Hezbollah says its militias won't leave southern Lebanon until Israeli forces also leave. Israeli leaders say they won't leave until Hezbollah also leaves. Lebanese officials say they won't deploy their army in the south until they're assured that they and the UN peacekeepers are the only armed forces in the area. Yet, according to Resolution 1701, the UN forces can enter southern Lebanon only to "accompany and support the Lebanese armed forces."

Each group has good reasons for their hesitations. Hezbollah doesn't want to leave Israel as an occupation force. Israel doesn't want to leave a vacuum that Hezbollah could fill. The Lebanese army doesn't want to get in the middle of shooting between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militias. The United Nations wants to be seen as assisting the Lebanese government, not as an unwanted interloper. It's a Catch-22: Who's going to make the first move, and under what authority?

In other words, there's a chance that this security arrangement could collapse from the get-go.

So from here it goes nowhere fast, or goes nowhere quite slowly if the locals are lucky. They're pouring back into southern Lebanon to get home and see what's left of where they lived and worked. And Hezbollah is there, offering aid - food, water, medicine, and help rebuilding. They're no dummies. That's how they deflect any anger at tripping off this thirty-day war by grabbing the two Israeli soldiers. They'll help, and Israel didn't exactly win much here - and they still have the soldiers.

In fact the day opened with Hezbollah claiming a win as the cease-fire held (details here) - the rag-tag band of rebels stood up to the Empire and the dark side of The Force.

No, wait - that's Spielberg Star Wars. But what may be the third most powerful military in the world couldn't do much with them. Israel has a history of wiping out whole Arab armies in a matter of days - think 1967 and all that. This time they were checked, for a full thirty days. It was kind of a first, and Hezbollah took that as a victory. And there were victory dances in the streets of Beirut - joy in the streets. The idea that had been floated by some in the Israeli government - that all the death and destruction would really piss off the locals and they'd turn on Hezbollah and then Hezbollah would be scorned and discredited and slink off into obscurity, toothless and disgraced for having started all this - didn't exactly work out. But it was an interesting theory.

Well, such a claim couldn't stand. A few hours later, President Bush dropped by the Sate Department - a place where you'd just never expect to see him - and with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at his side, said, no, Israel had soundly defeated Hezbollah (details here). That's not what Israel was saying, but never mind - "There's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon." And maybe there will be, one day.

He also said the war was part of a broader struggle between freedom and terror and "we can only imagine how much more dangerous this conflict would be if Iran had the nuclear weapon it seeks."

What? How did they get in there?

You just had to think deeply, and after all, the president has been reading Camus. The deep thoughts are these - Hezbollah started all this and all the suffering, death and destruction is their fault, no one else's. And everyone knows Hezbollah is just the tool of Syria and Iran - and those two, along with North Korea somehow - are part of a worldwide war on American and its values. The hate freedom, and Starbucks and KFC and Wal-Mart too maybe. You had to look at the big picture. Then he got a little wobbly, or the teleprompter crapped out. He reverted to his usual simple-man Texas rhetoric, as in his words -

The world got to see - got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it's a - it's the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.

A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective - this is the challenge.

And that's why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East.

And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free.

People want to be free. One way to put it is I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That's what I believe.

The surprising strength of Hezbollah's resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, "is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back."

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. "There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this," he said. "When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran."

A former intelligence officer said, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later - the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.'"

The thing is, if a devastating strategic bombing campaign couldn't even deter the Hezbollanians - the direct target of all those bombs - then it isn't likely to deter the Iranians. If one were intelligent and sensible, one would probably conclude that only an air campaign backed by a full-fledged ground invasion would do the trick. But Hezbollah's success at defending its turf (even in the face of something like 10-to-1 IDF numerical superiority) also suggests Iran's Revolutionary Guards aren't likely to be quite as easy a pushover as Saddam's conscript army and the professional criminals who commanded his Republican (body) Guard.

But of course, the neocons are not intelligent and sensible, so they'll likely conclude that the problem with Israel's war was that it didn't go far enough, fast enough. (This, of course, has been the neocon explanation for every military or foreign policy debacle they have caused or helped cause since the Vietnam War.) In this case, there's an element of truth to it - the Israelis did move slowly and hesitantly on the ground, and did shy away from the barbarity of Curtis LeMay-style total war from the air. (If they hadn't, the Lebanese really would be sitting in the dark for the next couple of years.)

Whether the failure to bomb Lebanon back into the Paleolithic, as opposed to the Neolithic, Stone Age was due to some residual shreds of humanity on the part of Israel's military and political elites, or simply because Hezbollah retained the deterrent capability to lob a few missiles into downtown Tel Aviv is not clear -- or particularly relevant. The former constraint certainly doesn't apply to Dick Cheney (the man who has defied medical science and proven that a human being does not in fact need a functioning heart in order to survive.) The latter - the ability to lob a missile into downtown Washington - isn't a credible deterrent - not unless Iran has developed ICBM capabilities.

Still, the fact that everything has not gone to plan in their splendid little war in Lebanon must have had some impact on the gang's thinking.

So the Democrats are hopeless. Unfortunately, back in the real world, Bush administration policy hasn't been particularly strong either.

... What good has the recent affinity for carrots done us? Are our enemies in retreat? Are Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Moktada al-Sadr, Bashar Assad, the Sunni holy warriors in Iraq, al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers in the United Kingdom, and Kim Jong Il on the run?

... The State Department has succeeded in the past year in making the Bush administration more Euro-friendly and UN-attentive than ever. For this, the president has reaped no political benefit at home - and the dangers continue to mount abroad. How Bush deals with Ahmadinejad's terror-supporting and nuclear-weapons-pursuing Iran will be the test.

What I think is actually sometimes the smartest thing to do in response to terrorist provocation, which is forbearance, is very hard to counsel. [But] if you ask what kind of shape would Israel be in if they had done a day's worth of retaliation, and since then just endured any missiles, and said, "OK, look, at this point there's no excuse for what they're doing, we're not even fighting them," I think Israel as a nation would be more secure than they are.

But it's very hard to convince people of that, and I admit that rhetorically it's hard to make that a winning strategy.

Is there an alternative to this pattern of mistakes and countermistakes? There is, but it involves a quality that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have ever come close to mastering: tactical restraint in order to achieve strategic advantage. Simply put, this involves looking past immediate and all-out retaliation as the best method of countering threat. It is not a call for turning the other cheek; rather, it suggests that savagely swinging back every time one's cheek is dealt so much as a brushing blow does not amount to effective boxing, much less enlightened belligerent behavior.

It's human nature to demand action following an attack. Any action. Counseling restraint in the hope that it will pay off in the long run is politically ruinous.

But our lives may depend on figuring out how to make this case. If it wasn't obvious before, it should be obvious by now that conventional military assaults are usually counterproductive against a guerrilla enemy like the ones we're fighting now. We can't kill off the fanatics fast enough to win, and in the meantime the war machine simply inspires more recruits, more allies, and more sympathy for the terrorists.

… Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to formulate this argument in an effective way. I wonder at times how Harry Truman managed the trick at the dawn of the Cold War, fending off the "rollback" hawks and convincing the public that containment was a more realistic strategy. But despite reading a fair amount about the era, I still don't know what the key was - though the presence of a sane faction in the Republican Party at the time was certainly a factor.

Beyond that, of course, actually having a coherent long-term strategy to pair up with a short-term counsel of forbearance would make the job easier. Ditto for a more aggressive short-term approach to homeland security. But neither of those will do the trick alone. Someone has to figure out how to sell the basic plan.

… as I see it, without a doubt the most bizarre aspect of the 9/11 attacks were not that they were imagined and plotted but that they actually happened. Even assuming an incompetent CIA and FBI, there were many, many signs that summer and fall that something was up (start with the 9/11 commission report and work your way through Pretext to War, The One Percent Doctrine, and a slew of other books). But for some strange reason all those signs were missed ignored, failed to rise to the higher echelons. Of course, I would be the last person to suggest that George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were unspeakably, unforgivably, negligent by ignoring the clear warnings of the Clinton administration on Al Qaeda - complaining about all the attention being focused on "just one man;" snickering, "Okay, you've covered your ass" when folks from CIA came to brief them.

Actually, I confess it. I just lied to you. I was one of the first to suggest that the Bush administration, through its utter incompetence, bears a heavy responsibility for the carnage of 9/11. I was saying so a few hours after the attacks to my friends from Finland who called to make sure that we were okay.

If nothing else, the exposure of the latest potential atrocity simply highlights how incompetent the Bushites were. No, they didn't "let it happen" and it certainly wasn't a black op to boost Bush in the polls. It's just that, well, Richard Clarke had been pushed aside, John O'Neill had quit in disgust to manage WTC security, Robert Mueller was the new kid on the block, and John Ashcroft was proofreading an arrangement of "When the Eagle Soars" for seven kazoos and musical saw. Meanwhile, many others were simply ignored and let the obsessive, paranoid and quite essential monitoring of bin Laden's activities drop.

That failure to pay attention to reality is a hallmark of the Bush administration.

The people backing Lamont are nothing if not sincere. But their breed of Democrats - many of them wealthy, educated, extremely liberal - often pick candidates who are rejected by the broader public. Many of the older Lamont supporters went straight from Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in the 1960s and '70s to Howard Dean in 2004. They helped Joe Duffey challenge Senator Tom Dodd in Connecticut for the 1970 Democratic nomination on the Vietnam War issue, only to lose to Republican Lowell Weicker in November.

Apparently there's some kind of batsignal for the US punditocracy that tells them all what to write each week. This week their orders are to inform us that the Democrats had better watch out for those far-left elitists like Ned Lamont, who will with their extreme anti-war positions lead them to defeat just like George McGovern did.

… This might make you wonder certain things - like, was opposition to Vietnam the "wealthy, educated" position? I know it's fun to listen to stories from Uncle Dave B, and extremely boring to look at reality. But let's give reality a shot just this once.

Hezbollah would not be disbanded nor disarmed, and its re-supply route from Syria would neither be destroyed nor impeded. Given the grand pronouncements with which this war began - that Hezbollah would be destroyed, that it was the start of the epic war of civilizations - any honest person (and even many who are not honest) would acknowledge that this is a defeat for Israel and for neoconservative dreams of a wider war. As a result, many in Israel are predicting, and vigorously calling for, the resignation of Israel's Prime Minister.

The disappointment and anger of neoconservatives over this ignominious end must be severe, and it is almost certain to be a source of very intense conflict between them and the Bush administration.

When this all started, neoconservatives were in full bloodthirsty glory, salivating over the complete obliteration of Hezbollah and much of Southern Lebanon, as the start of the "great opportunity" - "our war" - in which we would do the same to Syria and Iran. Instead, they got a joint U.S.-French UN resolution engineering a cease-fire dependent upon French troops protecting Israel from the Hezbollah militia, and even Israeli hawks lamenting the humiliation suffered at the hands of Hezbollah (assuming Hezbollah, which clearly has the strongest hand here, agrees to all of this).

Watching Fox News right now discussing this is like being at a wake. … The neoconservative dream for broader war, at least for the moment, has collapsed on its shattered foundations. Nobody should consider a Hezbollah victory to be anything remotely a cause for celebration; that should go without saying. But the plan the neoconservatives harbor - and thought they were finally able to execute - is as dangerous a threat as anything else in the world, and anything which puts a stop to it, and which drives a wedge between them and their enablers in the Bush administration, is something which, independent of all else, is a constructive development.

… I view this war and the end of it as "bizarre" because the war's ambitions were so grand and sweeping from the start - the amount of brutality and slaughter required to accomplish them were far in excess of what could be tolerated - that it was almost designed to fail from the start. One could say exactly that of the general neoconservative view on all matters…

They've blown it, right down the line, from the opening bid for an aerial knockout, through the defeats and retreats, the incredible shrinking war aims, the daily humiliation of seeing a third of Israel bombarded with rockets. And now this - a ceasefire that appears to give Hezbollah all or nearly all of what it demanded (although not the Laker tickets), all of it to be supervised by a "reinforced" version of UNIFIL (most of the reinforcements will probably never arrive) working under a limited one-year mandate, and with no more legal authority to use force than the current bunch of blue helmets.

And for this, Lebanon was ravaged, thousands were killled, millions on both sides spent weeks cooped up in air raid shelters and the credibility and any lingering shreds of respectability of the US government in the Islamic world were flushed down the you-know-what. For this.

After all, why did we embark on the war, if not to ensure that French soldiers will protect Israel from the Hezbollah rocket battery.

The long knives are already out - for Olmert, for Peretz, the ward boss turned defense minister, for Halutz and the commander of the Northern Front (who was effectively sacked in the middle of the war) and probably half of entire IDF general staff, if they don't sink them in each other's backs first. Losing is never pretty, and the post-war settling of accounts is going to be even less so.

It seems as if every minor league neocon in Washington is taking the opportunity to remind Israel that if there's one thing America detests it's a loser. So much for all the tearful singing of the Ha'tikvah. If Washington's Middle Eastern Rottweiler wants to keep getting its kennel ration, it will put a little more teeth into the business next time.

… All the bellicose rhetoric in the world - like Schiff's threat to respond with "cruel craziness" if and when other red lines are crossed in the future - can't conceal the failures: of a military aristocracy's arrogant faith in technology, of an Army that's grown accustomed to waging war against Palestinian teenagers, of a political establishment that believes with zombie-like intensity that the cure for incompetence is ever greater applications of military force.

There will be hell to pay for this fiasco - coming as it does on top of Uncle Sam's own murder suicide pact in Iraq. When and where that payment will be demanded isn't clear yet, but if the past is any guide it will be paid in the blood of the innocent and not the guilty.

I'd say a perfectly responsible liberal take on the war is this: The best weapon we have against the Islamic extremists in the long haul is the soft power of modern culture - its comforts, its freedoms and, well, it's enlightenment. Modernization is appealing, and will win, if given half chance. But if by our clumsy, aggressive behavior we cause moderate, ordinary Muslims to confuse modernization with American aggression, with torture, with greed for oil, and with uncritical support for Greater Israel, then by that behavior we deprive ourselves of our greatest strategic advantage.

The right policy after 9/11 was to pursue the actual terrorists to the ends of the earth, but at the same time to have the nerve and maturity to do our best to avoid actions that would alienate the moderates and young people who would otherwise find modernity appealing. Bush of course did exactly the opposite.

To believe all this is not to believe the conflict is unimportant, as you charge, it is to believe that Bush's frat-boy bravado and general incompetence is everyday worsening our long-term prospects. And that winning control of at least one house of Congress in November is the necessary first step on the long road back to an adult foreign policy.

My only substantive quarrel with this is as follows: the proclaimed Bush policy was not mere deployment of brute force, torture, bombs and swagger as a response to the civil war within Islam. It was ostensibly to create a beach-head for modernity and democracy in Iraq. That, at least, was the rationale I signed onto. Now, maybe in retrospect, the idea of a beach-head for democracy was always just a cover for Rumsfeld and Cheney to try to terrify a bunch of "barbarians" with brute force. And in so far as the war was designed this way, the Bush administration's general incompetence and brutality has, of course, done the precise opposite. It's actually emboldened the enemy, made the West look weak, and lost us potential support in the vital center of Muslim opinion. Send too few troops into Iraq and of course the Islamists think we're unserious. That's why I couldn't support Bush again last time around; and why I hope the Democrats take back at least one chamber this fall - if only to put a break on the Queegs and Strangeloves in the Pentagon and the Veep's office. [Note: You have to know you classic Hollywood movies, of course. - AMP]

But, for all Cheney's and Rumsfeld's flaws, they are at least proposing something serious, however ineptly carried out. I have yet to hear anti-war voices on the left propose a positive strategy for defeating Islamist terror at its roots, or call for democratization of the Arab Muslim world. Indeed, I heard little but scorn or silence when Bush announced this vision in London. Do the Democrats stand for democracy in Iraq? Or in Iran? Do they favor … containment of Islamism? Nuclear deterrence against Tehran? Certainly, the Kossites [cf. Daily Kos] seem utterly uninterested in any of these subjects. That's their prerogative; and it's equally my prerogative not to take them seriously until they do.

The same goes for the Dems as a whole. Until the opposition party presents a progressive, democratic agenda to reform the Middle East - as Blair has done in Britain, for example - there's no reason to take them seriously on national security. Maybe their presidential candidate will articulate such a vision. So far, however: so not so much.

British suicide bombers were within days of blowing up 12 passenger jets above five US cities in an unprecedented terrorist attack designed to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale", counterterrorism sources claimed last night.

Anti-terrorist agents said they had uncovered the plot from surveillance of a group of young British Muslims, which began nearly a year ago and was on a scale never before undertaken.

US and British counterterrorism officials claimed the men, the majority British Muslims of Pakistani descent, were going to disguise liquid explosive as bottles of soft drink and carry them in their hand luggage on to US-bound planes leaving British airports.

… A British government source said an intercepted message from Pakistan telling the bombers to "go now" had triggered the arrests. Security sources said they had been planning to break up the cells in the next few days, but were forced to move earlier to prevent huge loss of life; they believed the attacks were to take place in the next two days.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

This came at just the right time, after the one pro-war Bush-is-wonderful Democrat lost his primary election - the democrats would rather not have him represent them in the senate any longer (discussed here). Who's going to keep you safe after all? What better demonstration could you have?

And Senator Lieberman lost no time is saying that the guy who beat him was a fool - that this guy may have won but his Iraq policies would be a victory for terrorists. To be more precise, he told the Stamford Connecticut Advocate here that Ned Lamont's policy for an Iraq pullout would be a "tremendous victory" for and would "strengthen" the people who wanted to blow up the planes in the scheme foiled in England - "If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

Do you see the connection? We're tamping down a civil war in Iraq and hoping for the best, because if we don't do that some Brits of Middle Eastern descent will blow up airplanes. He says the two are directly connected. It seems we have to wage war badly and continue our occupation of Iraq to keep folks from getting murderously angry with us. That may be odd reasoning, but the Associated Press dutifully picked up the quote here.

It's the controlling narrative - the White House was saying pretty much the same thing - that all you fools thought you were safe and were ragging on us but, see, there are awful people in the world so let us do our job and just shut up. Actually the president said this airplane plot served as a "stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." The message was the same - shut up and support us (and don't vote for any Democrat).

The attorney and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald here says the president is insinuating - or explicitly claiming - that this incident proves that Bush was right about the whole array of our country's foreign policy disputes, from Iraq to the current Israel-Lebanon war -

This naked exploitation of terrorist threats for political gain occurs every time a new terrorist plot is revealed, no matter how serious or frivolous, no matter how advanced or preliminary, the plot might be. Each time a new plot is disclosed, administration officials and their followers immediately begin squeezing the emotions and fears generated by such events for every last drop of political gain they can manufacture.

But this effort is as incoherent as it is manipulative. Nobody doubts that there are Muslim extremists who would like to commit acts of violence against the US and the West. No political disputes are premised on a conflict over whether terrorism exists or whether it ought to be taken seriously. As a result, events such as this that reveal what everyone already knows - that there is such a thing as Islamic extremists who want to commit terrorist acts against the US - do nothing to inform or resolve political debates over the Bush administration's militaristic foreign policy or its radical lawlessness at home. Opposition to the war in Iraq, for instance, is not based upon the premise that there is no terrorist threat. It is based on the premise that that invasion undermines, rather than strengthens, our campaign to fight terrorism.

Invading and bombing Muslim countries do not prevent terrorism or diminish the likelihood that British-born Muslims will blow up American airplanes. If anything, warmongering in the Middle East exacerbates that risk by radicalizing more and more Muslims and increasing anti-US resentment. And the more military and intelligence resources we are forced to pour into waging wars against countries that have not attacked us, the less able we are to track and combat al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups that actually seek to harm us. There are few things that have more enabled terrorism than turning Iraq into a chaotic caldron of anarchy and violence - exactly the environment in which al Qaeda thrives.

But it is hard to overcome the narrative in play.

Matthew Yglesias here gives it a go -

Bush says today's plots serve as a "stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." If anything, it's a stark reminder of the reverse. A stark reminder that this isn't a "war" at all - you don't foil a plot like this with armored personnel carriers and JDAMs. We're also not going to capture the capital city of "Islamic fascism" - not Kabul, not Baghdad, not even Teheran and Damascus - and force our adversaries to surrender.

It's not at all difficult to kill or capture terrorists. Instead, what makes them dangerous is that they're hard to identify. What makes them doubly dangerous is that because they're hard to identify, the temptation is to target them very broadly. And as we saw in the administration's desperately failed strategies in the "Sunni triangle" when you tar huge numbers of not-yet-opponents in your effort to find the bad guys, you wind up generating a much larger number of adversaries. The great challenge is to identify strategies for targeting terrorists narrowly enough so that the number of terrorists actually declines as a result of your counterterrorism operations.

Bush keeps on doing the reverse - defining the enemy in very broad, very lazy ways; conflating issues that have little to do with each other; charging off half-cocked and pissing people off. Meanwhile, he hasn't managed to kill or capture Osama or Zawahiri and insists on reacting to everything that happens in the most-alarmist, most-partisan terms he can imagine. Worst of all, the continued failure of his policies to ameliorate the problem is then trotted out as a justification for continuing - or even intensifying - the same failed approach.

Yglesias thinks the man is "addicted to failure" but, really, he just deeply believes his own narrative.

Yes, he could have reassured America that the government will leave do everything possible to maintain the safety of American citizens, but he's pissed that no one thinks he's done or is doing the right things to get there from here. 

So it was attack day.

And there was what Vice President Cheney said when Lieberman, who supports the administration fully, lost his election -

Echoing a frequent Republican theme, US Vice President Dick Cheney said Democrats were purging Lieberman from the party over his outspoken advocacy for the war and displaying their "pre-9/11 mindset" and inability to protect Americans.

He said Lieberman's defeat showed "the direction the party appears to be heading when they in fact purge a man like Joe Lieberman, who just six years ago was their nominee for vice president," over his support for the war on terrorism.

"What is particularly disturbing about it is from the standpoint of our adversaries ... They clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task," Cheney said in a conference call with reporters while on vacation in Wyoming.

You see, despite what Joe Lieberman believes, invading Iraq and diverting our attention away from al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is not being strong on national security. Blind allegiance to George W. Bush and his failed "stay the course" strategy is not being strong on national security. And no, Senator Lieberman, no matter how you demonize your opponents, there is no "anti-security wing" of the Democratic Party.

One of the hallmarks of liberalism is its belief in empiricism. When things aren't working we try to figure out why and solve the problem. Despite our unfounded reputation for starry-eyed naive belief in human perfectibility, we are the practical thinkers who are looking to the future and trying to figure out a way to make things better. It is a grave misreading of the current sentiment to assume that we don't care about national security. The reason we are trying so hard to change things is because we do care about it. I don't think I'm the only who feels much less secure than I once did knowing that we have alienated half the world out of some misplaced faith in machismo as a diplomatic strategy. The world stage isn't high school and I'd like to see something a little more sophisticated than locker room psychology brought to bear to solve these problems. In case nobody's noticed, the Middle East isn't looking so good right now and the Republicans are shrieking like banshees in ever more hysterical terms. Far be it for me to object, what with the need to live down the summer of love and all, but that just doesn't seem like a good situation to me.

Perhaps it's fashionable to adopt Weisberg's disdainful pose, but it's completely worthless on both a political and policy level. It's as if they are living in an endless feed-back loop and haven't thought a new thought in decades. I doubt that even winning a majority will convince these timorous chatterers that objecting to Republican national security policy isn't a death wish, but it won't matter. The only thing that matters is that the Democratic Party stops listening to them.

Right now the extremist radical position is to stay the course in Iraq and just keep blindly flailing at terrorism with no real idea of how to tackle it on a long term basis. Consider this: George W. Bush turned the office of State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy into a patronage job and appointed one of his second rate office wives at a time when this country's greatest challenge is to win a war of ideas. He's kept Don Rumsfeld in charge of the war effort even as we have been watching him slowly unravel before our very eyes. Americans are hated by a majority of the world's inhabitants now. There is no Democrat in the country who would have done that.

Phantom hippies are the least of our problems. Is it too much to ask that the media not fall for Karl Rove's manufactured spin for just one minute and recognize that this nation's foreign policy is being run by incompetent political hacks and neocon fanatics at a time of maximum danger? It's fun to take these little trips down memory lane and all, but really, we have serious issues to deal with and the current government is doing a terrible job of it. Perhaps we could take our eyes off the rear view mirror for a minute or two and deal with the fleet of Mack trucks that are coming right at us.

One can choose one's degree of paranoia here, since the only information sources about the plot are the police and intelligence agencies involved, plus the political spinmeisters.

Many of us have grown accustomed enough to the pointless politicization of color-coded alerts to be instantly skeptical. But the idea that Al Qaeda had a "big one" in the works -- and would have loved to have pulled the trigger in the middle of Israel's war on Lebanon - certainly isn't inherently implausible. I've mentioned the possibility myself.

On the other hand, none of the previous known plots hatched by the British wing of the movement have come anywhere close to the alleged scope and sophistication of this one. To expect a bunch of idiots who literally couldn't figure out how to set their own shoes on fire to pull off the simultaneous destruction of up to 20 planes using liquid explosives is a bit of a stretch.

I'm also dubious about the claim that the plotters were following - almost to the letter - an 11-year old plan developed by Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to blow up a dozen or so US airliners over the Pacific. Following the script for a previously exposed and foiled operation doesn't exactly seem like a global terrorism best practice. Are we dealing with professionals or amateurs here? Or is it a little bit of both, plus a healthy dose of hype from a couple of guys (Bush and Blair) who right now can use all the hype - and raw, adrenalized fear - they can get?

Like I said, it's a BYOP (bring your own paranoia) party. The truth behind the latest episode of the "Osama bin Laden Hour" is one of those unknown unknowns Rumsfeld talks about. Would the security apparatuses of two leading capitalist powers (including the commercial heavyweight champion of the world) really turn the global transportation system on its ear just for the sake of a temporary political advantage? And if that's really what's really going on, why isn't it October right now?

Maybe what matters most isn't the credibility of the plot - using whichever meaning of the word you think most appropriate - but the fact that five years after 9/11 British society apparently contains a large (and growing?) number of young Muslim men who would like to kill as many Americans as they can whenever and wherever they can.

It's a pretty ironic coda to the wingnut flypaper theory - under which we were supposed to "take the fight" to the terrorists in Iraq (and Afghanistan and Lebanon and, in time, Iran) so that we wouldn't have to fight them in the streets of New York and London.

… Either there are more than enough flies to go around or the flypaper has moved - or both.

… What can I say? We're stuck to our own flypaper. Which means that phony or not, today's hysteria probably is an authentic glimpse at the shape of things to come. We're going to have to get used to the idea of standing in two-hour lines at airport security and toting our carry-on items in a clear plastic bags. But these inconveniences are absurdly insignificant compared to other risks we face if we remain on the road we're on - the one that leads to that clash of civilizations the uberhawks are clamoring for.

According to the Times of London, Pakistan's intelligence service worked "closely with MI5 and Scotland Yard" and, at the request of British authorities, supplied information that proved "crucial in thwarting the attacks" and in arresting the alleged conspirators, most of them apparently of Pakistani descent.

If police hadn't nabbed them in their homes during a sweeping raid, the plotters would likely have sailed through airport security. Metal detectors are blind to liquid explosives. Short of an amazing stroke of luck (along the lines of the flight attendant who sniffed out Richard Reid's attempt to ignite his shoe bomb on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001), not even the most astute guard would have looked twice at a soft-drink container or at the flash camera that was reportedly to trigger the blast.

By the same token, drones and radar-warning planes can't spot every potential terrorist scrambling across the border. X-ray machines cannot cope with the vast boatloads of cargo unloaded every day at America's ports (the standard estimate is that just 2 percent of containers are inspected). Nor can the radiation detectors deployed along New York City's bridges and tunnels pick up every gamma ray emitted by every truck that zooms by.

Border patrols and detection devices are necessary tools. Like locks on the front door, they make it harder for terrorists to make plans and wreak havoc. But there's always a back door or window that can be pried open. Preventing that from happening requires good intelligence, and good intelligence requires contacts with the sort of people who hang around the dark alleys of the world.

There's a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bush administration's present jam throughout the Middle East and in other danger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealing with Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria or Iran (namely, it's an evil regime, and we don't speak with evil regimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered and spilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would have died, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scary territory.

It is time to ask: Which is the more "moral" course - to shun odious regimes as a matter of principle or to take unpleasant steps that might prevent mass terror?