoxes, sustained by his telltale, compulsive alliteration:

"Nothing creates confidence like catastrophe.""[Amis] has a hot, heroic view of himself.""In Amis' universe, you are either religious or you are rational.""The results of Amis' clumsily mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage can be eccentric, or worse""For this reason, such writings will have more impact than influence.""[Amis] appears to believe that an insult is an analysis."

Yet it is Wieseltier, we've seen, who delivers more insult than analysis. He sounds like one who is rather too enthroned in the seat of judgment, but you can trace the rudiments of an analysis among the insults, in three parts.

First, as we've seen, Wieseltier rules that virtuosity has overcome virtue in Amis' writing.

Second, he decides that Amis is monocausally obsessed with the terrorists' frustrated libidos and warped masculinity, the polluted wellspring or mainspring of Islamism. Wieseltier tells us that Amis"believes that 2,992 more people would be alive today if 19 Middle Eastern men had only found some satisfaction of the flesh."

Wieseltier doesn't actually believe that Amis believes this. He has written the sentence for effect. That points us back to the first part of his"analysis," in which the pot calls the kettle black.

Only a few paragraphs later, Wieseltier decides, thirdly, that Amis' problem lies less in an obsession with sex than in the fact that his"antipathy to Islamism is based upon a more comprehensive antipathy to religion. In Amis' universe, you are either religious or you are rational." And perhaps not so sexual.

What's in Wieseltier's own clumsily mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage? There is, of course, that gift for prophetic scourging, nowhere more evident than in a column he wrote in The New Republic just after September 11:

"Is it a little laughter that we need now? Then behold the contrition of yesterday's frivolous, the new fashion in gravity. The man who edits Vanity Fair has ruled that the age of cynicism is over. He would know. I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz. The papers are filled with hip people seeing through hipness, composing elegiac farewells to the days of Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez. The on dit has moved beyond the apple martini. It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony."

This is the rod of instruction, which Wieseltier's forefathers and mine brought forth out of the land of Egypt and passed on to the prophets and jeremiadic Puritan divines and that arose often in the homiletics of my own childhood rabbi, Samuel H. Dresner.

There is another ingredient in the cocktail: Wieseltier, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Brooklyn as it was changing racially in the 1950s and '60s, pulls insights about identity and atrocity from out of his innards, as did the black writer Shelby Steele before he, too, grew comfortable in a seat of judgment funded by others. In The Closest of Strangers I was grateful to be able to quote Wieseltier's wisdom about both the defensive Jews and angry blacks I was writing about:

"The memory of oppression is a pillar and strut of the identity of every people oppressed.... [It] imparts an isolating sense of apartness... Don't be fooled, it teaches, there is only repetition. ...In the memory of oppression, oppression outlives itself. The scar does the work of the wound. That is the real tragedy: that injustice retains the power to distort long after it has ceased to be real. .... This is the unfairly difficult dilemma of the newly emancipated...: an honorable life is not possible if they remember too little and an honorable life is not possible if they remember too much."

All the self-comforting, quasi-liturgical cadences are there, but so is the prophetic truth, and Wieseltier wields it well against a generation of lost, WASP preppie gatekeepers from Exeter and Yale and their sweaty sycophants at The Times, The New Yorker and hipper Manhattan and online publications, most of them staging and watching debates more for entertainment value than to satisfy any deep craving to clarify our murky horizons. In Wieseltier, upper-middling thinkers like Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus find a kind of deliverance, gravitas for hire.

At his best, Wieseltier keeps and sometimes rouses their consciences.In the New Republic column already quoted, he scourged writers who'd responded to"atrocity with sensibility." Quoting John Updike's"Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface," Wieseltier noted rightly that"such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible."

But so is Wieseltier's own tidy prose, lovely as the Rose of Sharon even when justice is not on his side. For there is something more, or less, than prophecy and personal pain in Wieseltier's curiously mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage. You can sense it when you note the staleness that enters into his jeremiads against fine writing and stiffened memories of oppression when he turns them against writers like Amis, accusing them of meeting atrocity only with virtuosity, not anger and insight.

Here is Wieseltier, rummaging through his old grab bag, warming up to condemn Amis as he did Updike:"After the mind breaks, it stiffens in the aftermath of grief, it lets in only certainty. In a time of war, complexity is suspected of a sapping effect, and so a mental curfew is imposed. From the maxim that we must know our enemy, we infer that our enemy may be easily known."

Well, not quite. Amis does not infer any such thing, and Wieseltier, as we've seen, will eventually admit that Amis is not simple but complex. His inability to stand by his own grudging admission suggests the deeper problem in his review of Amis' book.

Here is the problem: Even as Ground Zero lay smoking, Wieseltier signed a letter to President Bush, dated September 20 and written by neo-conservative Field Marshall Bill Kristol on the letterhead of his Project for the New American Century. The letter's 42 well-known neconservative and Vulcan signers informed Bush that ''even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.''

It wasn't by fluke that Wieseltier signed. He is as comfortable with Kristol's crowd as he is in the seat of literary judgment. In 2007 he wrote one of 200 letters urging clemency for his friend I. Lewis"Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney who had been convicted on charges of lying, perjury, and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame affair.

In his letter, the scourge of preeners departed from praising Libby to praise his own integrity, assuring the judge,"I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest. I am, to the contrary, the kind of liberal who many neoconservatives like to despise, and that's fine with me."

It would have been fine with the court, too, had Wieseltier forgone such stylized bleating on his own behalf, but he did have tracks to cover after serving with Richard Bruce (Dick) Cheney, Carl Christian Rove, and others as an unlikely member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a now-defunct cousin of Kristol's PNAC and the American Enterprise Institute.

Wieseltier was an"adversary" of neoconservatives only in the way that he is an adversary of Martin Amis: He wishes these bad boys would stop embarrassing him by saying so brazenly what he would say blamelessly.

Wieseltier is nowhere more dishonest than when he tells us that Amis"writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate." Wieseltier knows well that the essay in which Amis quotes Lewis and Larkin --"Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind," written on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 -- pivots on Amis admiration for the insights of Paul Berman, whose Terror and Liberalism he quotes more often that the work of Lewis or Larkin.

Yet, to acknowledge this, Wieseltier would have to credit Amis with the discernment he thinks he showed in publishing Berman's excoriations of liberals'"naïve rationality" about terrorism in The New Republic. Wieseltier cannot condemn Amis honestly without condemning himself . So he condemns him dishonestly. And his writing assumes the flat, vacant intensity he imputes to Amis.

The only credible explanation for this dirge-like denunciation of a"bad boy" is that, since 9/11, it is Wieseltier who has stiffened. The Holocaust, the horrors in Israel and Palestine, and the horrors of his own misbegotten crusading after 9/11 have become scar upon scar, opening an ancient and terrible wound. Here is a man who will wander through life intoning his epitaph wordlessly as well as wordily:

I am so wise,
That my wisdom makes me weary.
It's all I can do
To share my wisdom with you.