As president Victor Yushchenko's rating plummets further there is a chance that Kiev's political elite may agree to form a parliamentary republic.

In a poll by FOM-Ukraina in mid-November 2008, Viktor Yushchenko's popularity reached a new low. With 3% of the respondents saying they would vote for him in elections, Ukraine's current President trails not only far behind his main contenders Yulia Timoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich. Yushchenko's support is also below the percentage of popular backing that such minor politicians as Arseny Yatsenyuk, Petro Symonenko and Volodymyr Litvin currently receive. It has been clear to most observers for a couple of years now that Yushchenko's chances for a second term are, at best, dim. One hopes that now even the detached President and his myopic aides will acknowledge that a re-election of the incumbent is beyond reach. As bitter as this might be for the hero of the Orange Revolution, this circumstance also provides the Orange camp with a window of opportunity to complete its second push for democratization started four years ago. In 2009, Ukraine will have a rare chance to get rid of its ill-construed semi-presidential system.

After the fall of the USSR, most countries emerging from it adopted a slightly transfigured version of the Soviet executive structure in which the respective republic's First Party Secretary was replaced by the President - a model that had been provided by Gorbachev, on the Union level, already in 1989. In the aftermath, this transmutation was, in public, rationalized as an adoption of the"French model of government." In reality, the division of executive power between the President and Prime-Minister in much of the post-Soviet world had little to do with learning from France's experiences, but was, instead, the result of idiosyncratic power-struggles in each of the former Soviet republics. The seemingly novel configurations of institutions in the central apparatuses of the Newly Independent States were christened"parliamentary-presidential" or"presidential-parliamentary" though, in most cases, these political systems were or, still, are neither.

Rather, they constitute(d) autocracies or oligarchies with a rubber-stamp or/and toothless parliament, and with a"Head of Government" who is no head and does not govern, but is merely the country's highest ranking bureaucrat, and often plays the role of a scapegoat, in the case, things go wrong.

In Ukraine, this started to change in late 2004 when it were, oddly, the opponents of the Orange Revolution who - out of ad hoc calculations - initiated a partial shift of prerogatives from the President to the Prime-Minister as well as to the Rada thus creating something close to real semi-presidentialism. As important as this transfer of power was for the re-democratization of Ukraine, it did not solve, but merely transformed the problem. Since then, Ukraine has a divided government with a duumvirate, at its top. To understand that this is unsatisfactory is not something that Ukrainians need to be explained by political scientists. Since 2005, the country has experienced such agonizing conflicts between the President, on the one side, and its two" cohabitating" Prime-Ministers (Timoshenko, Yanukovich), on the other, that there are, probably, few Ukrainians left who think that this political solution has been good for their homeland.

What (not necessarily foreign) political scientists could and should be still telling Ukrainians is that this problem is, contrary to what many believe, not something unique to Ukraine. One often hears from both younger and older citizens of Ukraine that democracy does not properly work there because of the low political culture, moral inadequateness or similar deficiencies of Kiev's political elite. While hardly anybody will disagree, these shortages are not the only and, probably, not even the main reason for last years' destructive confrontations between Ukraine's power-holders. International experience shows that these clashes President vs. Parliament, the Head of State vs. the Head of Government are inherent to duumvirates, in general, and typical for semi-presidential regimes in emerging democracies, in particular. Ukraine's chaotic politics of the last years has, contrary to commonly held opinion there, less to do with the culture of its nation, than with the structure of its state. The problem with semi-presidentialism - everywhere and not only in the post-Soviet world - is that it elevates conflicts between political parties or camps into confrontations between the branches of power or constitutional organs. An old democracy like France is able to deal with these tensions and euphemistically calls the conflict emerging from different parties occupying the country's highest posts" cohabitation." In young democracies and especially in post-colonial ones like Ukraine, the stakes of the decisions to be taken by the top officials are, however, much higher. Here minor inconsistencies in the voting behaviour of the electorate or in the coalition building of the parties or factions may transform into major political stand-offs that, in the worst case, come close to civil war (like in Russia in September-October 1993). Contrary to what many in the post-Soviet world believe, the Prime-Minister of Britain or Chancellor of Germany have more power, in their national contexts, than the President of the United States - at least, in those situations in which the President's party does not have a majority in Congress.

It should be noted that not only Moscow's"political technologists", but also a number of serious international political scientists advocate presidentialism, and see this form of democracy as superior to parliamentary systems - the world oldest democracy, the US, being the obvious example. However, concerning the specific challenges that young democracies are facing, study after study has shown that the stronger a new republic's parliament is the better are the chances that genuine political pluralism will survive and that the novel system of government will consolidate. Notably, these findings are not outcomes of theoretical considerations by experts who may have a preference for this or that form of government. Instead, the inference that parliamentarianism is better for an emerging democracy than a presidential or semi-presidential system is based on empirical research and results from more or less wide-ranging cross-national investigations.

The conclusion for a country like Ukraine is that, in order to become a more stable and effective democracy, it should transform sooner rather than later into a parliamentary republic. While political conflicts will continue to be fought ferociously in such a system, they will happen within the parliament, and not between parliament and president. Coalition building will become the major feature of the political process, and replace such strategies as brinkmanship, intimidation and bluffing prominent during intra-executive confrontations in semi-presidential systems. Parlamentarians able to build bridges between political opponents and not ideologues whipping up their political camps will take center-stage. Apart from that, for Ukraine, simply saving the costs of another round of elections, and having only one national poll every four years will help to save much money and energy that is dearly needed to further reform and stabilize this young nation-state.

"No matter how powerful our military is, we will not be powerful if we lose the war of ideas."

- Senator Joe Biden, soon after 9/11; cited in Ira Teinowitz, "Congress will support the war of ideas" (Advertising Age, 6/17/2002)

"We're in a war of ideas."

- Donald Rumsfeld, cited in Bill Gertz, "Rumsfeld pushes 'new sense of urgency'; 'War of ideas' needed to defeat the terrorists," (The Washington Times, October 24, 2003)

War has long been a term used by governments to mobilize their populations. In the twentieth century, for example, "war of ideas" was in circulation when referring to America's conflicts with Germany and Russia. Lately, this verbal construct, used off and on by a number of pundits and politicians since 9/11, has enjoyed something of a resurgence -- thanks to statements made by the current Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman.

Glassman's emphasis on the "war of ideas," for which he advocates the use of Internet social networking to discredit "violent extemism," has received, on the whole, a positive reception in the United States, with some exceptions; but should a "war of ideas," on or off cyberspace, be part of how we Americans determine our country's role in the world during the new millenium?

1. To understand the deceptive nature of the term "war of ideas," it helps to go back to Plato -- as Alfred North Whitehead famously said, Western philosophy is but a "series of footnotes to Plato." In Plato's Gorgias we gather from Socrates that persuasion is not dialogue, and indeed that rhetoric and philosophy are in a state of tension if not opposition. Following this train of thought, it becomes evident that Glassman's "war," by definition a win-or-lose conflict rather than an intellectual exchange, has nothing to do with ideas as such. It has to do -- and wouldn't terrorists find much in common with the Under Secretary's bellicose, unsubtle, hit-'em-hard approach? -- with changing behavior to advance one's interests: in other words propaganda, a weapon of war which, at its most rudimentary, appeals to atavistic emotions, not the inquisitive intellect.

2. To suggest -- as Glassman's "war of ideas" does -- that violent extremists are capable of ideas is to give them intellectual credit that they seldom deserve. To be sure, some of the terrorists' statements are taken seriously in some societies, but that is because they inflame the spirits rather than enlighten the mind, for often regrettable but understandable reasons. And words, which in discourse are a vehicle for thought, are at most of secondary importance to terrorists. What they most believe in, as a means of getting their way, is the propaganda of the deed (the more violent the better), a phrase traced back to a 19th century Italian revolutionary. How ironic, then, that Mr. Glassman's predecessor, Ms. Karen Hughes, referred to "diplomacy of deeds" as a central part of her agenda, and that Dr. Condoleezza Rice, while teaching at Stanford, stated that "I tell my students that policy-making is 90 percent blocking and tackling and 10 percent intellectual."

3. Meanwhile, what, exactly, are our American "ideas" in the "war of ideas?" -- and, indeed, what are the ideas of the US-politically acceptable Middle East moderate "locals" who can fight the evil "them" for "us," to follow the contentions of Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy? To seek to define America through certain principles ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") is all well and good, but to reduce the United States to a fixed set of ideas it "fights for" simplifies the complexity and changeability of the United States. In fact, what perhaps most characterizes the U.S. is that it contains a multitude of differing and evolving ideas, rather than permanent ideas everyone agrees upon. The notion of an American "war of ideas" is, therefore, an attack on ideas in the United States, as it implicity limits their infinite variety. As Mr. Glassman himself wrote in 1997: "Of course, not every new idea ... will be a good one. But the trial-and-error process of learning is essential to the progress and plenitude of American life. Whether in science, technology, business, or popular culture, we cannot know in advance which experiments will succeed. For a political class dedicated to technocratic planning, that is a scary idea."

4. In the long term, a crude propaganda campaign thinly disguised under the term "war of ideas" may in fact discredit the U.S. far more than its "enemies" by confirming what violent extremists claim -- that America is not truthful about what it does, what many in the world are predisposed to believe, given the Bush administration's hypocritical record in Iraq and elsewhere. As a noted scholar, known for not mincing words, informed me by e-mail, Glassman's war of ideas is simply "dumb." "Because," he explains, "the most subversive thing we can do is be ourselves, guilelessly and unapologetically. Wars of ideas are not our style." (He also notes, on a less idealistic level, that "as any poker player knows, you don't win the game by announcing that you are out to win the game." I would only add to this observation that seasoned propagandists, approve of them or not, know that the best propaganda is the least propagandistic: subtlety, not bombs or a loudly-proclaimed "war on ideas," is the best propaganda, especially in the long-term. Just ask the BBC.)

5. One of the most important articles to appear, a few weeks after 9/11, was by Douglas McGray in The Christian Science Monitor (September 26, 2001), under the headline -- "Don't Oversell an 'Idea War'" -- and with the following wisdom: "Richard Nixon ... declared 'war' on drugs ... Even earlier, President Johnson's administration declared 'war' on poverty ... These wars are 'ideas wars,' in which leaders appropriate the language of war to rally political support and signal big budget commitment. ... Meanwhile, the real fight against terrorism, an ongoing combination of thankless police and intelligence work -- more like like fighting crime on a global scale than waging war -- could get overshadowed."

6. Full disclosure: I was a public diplomacy Foreign Service officer during the Cold War and its aftermath (1981-2003), serving mostly in Eastern and Central Europe (Prague, Krakow, Tallinn, Kiev, Belgrade, Moscow). The Agency that provided me with a paycheck, the USIA (United States Information Information Agency), claimed to be engaged in a "war of ideas" with the Soviet Union (according to Washington headquarters, depending on the political season). Neverthess, I felt that my role "in the field" was not, directly (stupidly?) to confront Soviet-thug-thoughtlessness -- which had nothing to do with Marx, after all a serious philosopher -- but rather meet with persons, from all sides of the political fence and sectors of society, who were concerned with ideas, including about the human condition and America's relation with their country. My guide for these cherished meetings was far more Plato's dialogues than any official statements about the "war of ideas." And no one in DC headquarters ever bothered to fire me, perhaps because ideas are never considered that important in Washington to begin with.

I'd like to drive home the point that the case for fiscal policy has not yet been made by its advocates.

I believe that most current advocates of a huge fiscal stimulus have two major arguments in mind.  The first is that "when resources are unemployed, in principle government spending can put them back to work, times are dire so we need this."  The second is the Galbraithian point that public sector expenditure has been starved for a long time so in principle there are plenty of good ways to spend money through government.  In the predominant mental model on this topic, it is believed either of these arguments suffices to justify a large fiscal stimulus.  In the debates I sometimes find that when one claim is criticized there is a mental switch back to the other.

Don't let those switches distract you.  My point is simple: it is very hard to find examples of successful fiscal stimulus driving an economic recovery.  Ever.  This should be a sobering fact.  The New Deal doesn't count because fiscal policy wasn't very expansionary then.  American participation in World War II doesn't count.  Nazi Germany during the 1930s doesn't count.  (Read Matt Yglesias's response; the point however is that maybe Hitler couldn't have easily spent the money on something else in a rapid and effective fashion; if he could have they why can't we find more examples of a fiscal-policy lead recovery elsewhere?).  I'll cover Japan in the 1990s and other examples soon.

Don't be mesmerized by a static, aggregated AD-AS diagram into thinking surely it must be easy.  Whether the government can target unemployed resources effectively, and deliver the right stimulus in time, is a major question and so far the evidence isn't so convincing.  Keep in mind there are good reasons why truly major fiscal stimulus hasn't been tried very often.

Here's Free Exchange on the research behind fiscal policy.  They write:

Today, Mr Cowen links to a(nother) piece of macro research on stimulus multipliers that finds in favour of tax cuts before declaring that "the science isn't there", to support deficit spending as stimulus.

The point is not that I think tax cuts are much better than government spending as stimulus; I don't.  The NBER piece I cited considers the possibility that tax cuts bring a multiplier of as large as five.  I say no way.  The point is not to argue for tax cuts.  The point is to note that this is the best research that the highly reputable NBER can come up with on the topic.  What does that say about prevailing standards of evidence and proof in the area as a whole?  It means they are very weak and that we know very little.  This is not "the evil and corrupt WSJ Op-Ed page," this is the NBER and the researchers have done as good a job as others on this topic or maybe better.  And what they have produced still isn't very believable.

The bottom line is this: we are being asked to believe that a big, trillion or even multi-trillion fiscal stimulus can boost the current macroeconomy.  If you look at history, there isn't good reason to believe that.  Any single example, such as the Nazis, can be knocked down for lack of relevance or lack of correspondence to current conditions.  Fair enough.  But the burden of proof isn't on the skeptics.  It's up to the advocates of the trillion dollar expenditure to come up with the convincing examples of a fiscal-led recovery.  Right now we're mostly at "It wasn't really tried."  And then a mental retreat back into the notion that surely good public sector project opportunities are out there.

So what you have is the possibility of faith -- or lack thereof -- that our government will spend this money well.

And that is under "emergency" conditions, with great haste ("use it or lose it"), with a Congress eager to flex its muscle, and with more or less one-party rule.

For me, that's not enough.

I present below the top 10 reasons for which President-Elect Obama should stick to his guns and withdraw US troops from Iraq despite any resistance he may get from the US officer corps and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

In fact, it was little noted in the US press that Gen. Ray Odierno, US commander in Iraq, said at Balad on Sunday,"I expect us, frankly, right now, to be out with our military forces by 2011." So what I am saying does not necessarily run counter to the views of the concerned commanders.

Nevertheless, Odierno's comment contradicted the impression he and his colleagues went on to give the rest of this week. Gareth Porter reviews the evidence that the US military command is trying to get around the provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement that Iraq has concluded with the United States.

The agreement, for instance, calls for all US combat troops to be out of Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009. But on Dec.12, Gen. Ray Odierno said that thousands of US troops would remain in the cities. Apparently combat troops doing joint operations with their Iraqi counterparts will just be re-categorized as support troops.

MP Ahmad al-Masoudi, a leader of the Sadr Movement, which has 30 seats in parliament, slammed Odierno's remarks. The Sadrists had been opposed to the SOFA, considering it a Trojan Horse for the legitimation of US troop presence in Iraq.

Porter also points to George Will's report of Gates's views on a long-term US troop presence in Iraq:

' He [Gates] stresses, however, that there is bipartisan congressional support for"a long-term residual presence" of perhaps 40,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and that the president-elect's recent statements have not precluded that. Such a presence"for decades" has, he says, followed major U.S. military operations since 1945, other than in Vietnam. And he says,"Look at how long Britain has had troops in Cyprus." '

Suspicions of US military resistance to both Obama's and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's plans for US troops to withdraw from Iraq were fueled by an NYT report on the withdrawal plan presented by Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno to Obama that envisioned combat troops remaining after May, 2010, Obama's own deadline. Still, to be fair, not getting out by May 2010 is not the same as not getting out by December 2011.

It should be noted that what seems to have provoked Odierno's own attempt to keep US troops in Iraqi cities through 2009 is his concern that they are needed to ensure that the referendum and 2 elections scheduled for 2009 actually take place and are aboveboard. My guess is that Odierno is afraid that if the US presence is too diminished by December of 2009 when the federal parliamentary elections are scheduled, Iran might well engage in massive vote-buying and install a government hostile to US interests.

On the other hand, Odierno does not appear to share Gates's hopes that 40,000 troops could stay in Iraq in the medium to long term, given the statement he made at Balad that I started with.

Here are the reasons for which a long-term US presence-- of the sort Gates is said by Wills to have advocated-- is completely impractical.

1. The Status of Forces Agreement passed by the Iraqi parliament explicitly calls for all US troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. In fact, the Iraqi cabinet and parliament and notables such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani all wanted a shorter timetable than that. This schedule is the maximum they will put up with.

2. The US military cannot stay in Iraq against the will of the elected government. Those who doubt this principle should look at what happened two decades ago in the Philippines. Or consider Uzbekistan's withdrawal of permission for US to use its bases, in 2005. The diplomatic cost of staying against a country's will is generally too high for Washington to take that risk. Gates can wish for a change of heart on the part of the Iraqi government, but it is highly unlikely to happen.

3. The fatwas or formal legal rulings of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani must be obeyed by all adult Shiites who follow him (the majority in Iraq). He wants US troops out. He pressured al-Maliki to bargain hard over the SOFA, and he was reportedly not happy with the infringement on Iraqi sovereignty in the final version of the SOFA. One fatwa from Sistani could put hundreds of thousands of angry Shiites in the streets protesting any remaining US bases, and there would be no way for the Iraqi government to resist such a demand that it ask the US to leave.

4. The Sadr Movement would never accept a permanent US base in Iraq. The British contingent in Basra took constant mortar and rocket fire from the Mahdi Army, until ultimately the shellshocked Iraqi neighbors of the base in downtown Basra sked the British to move out to the airport. They did so, and went on taking mortar fire out there. They are being withdrawn by June of 2009 by PM Gordon Brown.

5. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary would never accept a long-term US presence, since they want to assert control over Iraq themselves. It was touch and go whether they would accept the SOFA, which gives the US military more prerogatives and leaves them in the country longer than ISCI would like.

6. The Sunni Arab guerrillas will never accept a long-term US base. They would also find ways of hitting it, and its very presence would fuel and prolong the Sunni insurgency.

7. Iran would never put up with a long-term US base in Iraq, and would certainly supply Iraqi guerrillas with the weapons needed to hound and harass US troops.

8. Syria would not want a long-term US base, and the Syrian Baath has enough assets in Iraq to ensure that US troops would be under constant attack.

9. The international Salafi Jihadi movement (what the US tends to call al-Qaeda, but the latter is only one part of this larger movement) will be galvanized by any attempt of the US to stay in Iraq for the long term militarily, and a US base in Iraq will produce constant terrorism. The way the US came to Iraq, as an act of unprovoked aggression, left the US presence without any legitimacy, and the Salafi Jihadis will make use of that condition of Illegality to challenge any base.

10. There is no safe place for an American base. A US base near Baghdad would have to be supplied from Kuwait and southern Iraq, and those supply lines could always be cut by angry Shiites and Iran. A US base near Basra in the south would face the same constant attacks and harassment that the British suffered. A US base in Kurdistan would have to be supplied via Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. But Turkey is in conflict with the Kurds, a conflict that could become hot and result in supplies being cut off to the US base. The US military would be in an impossible situation if Turkish-Kurdistan violence broke out, since Turkey is a NATO ally but the Kurds are the only Iraqis that might want a US presence. Moreover, US backing for Baghdad and Nuri al-Maliki's assertion of authority over Kurdish populations outside Kurdistan in Iraq proper have caused the Kurdistan leadership to rethink whether they really want an interfering US military in their area.

A long-term US base in Iraq is a crackpot Neoconservative fantasy that is highly unlikely to be realized. Like all Neocon fantasies, even if it could be realized, it would cause endless trouble and further wars.

President-elect Obama, keep your pledges and redeem the United States by seeking friendship with Iraq rather than supremacy in Iraq.

As the officials of the Bush administration pack up in Washington and move into their posh suburban homes around the country, will they be able to rest easy, or will they be haunted by the fear that they will be held accountable for war crimes committed during their reign?

There are many reasons to anticipate that the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress will let sleeping dogs lie. Attention to criminal acts by the former administration would probably anger Republicans, whose support Obama is hoping to win for his first priority, his economic program. Democratic Congressional leaders have known a great deal about Bush administration lawlessness, and in some cases have even given it their approval--making an unfettered review seem unlikely.

Some of Obama's own top appointees would undoubtedly receive scrutiny in an unconstrained investigation--Obama's reappointed defense secretary Robert Gates, for example, has had responsibility not only for Guantánamo but also for the incarceration of tens of thousands of Iraqis in prisons in Iraq like Camp Bucca, which the Washington Postdescribed in a headline as"a Prison Full of Innocent Men," without even a procedure for determining their guilt or innocence--unquestionably a violation of the Geneva Conventions in and of itself.

But the repose of the Cheneys, Bushes, Gonzaleses and Rumsfelds may not turn out to be so undisturbed. In his notorious torture memo, Alberto Gonzales warned about"prosecutors and independent counsels" who may in the future decide to pursue"unwarranted charges" based on the US War Crimes Act's prohibition on violations of the Geneva Conventions. While no such charges are likely to be brought anytime soon, neither are they likely to vanish. In the short run, Obama and his team face inescapable questions about the legal culpability of the Bush administration. And in the long run, such charges are likely to grow only more unavoidable once the former officials of that administration have lost the authority to quash them.

In April Obama said that if elected, he would have his attorney general initiate a prompt review of Bush-era action to distinguish between possible"genuine crimes" and"really bad policies."

"If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," Obama told the Philadelphia Daily News. He added, however, that"I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."

Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, speaking to the American Constitution Society in June, described Bush administration actions in terms that sound a whole lot more like"genuine crimes" than like"really bad policies":

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning."

A Reckoning?

While attention has focused on whether, once president, Obama will move quickly to close Guantánamo, shut down secret prisons, halt rendition and ban torture, there's a less visible struggle over whether and how to provide a reckoning for war crimes past.

A growing body of legal opinion holds that Obama will have a duty to investigate war crimes allegations and, if they are found to have merit, to prosecute the perpetrators.

In a December 3 Chicago Sun-Timesop-ed, law professors Anthony D'Amato (the Leighton Professor at Northwestern University School of Law) and Jordan J. Paust (the Mike & Thersa Baker Professor at the Law Center of the University of Houston) ask whether president-elect Barack Obama will have"the duty to prosecute or extradite persons who are reasonably accused of having committed and abetted war crimes or crimes against humanity during the Bush administration's admitted 'program' of 'coercive interrogation' and secret detention that was part of a 'common, unifying' plan to deny protections under the Geneva Conventions."

They answer,"Yes."

"Under the US Constitution, the president is expressly and unavoidably bound to faithfully execute the laws." The 1949 Geneva Conventions"expressly and unavoidably requires that all parties search for perpetrators of grave breaches of the treaty" and bring them before their own courts for"effective penal sanctions" or, if they prefer,"hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party."

The statement is particularly authoritative--and particularly striking--because Paust is also a former captain in the United States Army JAG Corps and member of the faculty at the Judge Advocate General's School.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights says that one of Barack Obama's first acts as president should be to"instruct his attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush Administration officials who gave the green light to torture."

Parallel to the legal community, members of Congress and president-elect Obama are trying to chart a strategy that avoids the appearance of seeking to punish Bush administration officials without appearing blatantly oblivious to their apparent war crimes. According to the AP's Lara Jakes Jordan,"Two Obama advisors say there's little--if any--chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage." Instead,"Obama is expected to create a panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to study interrogations, including those using waterboarding and other tactics that critics call torture."

Asked if Bush administration officials would face prosecution for war crimes, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy flatly said,"In the United States, no," but he does intend to continue to investigate Bush administration officials and their interrogation policies."Personally, I would like to know exactly what happened. Torture is going to be a major issue."

Continue the Cover-Up?

President-elect Obama may well seek to delay taking a stand for or against such accountability actions. But he is likely to be confronted early in his administration by choices about whether to continue or terminate legal cover-up operations the Bush administration currently has under way.

For example, the Bush administration has blocked the civil suit against US officials by Canadian Maher Arar for his"rendition" to Syria and his torture there by invoking the"state secrets" privilege. According to Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, they have appointed a prosecutor to investigate the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations, but the investigation is limited only to whether crimes were committed in relation to the destruction of the tapes--not whether what was being videotaped is a crime. The administration has refused to cooperate with the trial of twenty-six Americans, mostly CIA agents, who kidnapped a terrorism suspect in Milan and flew him to Egypt where, he says, he was tortured. And they have refused to provide secret documents to the British High Court in the case of Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed that may demonstrate that US officials were complicit in his torture in Morocco.

If the Obama administration continues the Bush administration's efforts to prevent investigators from investigating and courts from hearing such cases, it will rapidly become part of the cover-up. If it begins to, at a minimum, stop obstructing such proceedings, the result could be a rapid crumbling of the wall of silence the Bush administration has tried so assiduously to build around its"war on terror."

A bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 11 will make it far more difficult to evade the responsibility of holding Bush administration officials legally accountable for war crimes. Released by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain after two years of investigation, the report concluded:

The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own.... The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.... Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

In an interview published in the Detroit News, Senator Levin said he was not responsible for deciding whether officials should be prosecuted for authorizing torture, but he admitted that there is enough evidence that victims of abuse could file civil lawsuits against their assailants. Levin also suggested that the Obama administration"needs to look for ways in which people can be held accountable for their actions."

An Accountability Movement

Outside the Beltway, a movement to hold Bush administration officials accountable for torture and other war crimes after they leave office is gradually emerging. It received a boost when over a hundred lawyers and activists met in Andover, Massachusetts on September 20 at a conference entitled"Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." The conference created an ongoing committee to coordinate accountability efforts. At the close, conference convener Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law noted more than twenty strategies and specific actions that had been proposed, ranging from the state felony prosecutions proposed by former district attroney Vincent Bugliosi to the international prosecutions pioneered by the Center for Constitutional Rights' Rumsfeld cases; and from impeaching Bush appointees like Federal Judge Jay Bybee to public shaming of torture-tainted former officials like ohn Yew, now a professor at the University of California Law School.

One of proposals discussed at the Andover conference was the creation of a citizens' War Crimes Documentation Center, modeled on the special office set up by the Allied governments before the end of World War II to investigate and document Nazi war crimes. Such a center could be the nexus for research, education and coordination of a wide range of civil society forces in the US and abroad that are demanding accountability. It could bring together the extensive but scattered evidence already available, to compile a narrative of what actually happened in the Bush administration. It could help or pressure Congress to conduct investigations to fill in the blanks. It could pull together high-profile coalitions to campaign around the issue of accountability for specific crimes like torture. If Obama does initiate some kind of investigating commission, such a center could provide it with information and help hold it accountable.

A Moral Education

There are a myriad of reasons for urgently holding the Bush regime to account, ranging from preventing unchallenged executive action from setting new legal precedent to providing a compelling rationale for the immediate cessation of bombing civilians in the escalating Afghan war.

But the issue raised by Bush administration war crimes is even larger than any person's individual crimes. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense,"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." The long history of aggressive war, illegal occupation, and torture, from the Philippines to Iraq, have given the American people a moral education that encourages us to countenance war crimes. If we allow those who initiated and justified the illegal conquest and occupation of Iraq and the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to go unsanctioned, we teach the world--and ourselves--a lesson about what's OK and legal.

As countries like Chile, Turkey and Argentina can attest, restoration of democracy, civic morality and the rule of law is often a slow but necessary process, requiring far more than simply voting a new party into office. It requires a wholesale rejection of impunity for the criminal acts of government officials. As Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) put it,"We owe it to the American people and history to pursue the wrongdoing of this administration whether or not it helps us politically.... Our actions will properly define the Bush Administration in the eyes of history."

Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

Worlds shudder and collapse all the time. There's no news in that. Just ask the Assyrians, the last emperor of the Han Dynasty, the final Romanoff, Napoleon, or that Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff. But when it seems to be happening to your world, well, that's a different kettle of fish. When you get the word, the call, the notice that you're a goner, or when your little world shudders, that's something else again.

Even if the call's not for you, but for a friend, an acquaintance, someone close enough so you can feel the ripples, that can do the trick. It did for me two weeks ago, when a close friend in my niche world of book publishing (at whose edge I've been perched these last 30-odd years) called to tell me that an editor we both admire had been perp-walked out of his office and summarily dismissed by the publisher he worked for. That's what now passes for politeness in the once"gentlemanly" world of books.

His fault, the sap, was doing good books. The sort of books that might actually make a modest difference in the universe, but will be read by no less modest audiences -- too modest for flailing, failing publishing conglomerates. If you were talking in terms of cars, his books would have been the equivalent of those tiny"smart cars" you see in increasing numbers, tucked into previously nonexistent parking spots on city streets, rather than the SUVs and pick-ups of the Big Three. It may be part of the future, but who cares? Not now -- and too bad for him.

It wasn't really him, of course. He was just a small fry, like most of us, in the bloated universe of entertainment. As with so many workers at the moment -- and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the downturn in restaurant hires or the cuts made by that sports titan, the National Football League (about 150 jobs), or the public radio oufit NPR (64 jobs, two shows) -- his firing was a by-product of economic and funding catastrophes elsewhere.

He went down during what publishing people are calling "Black Wednesday." On that day, 35 people were axed by publisher Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS), while two key figures at Random House (owned by the German multimedia giant Bertelsmann), who headed two of its largest groups"resigned" as part of a"reorganization" -- a vague word that covers a multitude of sins. This will undoubtedly result in further head-rolling in the weeks or months to come.

Then, of course, there was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (The name is a little publishing history lesson, a fusion of two recently conglomerated houses of distinction. It reminds me of newspaper names from my New York City childhood like the World-Telegram and Sun -- once the New York World, the Evening Telegram, and the New York Sun.) Just the week before Black Wednesday, its owner, the Irish private-equity firm Education Media & Publishing Group Ltd., saddled with an ocean of debt, made publishing history by instituting a "freeze" on the acquisition of new books. If you're not in the tiny world of publishing, that may not ring too weirdly, but what is a publishing house except a staff, a backlist (those books already published and still in circulation), a set of books being published (that is, a catalogue), and those signed on for the future? Without future books, there is no publishing.

On Black Wednesday, Education Media completed the deal by decimating Houghton's staff. Its publisher had already resigned, assumedly in protest or dismay. Evidently, sooner or later, the"house" will go on the auction block, the assumption perhaps being that, in the present economic environment, a distinguished publishing house with a long history is more saleable as a valuable backlist than as a living, breathing entity. Houghton-Mifflin (Harcourt) R.I.P.

Publishing Obits

A friend (and author) called me recently after visiting a large bookstore in Northern California and, his voice suitably hushed, told me that, on a weekday, he had been the only customer in sight. That's typical of the nightmarish tales about traffic in bookstores and book sales now ripping through my world as 2008 ends.

So it goes, the late Kurt Vonnegut might have said.

Publishing houses are certainly bleeding and those that haven't yet started to take staff and books out to the woodshed, axe in hand, are going after end-of-the-year bonuses, raises, and who knows what else, while management girds its loins for"the inevitable." After all, in malls across America, the chain bookstores are getting mauled (just like other retailers). Traffic at many bookstores nationwide has evidently slowed to a trickle. Book orders have reportedly fallen off a cliff. It's now being said that, in this Christmas season, no popular book is selling so well as to be unavailable. In other words, if you want it, it's going to be at your local Barnes & Noble. For publishing, that's like an obituary.

Think of those auto showrooms that were selling a couple of cars a week and are now lucky to sell a couple a month, then think books. And it's not just that books aren't selling, comparatively speaking, but that they're winging their way back to publishing houses in startling numbers and, evidently, even more startlingly to university presses. Rumor has it that some academic publishers are experiencing unheard of return rates that can go as high as 90%. (A unique aspect of the book business now guaranteed to add up to hell-on-Earth for publishers is that bookstores can return unsold product to manufacturers without penalty.)

Think of it this way, those book versions of SUVs and pick-ups, all those Ford Explorer-type volumes, often so costly to put under contract but churned out so confidently for so long by the oversized giants of the publishing world, are now mostly sitting in their mall lots idling -- or, as you read this, they're winging their way back to publishers' warehouses.

How Not to Read a Newspaper

To put this in perspective, the corporate giants of publishing, and their serried ranks of groups, divisions, imprints, and boutique operations, all those formerly independent houses swallowed whole from the 1970s through the 1990s, are but drops in the overflowing economic bucket of bad times. Thirty-five people beheaded? A mere bag of shells, as Jackie Gleason used to say.

For a little perspective, just consider the jobs headlines of the last couple of weeks: In a major reorganization, announced on December 8th, Dow Chemical revealed plans to cut 5,000 jobs and close 20 plants, sending about 11% of the chemical giant's workforce down the human drain. The company also plans to"temporarily idle 180 plants and prune 6,000 contractors from its payroll."

Or think of GM announcing that it will idleall its North American assembly plants during some part of the first quarter of 2009, while turning out 60% fewer vehicles. Or the 3M company, which announced cuts of 1,800 on the same day Dow issued its bad news. Talk about a"black" day! Or the Sony Company at about the same time, announcing that it would" cut 8,000 employees worldwide over the next year, slash investment in its electronics business by 30 percent, and close roughly half a dozen of its 57 manufacturing sites around the globe." We're talking 5% of Sony's workforce. Or Bank of America, which made public a massive "workforce reduction" scheme: 30,000-35,000 jobs eliminated globally over the next three years, as part of a reorganization after absorbing Merrill Lynch. I mean, we're talking slaughter here. And given the staggering U.S. job-loss count in November, 533,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the fact that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits jumped to a 26-year high in early December, you know that this is just scratching the surface of the disaster.

Chemicals, cars, finances, even post-its. That's major stuff. Books? They're such modest (and, at best, modestly profitable) objects, even if the book has the remarkable ability to teleport readers into worlds not their own. I mean, if you really want to talk about the destruction of companies in the reading game, then try a business where it's been hell on Earth for years: newspapers.

Talk about collapsing worlds, newspapers were a disaster area long before the greatest downturn"since the Great Depression" hit. The bad news about the news has been flooding in for years, even if it's worsened under the weight of more general economic tough times. If, for instance, you were even reading a newspaper in print on Tuesday, December 9th (and, if you're under 25, odds are you weren't), then you undoubtedly caught the story about the debt-ridden Tribune Company, a news monster which owns, among other properties, the Los Angeles Times (almost half its staff lost since 2001), the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune (almost a third of its staff lost since 2005), and even the Chicago Cubs, filling for"bankruptcy."

The company even had the nerve to claim that bankruptcy meant it could" cease all severance payments and deferred compensation to employees who have been laid off." (Pity the poor reporters who took those buyouts.) It also hired the investment bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin as consultants. In case you're worried, they surely will get paid. (Up front, if they're smart.)

All this means is that another bunch of newspaper workers -- a dwindling crew -- is now in essentially the same situation as the workers who sat in and won their severance pay at Chicago's Republic Windows and Doors factory after they were given only three days notice to vacate. Don't expect sit-ins or fight-back victories at the LA Times anytime soon, however.

Only the week before the Tribune filed, America's largest newspaper company Gannett announced a 10% cut in its workforce due to"declining revenue," on top of a 3% cut last August (neither evidently being part of the 5%"trim" at its flagship paper USA Today in late November). And don't get me started on the rest of America's newspapers. At least 30 of them are for sale right now, including the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which lost $11 million in the first nine months of this year, with few buyers in sight.

In the style of some black hole, the vortex of the Internet has, for years, been sucking in young readers and, more important for the finances of journalism, ads, which account for four-fifths of all newspaper revenue (with disappearing classifieds accounting for half of that). Under the extra pressure of hard times, the decline in ad revenues is now turning into a deluge. In the third quarter of 2008, national newspaper advertising reportedly dropped by 18%. When it comes to the news in print, you wonder who will be left minding the store. Poor Detroit's main papers are cutting home delivery to three days a week, another national first, and it can't be long before a major U.S. city lacks its own daily. Maybe the question now is: What store?

All of this certainly adds up to a nightmare for a guy just young enough to be running a political website, but old enough to have the habit of reading two newspapers in print a day. Still, none of this got to me, not even those 533,000 jobs lost, the way the firing of one editor I knew did.

And that, I suspect, is typical. For most of us, most of the time, the world is a remarkably parochial place. I read newspapers, use post-its and Saran Wrap, and drive a car (sometimes). But I've probably edited and put into circulation several hundred books. That's my world. And now it's beginning to look like the time of the bloated publishing conglomerate is nearing an end, with an unknown effect on the time of the book itself.

The Ad and the Book

In my career as an editor, a mere few decades, I've seen publishing transformed from the equivalent of a cottage industry -- the term"publishing house," of course, once implied a freestanding entity -- to the subbasement of giant entertainment conglomerates. I've watched those conglomerates swallow up houses large and small, creating book companies filled to the rafters with various publishing groups, divisions, imprints, and boutique operations.

All of this happened as bookstores, too, morphed from largely independent cottage operations into giant chains that kept expanding their vast book emporiums into ever newer territory. And all of this, in turn, was possible only because the computer was transforming everything in the publishing process except the book itself. (A typical Barnes & Noble book palace couldn't, for instance, exist without computer systems to keep track of stock.) And for those ever expanding stores, the publishing conglomerates just kept spewing out new catalogues and new volumes. After all, there were all those bookshelves to fill nationwide, forever.

In scale, even the largest of modern publishers with a global reach isn't exactly a GM or a Citigroup or an AIG, in part because, unlike the car, banking, or insurance, the book represents such a quirky, small-scale, labor-intensive process to create and produce, but also to absorb. Demanding a significant investment of time and energy on the part of the consumer, it has always fit somewhat awkwardly into the world of mass entertainment. Still, there's a comparison to be made. As bloated as their larger cousins, the big corporate publishing outfits seemed to feel that, when it came to the future, they were immune.

Now you can't exactly blame a business for not predicting the future, since we humans are generally terrible seers. But when the future stares you in the face, as with the three automobile giants over the last decade, or when, as with publishing, it even offers you a helpful illustration of what might be in store for you, aren't you culpable of something?

After all, when it came to illustrations, the newspaper's decline wasn't exactly a well-kept secret. But there were, I suspect, three key factors that cushioned book publishers from believing that that future would be theirs, and so from truly facing the challenge of the Internet and of the screaming wallpaper of the burgeoning entertainment universe.

The first was the ad. Book publishers seemed invulnerable to the fate of the newspaper, in part, because the ad played no part in the book's financial success.

There's a piece still to be written on the book and the ad. The ad, after all, has colonized everything in our world from gas pumps to urinals, bars to doctor's offices, taxis to your sneakers and cell phone, not to speak of every imaginable printed form, including the cereal box and the back of your supermarket receipt, and yet, strangely enough, it never successfully colonized the book.

This, in our world, has to be considered some kind of unnoticed miracle. Yes, the early book sometimes had quack medicine ads in it and, for years, certain paperbacks had ads for other books (by the same publisher) at the back, but the book largely resisted the ad. Even after publishers, rushing to join the other mass forms, began wrapping book covers around anything from movie novelizations to material that had once been confined to"police gazettes" or Hollywood fan mags, the ad still -- against all logic -- stayed away. The authority of the book seemed, by some mysterious process, to resist it.

Back in the 1990s, ad whiz Chris Whittle launched a series of books on serious subjects by select high-flying authors for select high-flying corporate readers and leaders. These were filled with glossy Fedex ads. But when the publisher W.W. Norton picked up the series for the book trade, the ads were dropped. In 2001, the jewelry firm Bulgari paid Fay Weldon for extensive"product placement" in her novel fittingly entitled The Bulgari Connection, and that caused a little media brouhaha. Each of these, however, proved not an inroad, but a stunt.

(On the other hand, any future successful e-book reader, whether the Amazon Kindle or something else, will surely have ads; but then again, if any one device really catches on, in its next generations it is bound to"generalize": that is, you'll be able to read books on it, but also undoubtedly catch what's left of newspapers, check your email, text friends, and probably take photos too. In other words, you'll be in a new universe which, for better and worse, will only partially resemble book reading as we've known it -- and worse yet, from the publisher's point of view, the technology will be the property of someone else.)

Because the ad played no part in the book, there was nothing of obvious financial value for the Internet to suck out of book operations, except, of course, the attention of readers. This left publishers, even if not thinking directly about the ad and the book, feeling relatively immune to the otherwise erosive and corrosive qualities of that new world.

In addition -- factor two -- the chain bookstore was still expanding in the early years of this century, reaching into new cities and new neighborhoods. This seemed to ensure an expanding future for the book business (despite a yawning lack of evidence that Americans were, on average, reading more books).

The blindly hopeful nature of all this was brought home only in the last few months as books went dead in those very same stores, and the chains began cutting back every which way. One of the two major chains, Borders, losing money hand over fist, is now"reorganizing," which may actually mean hanging on by a thread. As the trade publication Publisher's Weeklyput the matter, Borders"has become more selective in its buying, aggressively reducing the size of its inventory." "Steep cuts in inventory" is another way of putting it and obviously not good news for those inventory providers, book publishers. By now, both chains may also be closing some less profitable stores.

As with GM, it was always easier and far more immediately profitable for the big publishers just to keep selling those"SUVs" until their business model went into the toilet rather than try to prepare for a new world. And -- factor three -- there was one last bit of history that helped foster the illusion of future book prosperity. It was well known in the business that, during the Great Depression, books, like movies, had done splendidly. They were an inexpensive bit of entertainment and distraction, consumable at home, at a time when not much else pleasurable was going on in a rugged world. Ergo, books would be no less recession-proof in the next big downturn.

There was no reason to believe otherwise… unless you happened to focus on just how many dazzling entertainment options had, in the interim, entered the American home at prices more than competitive with the book. After all, most Americans can now read endlessly on the Internet, play video games, download music, watch movies, and even write their own novels without stepping outside; and keep in mind that the $27.95 hardcover and the $15.95 paperback on the shelves of that mall store, once you drive there, aren't exactly the inexpensive objects of yore.

Publishers nonetheless clung to this bit of Depression-era lore for dear life as economic bad times bore down. And, unlike with the newspaper, it's been those bad times that have suddenly brought the axe down on book publishing. But publishers now firing staff, folding up or merging divisions, and shutting down boutique operations in order to last out the bad times shouldn't be fooled twice. The return of economically better times (someday) is unlikely to mean the return of the book world of these last few decades.

Small independent publishers, which often have trouble surviving even in good times, are nonetheless more agile, more experimental, and closer to the Internet revolution than the big houses. They are capable of turning on a dime, while the conglomerates -- with their long lead times (often 8 months to a year to put a book in the store) -- probably can't turn on anything, which leaves them losers in an Internet world in which yesterday's news might as well be last year's.

Think of that old image of shrew-like mammals scooting around among the feet of the soon-to-be-extinct dinosaurs. For instance, Chelsea Green, a small publisher in Vermont having its best year ever, reports that it delivered a new book by Robert Kuttner, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, from final manuscript form into the hands of readers in a matter of four weeks, and so just in time for the Democratic Convention, which is remarkable. There perhaps lies one future for the book.

I can't claim to be exactly surprised by all this. After all, in my 2003 novel The Last Days of Publishing, I imagined -- because this wasn't exactly a feat of genius (except perhaps for publishing management) -- many of the things that are now happening to the book and the business (even an editor being perp-walked to an axing, something that, back then, hadn't yet happened in the business).

I meant that title with a certain irony, because the end of the book, or even of reading itself, had been predicted and fretted about for so long. And yet, more than 550 years after the first Gutenberg Bible appeared, the printed book, still an unsurpassed technology for delivering information and experience, isn't leaving the scene soon. It's always worth remembering that, when those first printed books began to circulate in Western Europe, the previous form, the illuminated, hand-copied manuscript, did not disappear, despite what you might imagine. It lasted at least another century as a high-end collectible, which was largely what it had long been anyway.

The book remains a techno-wonder that not even the Kindle has yet surpassed. But it's a wonder in a very crowded entertainment universe in which habits, reading and otherwise, are changing fast. Add to that a world plunging into the worst of times and you have a combustible combination. The chain bookstore, the bloated publishing house, and the specific corporate way of publishing that goes with them are indeed in peril. This may no longer be their time. As for the time of the book, add on another century if you want, but in our ever restless universe it does seem to be shortening.

This Monday, as I was working on this post, MacMillan, owned by the other German publishing giant Holtzbrinck, which owns St. Martin's Press, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, the paperback house Picador, and Henry Holt, which, in turn, houses Metropolitan Books, the small imprint for which I work part-time, fired 64 of its employees. I'm still here, but again my tiny world shuddered.