… Just before the war began, a reporter asked Bush what he could say to assure Americans that he wasn't leading them into another Vietnam. "That's a great question," the president said. "Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. And in order to disarm, it would mean regime change. I'm confident we'll be able to achieve that objective, in a way that minimizes the loss of life. No doubt there's risks in any military operation; I know that. But it's very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won't change. Our mission is precisely what I just stated."

But if the mission was "disarmament," that mission was accomplished before the first U.S. soldier died. Three years into the war, there's still no proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. What there is, increasingly, is proof that the president and his men knew that Saddam didn't have WMD but pressed ahead with their plan for war anyway. So what was the mission when Bush said "go"? What is the mission three years later? And how is that mission worth more than $300 billion and 2,400 American lives?

These are questions one might have asked the president today, if in fact he had been taking any. At the White House, Bush played host to Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, squeezing every last drop of press out of the dog-and-pony show that began last week when Rumsfeld and Rice met up in Baghdad for a synchronized surprise visit. Bush said it was important that they'd gone. "I thought it was very important for both secretaries to go firsthand, to be there with the leadership to say we're supporting them," Bush said. "It's very important for these two senior officials to sit down with these new folks and say, you have our support and we want you to succeed."

Important for U.S. public opinion? Maybe. Important for the Iraqis? Apparently not. After Rice and Rumsfeld left Baghdad, Iraqi politicians trying to make something out of their government said the joint visit was more hindrance then help. "We didn't invite them," said a Shiite legislator close to the new prime minister. "It would be more appropriate if they would leave us alone," said a senior Kurdish legislator. "Rice's trip to Iraq at this critical time is just another desperate move by the Americans to try to impose themselves on our new government," said another Shiite legislator. "They have lost their influence."

That is not all we have lost. The soldiers are gone. The money is gone. America's place in the world, its image, its power - they're all diminished. Americans' faith in their government is shot: Only 9 percent think it was "mission accomplished" back in May 2003, and only 40 percent believe that the mission in Iraq - whatever it is - will ever be accomplished now.

• The establishment of a White House press office that not only doesn't say anything but doesn't know anything.


• A mania for secrecy that has resulted, most recently, in the secret reclassification of declassified documents in the National Archives.


• The deliberate sowing of official disinformation about Iraq and the Iraq war.


• The tightening of FOIA restrictions.


• The production of video "news releases" that look like news but are government propaganda ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting.").


• And more, including, but not limited to, a laundry list of slights; pundits on the take (Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Michael McManus); gross insults (Chief of Staff Andrew Card telling The New Yorker, "I don't believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function"); and other provocations (for example, a vice president who has removed himself from the information grid) directed at the press.

... the Bushies ambition was to "decertify" the press from its modern role as purveyor of news and portray it as just another special interest. ? Bush's preference for "unfiltered" news, received directly from his staff, is well-known. Disciplined and silent, as The New Yorker's Ken Auletta put it, the administration has factored the press corps out of the equation.

The upsides of filling the president's tanks with unfiltered and blunting the press corps are obvious. Limit the flow of information to the press - and the public - and you temporarily blind your critics and political foes, freeing you to execute your policies unimpeded. As journalist Ron Suskind told Boehlert, "For [Republicans], essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast."

The downsides are less obvious. A starved press corps doesn't necessarily wither away. In fact, a Machiavellian case for feeding the press corps with stories - even stories that reflect negatively on the administration - can be made. If properly fed such "scoops," they will remain under the control of their feeders, which is what happened to the press corps orbiting Henry Kissinger during the Nixon-Ford administrations. Starve them and they may well go prospecting for news in the vast bureaucracy where White House feeders aren't in control. The recent clandestine CIA prisons and NSA surveillance scoops by the Washington Post and New York Times illustrate the limits of White House control on information: Other, non-White House parts of the bureaucracy rebelled against Bush. Viewed from this end of the telescope, Bush secrecy "caused" the Post and Times scoops and may well cause many more, no matter who gets fired or prosecuted.

Another downside: As information theory instructs us, it's never in the interests of a totalitarian regime to completely eliminate debate over - and knowledge of - controversial policies. Unless an administration is infallible - and Pope George W.'s certainly isn't - it benefits from testing its policy ideas in some fashion with its critics, or even its allies, before deploying them. Public debate helps an administration build support for its plans, permits it to see the weaknesses of and retrofit its strategies, and if need be, abandon the ideas. Machiavellians might logically desire secret prisons for their enemies, but will they if the press discovers the prisons - which is to be expected - and the stories cause international incidents that outweigh the benefits of operating them? Right now, the political damage may seem slight. But combine the prison story with the NSA account, and add a third such revelation (these things always come in threes), and even Sean Hannity will abandon his lame-duck president. (Come to think of it, if the press is so cowed, where did the prisons and NSA stories come from?)

The hermetically closed universe in which the Bush administration operates contains the seeds of its own destruction. But that doesn't mean reporters and others can't nurture that germination and flowering.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Why this new minimalism in war?

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty.

The collapse of white supremacy - and the resulting white guilt - introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal.

If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

... This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life - absorbed as new history - so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

... compassionate conservatism, whatever you think of the concept domestically, clearly shouldn't extend to war - and there are times when the international equivalent of Sherman's march through the South would, in the long run, save American soldier's lives and foreshorten the conflict.

Which is why there are times when we really should turn off the "smart" bombs and show our seriousness by putting the world on notice that, when we believe the situation calls for it, we are willing to ignore the inevitable bad press and the howls of protest from human rights groups, and exhibit a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal.

Of course, no one wishes to see innocent civilians die (only the unserious make the claim that those who support what they consider to be a necessary war somehow luxuriate in collateral deaths). But at the same time, from a practical standpoint, there is nothing wrong with fighting a war as if it is a war - and sometimes the only way to disabuse the enemy of the notion that we are constrained by a moral calculus that makes little sense in urban combat situations is to refuse to show the kind of restraint they have come to anticipate and count on.

Looking at the bright side of this deranged rhetoric, it is, in a sense, refreshing to see that many of these war supporters, in their great frustration, are finally relinquishing their solemn concern for the Iraqi people and the tearful inspiration caused by the Purple Fingers. Instead, they are now just calling for some good old-fashioned carpet bombings and mass killings.

... Does it really have to be said that the reason we can't carpet bomb Iraq and "win the war" is because we are supposedly there to build Iraq, not to destroy it? Let's review a few basic, undisputed facts about our current occupation of Iraq - undisputed because the administration itself acknowledges them. Once our original, predominant justification for our invasion disappeared - that would be the whole bit about WMDs - the only one we had left, the one we have since trumpeted over and over, is that we are there in order to improve that country, to enhance our reputation in the region, and to win "hearts and minds."

... According to the President, we're going to win because the terrorists bring suffering and destruction to Iraq and we don't. So they will like us and hate the terrorists and will soon be our "partner for peace." Advocating that we act more the way the President says Al Qaeda is acting - by bombing more and killing more civilians - doesn't seem all that compatible with those goals.

We are not there to conquer territory or drive the Iraqi government into forced surrender and submission.

... Escalating the use of military force in Iraq by indiscriminately killing civilians and eradicating whole cities would contradict every single statement we have made about why we are there, what we want to achieve, and what our plan is in that region. We're not refraining from those acts because of white guilt or a fear of what European diplomats will say about us. We're refraining from them because the wholesale indiscriminate slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis - all because we have grown impatient and annoyed with our pet little democracy-building project and just want to bomb the whole place into submission - would be both morally reprehensible and, from the perspective of our own interests, an indescribably stupid thing to do.

To sit and listen to people who have spent the last three years piously lecturing us on the need to stand with "the Iraqi people," who justified our invasion of that country on the ground that we want to give them a better system of government because we must make Muslims like us more, now insist that what we need to do is bomb them with greater force and less precision is really rather vile - but highly instructive. The masks are coming off. No more poetic tributes to democracy or all that sentimental whining about "hearts and minds." It's time to shed our unwarranted white guilt, really stretch our legs and let our hair down, and just keep bombing and bombing until we kill enough of them and win. Shelby Steele deserves some sort of award for triggering that refreshingly honest outburst.

Both Gallup and CBS now have Bush at all-time lows in approval numbers; and the ratings for the GOP appear to be way below the water-line for November. Things can change. But I have a feeling that Bush has now become Carterized. It is very hard to see how he can regain his footing at this late stage. After six years or so, the public knows who you are; and they have come to a judgment. With the economy now booming, who can imagine where his polling might be headed if his reckless fiscal policies bring disaster sooner rather than later?

Ironically, his main hope might be Iraq. It's possible that things will improve - and any halfway decent outcome will seem like good news given the recent past. The NYT had a helpful piece today on a place where things are going right. Maliki may exceed expectations. I sure hope he does. On Maliki, Bush's future hinges. And it's not much within the White House's control.

Ahmed Chalabi, the man who helped provide cooked intelligence on Iraq to the Pentagon and the New York Times in the lead-up to war, is once again being engaged in US policy decisions, current and former intelligence officials say.

According to two former high level counterintelligence officials, one former senior counterterrorist official and another intelligence officer, Chalabi is acting as broker between the US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Iranian officials in what are now stalled diplomatic efforts between the US and Iran.

Graffiti painted by Chicago gangs is showing up in Iraq.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports the graffiti shows the increasing gang activity in the Army.

Military leaders are concerned some soldiers may be supplying gangs at home.

Some gangs encourage their members to join the Army to learn urban warfare techniques and teach other members.

Chicago police have reportedly seen evidence of gangs getting help from soldiers, and the FBI visited Army bases to check into gang activity.

What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.

I mentioned my outrage to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, on Thursday. He shook his head and said, "Tell me about it.'' Disgust dripped from his voice.

What are we doing in this country?

... How can we let an area like the Lower Ninth Ward sit there, on the eve of another hurricane season, with nothing being done to either bulldoze the place and start over, or rebuild? How can Congress sit on billions of looming aid and not release it for this area?

I can't help but think that if this were Los Angeles or New York, that 500 percent more money - and concern - would have flooded into this place. And I can't help but think that if the idiots who let the levees down here go to seed had simply been doing their jobs, we'd never have been in this mess in the first place - in New Orleans, at least. Other than former FEMA director Michael Brown, are you telling me that no others are paying for this with their jobs? Whatever happened to responsibility?

Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged.

Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page!

Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today - fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.

It is not uncommon for a President to refrain from executing a law which he believes, and states, is unconstitutional. Other Presidents have invoked that doctrine, although Bush has done so far more aggressively and frequently. But what is uncommon - what is entirely unprecedented - is that the administration's theories of its own power arrogate unto itself not just the right to refrain from enforcing such laws, but to act in violation of those laws, to engage in the very conduct which those laws criminalize, and they do so secretly and deceitfully, after signing the law and pretending that they are engaged in the democratic process. That is why the President has never bothered to veto a law - why bother to veto laws when you have the power to violate them at will?

"At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United States than in England and the differences are really dramatic," said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.

... The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income British.

The researchers are careful to say that their study doesn't prove that Britain's healthcare system is better than America's - something that would be nearly impossible to demonstrate conclusively with a study like this in any case. But that's not the point. The point is that it's obviously not worse even though the British spend about half as much as we do per capita.

So here's the deal: under the British system, you don't have to worry about which doctors your HMO allows you to see. You don't have to worry about losing coverage if you get laid off. You don't have to worry about being unable to get a new job because you have a pre-existing condition. You don't have to worry about being bankrupted if you contract a serious chronic illness. And large corporations don't have to worry about going out of business because of spiraling healthcare obligations.

And the result of all this? Healthcare that's as good as ours and delivered for about half the cost. Under a national healthcare system, when you get sick, all you have to worry about is getting well. Explain to me again why we're afraid of this?

We spend around twice what any other country does per capita, and we see very little, if any gain, from the added expense. Indeed, there's an interesting thought experiment as to how much better their outcomes would be if they pumped up their per capita spending to match ours. Meanwhile, they cover all of their citizens ... while we have a population of 46 million uninsured, and another 15 or so million underinsured. 20,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance, and many more perish because they forego care that turns out to be necessary.

Ohio: alcoholism treatment, cervical cancer screening, contraceptives, emergency services, infertility treatment, mammography screening, mental health (general), off-label drug use, and well child care.

California: alcoholism treatment, AIDS vaccine, blood lead screening, bone density screening, cervical cancer screening, clinical trials, colorectal screening, contraceptives, dental anesthesia, diabetic supplies and education, drug abuse treatment, emergency services, home health care, hospice care, infertility treatment, mammography screening, maternity, mental health parity, metabolic disorders/PKU, minimum mastectomy stay, off- label drug use, orthotics/prosthetics, prostate cancer screening, second medical/surgical opinion, and well-child care.

Florida: Alcoholism treatment, ambulance transportation, ambulatory surgery, bone marrow transplants, bone density screening, cleft palate, dental anesthesia, diabetes supplies and education, emergency services, home health care, mammography screening, mental health (general), metabolic disorders/PKU, minimum mastectomy stay, off-label drug use, prosthetics, TMJ Disorders, and well-child care.

I don't know where to start with this stuff.

Hydrogen is not a fuel, and neither is electricity. There's no mine for either of them; if people start plugging in cars into the wall, power plants of all kinds will just rev up faster and longer, and the marginal electricity is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that's only somewhat less greenhousy than oil, though a lot less than coal. These cars have to haul an enormous stack of heavy batteries around, and half the energy that goes into the power plant is lost in the transmission and generation system anyway. "Clean coal" doesn't mean "coal that doesn't cause global warming," it means less pollution of every other kind: coal, clean or not, is the worst greenhouse fuel until we figure out how to capture all the stack gas and put it somewhere (this is called carbon sequestration, and it's a very long-term, daunting, technological road at this point).

As a piece of social policy, one has to wonder about the wisdom of slapping a big tax on the only people who are providing any of this oil we want so badly. One doesn't even have to wonder about the whole concept of all the schemes to make oil less expensive; did the demand curve for petroleum suddenly tilt the other way while we weren't looking? One more time, what's the logic of subsidizing domestic production and exploration: is there some prize for being the first country to use up its petroleum?

When I did wind tunnel research on how tall buildings affect the street-level winds around them, the architects always asked whether some sort of canopy over the door would help, and we had to explain that the wind is very big, and so is the building, so anything that would change the way the wind blows also has to be very big. The oil system is very big, and poking at it with tiny instruments like deposits to the strategic oil reserve, or rushing to slurp out the two years' worth of oil imports in ANWR, are not going to make any important difference. Actually, no bullet is silver, even though we desperately want to think wind power, or biofuels, or nuclear, or turning off the lights more carefully, will "solve" the energy crisis. Lots of these will be incrementally helpful, but none of them is as big as the oil flow we've become habituated to, and every one has a really sobering social price of one kind or another.

Petroleum is not like solar energy. Fossil fuels are a stock, not a flow, of sunlight that was stored up over millions of years when no-one needed to drive kids to the soccer game. We've had a nice century drawing down that bank account, and it's over. Maybe, as Rick says, not right away, but soon. "Soon" in policy earthquake terms is a few decades. There's lots of coal, but if we start really playing that game with current technology (that is, burning it into CO2 that goes into the air), a lot if it will be used up (for example) keeping Europeans warm in a subarctic climate when the Gulf Stream stops. Of course the beach will be much easier to drive to as it moves inland.

What will make a difference is to use a lot less, and using less oil means real behavioral change on a broad, retail level. It absolutely doesn't mean making gasoline cheaper! We're talking about things like living in smaller houses, close enough together to get people out on their feet and bicycles, and into trains and trams. Of course this has all sorts of quality-of-life payoffs in my view, but it's a hard sell to a society that treats "get in my big car alone, drive where I'm going at 60 mph, and park free when I get there" as some sort of basic moral right. Still, I cannot understand a family that would rather have a house and a big yard that Mom and Dad don't play with their kids in because they're on the road commuting three hours a day, than an apartment with a playground nearby that the family can actually occupy and enjoy each other in.

We should be talking about paying a lot of taxes to pay for things like transit and community swimming pools where we can enjoy our neighbors, instead of the thousands of backyard pools that have no-one in them almost all the time, and community soccer fields instead of the ridiculous little patches of green that are useless once the kids are school age. We should be talking about having less stuff, and less house that needs to be filled up with it, and more shopping for it locally, on our feet, with a little wheely shopping cart instead of an SUV. What could possibly make up for having less stuff, though? Well, how about listening to more music and making more of it ourselves? And dinner with friends who come on the bus and don't have to find a parking place is a pretty low-impact, high-quality life experience.

We're not talking about those things, though; we're talking (praying, actually) about making it not so, please. Our politics have a long, toxic tradition of candidates' and voters' mutual infantilization. The politicians treat an election, or an office, as the worst thing one can lose, and promise to fix everything with a trick that won't require any actual work by us; we vote for people who tell us fairy tales that would excuse us from any heavy lifting if they were true, and excuse us from confronting downers and grownup responsibilities if we pretend to believe. This game is being played at a really frenzied level around gas prices, and the mix of ignorance and plain mendacity both parties are wallowing in is - this is really amazing - neck and neck with the immigration performance in the theater next door.