Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti's limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it's small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction - all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti - it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world's governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a "natural" disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don't know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers "of record." Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I'm referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what's now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available - I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street - again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.

The 9/11 bunch were mainly Saudis, almost certainly on a secret CIA training program in the U.S. that went very sour (they had valid American visas, and they were being followed closely by Mossad).

Osama bin Laden has been dead since the horrific bombing of Tora Bora. The extent of that bombing has been kept secret, but it was earth-shattering by first-hand accounts.

Al Qaeda, as a former British Foreign Secretary admitted a few years ago, does not exist. It is a Pentagon nickname to cover a group of disparate fundamentalist Muslims who hate American policy. The word means toilet.

America has worked to keep alive the idea of both bin Laden and Al Qaeda because they serve as focuses for the lunatic "war on terror."

You cannot have a war on a technique or a set of attitudes: it's a pure nonsense, rather like Israel's mantra about there being no such thing as a Palestinian people.

America went to Afghanistan, dragging others along, for vengeance, which it got in spades. Now, it does not know what to do.

In a sense, it is the victim of its own propaganda. As well, there are now huge entrenched interests in the Afghanistan effort, everything from Blackwater Corporation to the manufacturers of Hellfire missiles. America's Israel apologists, too, never saw a war against Muslims they didn't like: put them in their place, so to speak.

A very great assembly of forces for a newcomer like Obama to oppose, and, truth be told, he has already buckled.

But he cannot win his war. Absolutely, he cannot hold down a huge country of 30 million people, a land of mountains and deserts and sweltering heat and hardscrabble poverty; moreover, a place where millions deeply resent America's arrogance and brutality.

One hopes that Obama intends only to make a show and to reach a compromise with the Taleban from a position of increased strength and then get out with a shred of dignity. It is starting a system of payoffs - successful short-term in Iraq - hundreds of millions for opponents to lay down their arms temporarily.

But I am not optimistic. The Afghans are some of the toughest, hardest people on earth, largely because they live in an extreme part of the world with almost no wealth.

___________________________

America's "Drone Attacks" on Pakistan

It truly is dishonest to always write about "drone attacks."

Drones don't attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel's bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

___________________________

Secretary of State Clinton's Announcement of An Average of 290 Troops from Each of Two Dozen Nations

Clinton is simply out of her mind.

Two dozen countries sending seven thousand troops?

And many or most not for combat?

That's an average of about 290 troops per country.

290 cooks, guards, and orderlies each.

Some world crisis.

Everyone clearly sees what a mistake Afghanistan is, except the government of the United States.

Of course those eager not to offend American sensibilities, or those whose assistance or favors from America are under threat, send their token contingent.

This whole matter is like one of those slightly absurd British comedies of four or five decades ago.

World crisis, civilization in peril, so we better send 290 troops.

The press should be embarrassed to even report such press-release fantasy as an event.

Clinton should be embarrassed to utter a word about these 24 mice roaring, but this woman is long ago beyond any possible embarrassment, having said countless absurd things in recent years or quickly backtracking what she has previously said, making absolutely no sense in most of what she says.

Were a major business run the way America runs wars and foreign policy, the economy would collapse.

NOTE TO READERS: This is an assembly of several extensive comments, slightly edited by the author, recently posted to some of the world's leading English language newspapers.

Indeed, her use of the question-begging word "mission" in the title to describe what has been the pointless conquest and occupation of a people signals the vacuity of the words that follow.

"The violent extremism that threatens the people and governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan also undermines the stability of the wider region and threatens the security of our friends, allies and interests around the world."

No government in Afghanistan or Pakistan was threatened until the U.S. became involved. Yes, they are poor regions with much backward fundamentalism, but those governments knew how to handle the difficulties of their own affairs before the U.S. bombed and machine-gunned its way in.

No matter what the U.S. does, short of exterminating an entire class of people (for the Taleban is not an invading guerilla force but a substantial portion of the population), the fundamentalism is not going to go away in our lifetimes.

It would take decades of very healthy economic growth to bring these places forward, and so far America's only contribution has been to kill tens of thousands of people and destroy a great deal of the meager physical assets in these places.

I would remind Ms. Clinton that it was only as recently as the 1930s, and into the 1940s, that families in the American South, likely considering themselves good Christians all, would attend picnics to watch the lynching of some black men. I am not exaggerating: such events were common even in Franklin Roosevelt's day, and he never spoke out against them, despite prodding from Eleanor, for fear of losing his political support in the South.

Yet that grotesque horror has come to an end. How did it happen? The answer is decades of strong economic growth bringing jobs, wealth, and fresh air to America's once-fetid South.

How much larger is the problem in a land that lives, to a considerable extent, in the 17th century? Immensely larger.

How is the security of the world threatened by these people? It's not and never has been. The very fact that NATO countries have made such almost laughably small contributions is the strongest possible evidence that Ms. Clinton is not believed by any of them.

Imagine a genuine world threat in which the many countries of NATO each sent the troop equivalent of the police force of very modest-sized cities?

They have only indeed sent those owing to constant American browbeating, cajoling, and, in some cases, threats: the U.S. colossus can summon a great deal of economic and political force in getting its way.

Which fact brings us to the question of why the U.S. did not use those great non-lethal powers in Afghanistan after 9/11.

It simply demanded the extradition of people without supplying a shred of proof to the Afghan government, the Afghan request being the normal procedure for extradition anywhere.

Then the U.S. invaded while lining up a façade of support from the U.N. and NATO, everyone at that time being under both pressure from the U.S. and only naturally feeling sympathy over 9/11 .

What was America's purpose? No person in the American government today, not Clinton and not even Obama, can give you a lucid and reasonable answer, because the truth was that there was nothing lucid or reasonable about the invasion. The purpose was blinding white-hot rage for revenge.

Once the U.S.got there, beyond its early cheap victory over 17th century people, it did not know what to do, and it still does not know what to do. Its victory consisted of displacing the Taleban with warlords of the Northern Alliance, supported by a level of horrific bombing perhaps not seen since America's holocaust in Vietnam.

Eight years later, there is no democracy in Afghanistan, elections being pretty much a sham. The burka is still worn by most of the women in Afghanistan: after all, many members of the Northern Alliance are just as backward and vicious as the Taleban. General Dostum, for example, is a certified mass murderer, a man whose ghastly, brutal excesses were winked at by Bush and Rumsfeld, if indeed not quietly encouraged.

I heard an interview recently with the only woman elected to the Afghan legislature - since tossed out by the warlords - who says that nothing really has changed and, indeed, some things are even worse than they were under the Taleban.

I have heard from other sources that schools for girls are closed almost as soon as they are opened because no money flows to pay salaries and because of the threats from local authorities. The openings of such institutions are often little more than Potemkin village photo-ops. The Bush people used women's rights as a propaganda tool to gain domestic support for their invasion, and, like all good propaganda, it worked because it was based on truth.

The truth is that Afghanistan is not even a country in the sense that we understand it. It is a remote, impoverished land of about 30 million where tribes live hardscrabble lives with almost no economic progress, steeped in superstitions having the same force they did in 17th century Spain with its Holy Inquisition. Even its border with Pakistan is artificial, never properly defined with the same tribes living on both sides.

You simply cannot change these realities, and certainly not with bombs.

The world is full of awful places. They burn brides in India, force child marriages, and treat young widows who were married to old men in horrible fashion.

The great irony is that the Taleban need never have been an enemy. No Taleban invaded anyone. No Taleban was involved in 9/11. That atrocity was committed by a group largely of Saudis. Importantly, they virtually all held valid American visas and were almost certainly part of secret CIA training program that failed terribly.

By the way, to this day, there is not one shred of valid evidence that Osama bin Laden did anything like the U.S. claims he did. Yes, he was a guest of the Taleban, but then he also was a past CIA operative, something that only enhanced his status for many in the region. Does that mean the CIA is responsible?

The entire Afghanistan invasion and occupation is an unqualified disaster.

One can only hope that Obama intends to use the next year or two to come to a reasonable modus Vivendi with the Taleban and then to withdraw.

________________________________

Note: Ms. Clinton's piece may be read here

Obama's was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama's call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama's arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America's military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma's treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America's treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn't done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar's experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America's Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic's, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America's own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let's go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America's carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist - an American no less - with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America's brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial "victory": tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be "questioned."

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else's country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America's hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld's Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America's ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as "bitches" by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America's establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama's White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President's, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama's promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy's chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America's secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA's vast international torture gulag, is anybody's guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA's euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world's hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying "you can bank on it," and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America's soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan's airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America's flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

But if all affairs are to be carried on in every country from that point of view, it seems to me that it is acceptance of America's right to dictate every matter over the planet, including such intimate matters as how individual countries interpret justice and the government of laws.

This is the acceptance of a de facto aristocracy running the world since American voters - and only about half of eligible Americans bother to vote - represent only a percent or so of the planet's population. It is remarkable how many Americans do not understand the basic point that not everything a democracy does is democratic or decent or even acceptable, especially things done outside its borders.

Democracies abuse power just as surely as any other form of government, and a democracy with the immense military power of the United States - a power virtually cancerous to genuine democratic values - provides a case study in the inexorable workings of Lord Acton's dictum.

It would also represent a repression of all the better motives from which individuals and societies act now and then, surprising us and raising the standard of human behavior from the violent-chimpanzee standard that tends to hold for much of humanity and is especially notable in America's international affairs.

That is unacceptable to most people who are not Americans or who are not dedicated flatterers of America seeking leftovers being dropped from its groaning table.

You only have to ask yourself how Americans themselves would react to others telling them how they should run their court system. The sound would be deafening, like the bellowing of walrus bulls on a stony beach in mating season, which is actually pretty close to the sound of some of America's professional-victim families today.

Mercy is never misplaced, and I think Scottish justice has reached an admirable decision despite the bellowing of the unthinking American families we have heard from for years.

Apart from that, and a very important consideration, it is almost certain that al-Megrahi is innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence desperate for a scapegoat with the relentless political pressure of the walrus-bull families.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time. It is an American mantra, emphasizing the special and precious nature of American lives over all others, at least, that is, the lives of upper middle-class Americans.

Rarely do we read an accurate perspective on the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy stupidly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War, a devastation America had an important hand in extending.

Those 300 innocent men, women, and children received no mercy, and their horrible deaths certainly never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was even offered by Americans, a disgusting set of behaviors, entirely.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge, but no one knows who actually committed the act of revenge.

I might offer the observation, too, that it is the same bellowing Americans always ready to use capital punishment or torture and assassinate opponents or, indeed, to invade the lands of those with whom they disagree, bombing and killing countless innocents - three million just in Vietnam, another million or so in the Cambodia they de-stabilized, and another million or so in Iraq.

The whole pattern of the two acts of wanton destruction explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror. It is simply America's saying, "I can do to you, but you can't do to me."

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America's penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it's Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.

The world is horrified by Israel's bombing of Gaza's densely populated area, and rightly so, but the bombing is only a more intense horror than the blockade.

The word "blockade" comes so easily, so cleanly, without any feeling for what it reality means. It is one of that class of terms you find dissected in Orwell's great essay, "Politics and the English Language." It truly means here an entire population is abused and tortured for months because it voted the wrong way.

I do think most of us, if treated in this fashion in our homes by a foreign power, would use any means at hand of protesting and fighting back, even if that fighting is hopeless, as it is. It was, I believe, a former Israeli Prime Minister who said that if he were a Palestinian, he would be a terrorist.

The blockade and the bombing and the invasion have little to do with homemade rockets. Those rockets long predate the Hamas government.

Defenders of Israel's bloody excesses insist on muddying the water by saying that the rockets are the reason for the current mass murder in Gaza, for that is just what it is, mass murder.

Israel's secret service, Shin Bet, quietly subsidized Hamas for years, deliberately creating a future competitor for Fatah.

It clearly never feared Hamas. And why should it? If Israel were to stand back, even today, and say to Hamas, "Okay, give me your best punch," the results would be small and ineffectual. On the other hand, we all know Israel possesses the capacity to virtually annihilate all Palestinians.

Hamas prospered after Israel's secret subsidy. Why? Partly because it served many humanitarian needs in Palestine with perhaps ninety percent of its work being humanitarian, but also, of course, because of the endless, grinding oppression of Israel's Apartheid system. People need hope.

When Hamas finally was elected in a cleaner election than that of George Bush, it was also in large part because the poor people of Palestine had become exhausted by the corruption of Fatah. Just as Americans with Obama, Palestinians wanted a fresh start with some people that seemed to be doing something right.

Yes, Hamas mouths anti-Israel stuff, but so what? Israel is full of people saying ugly anti-Arab stuff. It is not hard to find a number of disturbing quotes by fairly prominent Israelis calling Palestinians "roaches" and "vermin." There are also prominent advocates of simply driving all the Palestinians under an artillery barrage across the Jordan River. Others are on record as saying the Palestinians should be "eliminated," whatever was meant by that chilling word.

As in international affairs generally - what someone like Nixon or Bush has said of Russia or Cuba - I do not focus on such statements, they are for domestic consumption, and they also represent an unpleasant release of stress. But when a government does focus on them, as Israel's government does, you know it is being dishonest. Governments and politicians everywhere make statements that do not reflect their actual behavior. And just so, Hamas.

It is always actions that count. So what have Israel's actions been?

Israel immediately said an elected government was a bunch of terrorists.

Israel refused even to talk to the government although that government indicated on more than one occasion it was willing to talk to Israel and to work towards some kind of modus vivendi.

You really do not have to like your neighbor to get along with him or her. Peace requires that, often. It is the common experience across much of humanity. And with so much at stake, you might expect Israel to show some slight flexibility and even generosity. Look at the immense sacrifice of Anwar El Sadat for peace.

And it was not Arabs who gave the world the Holocaust, the event that gave the final impetus to the foundation of a state that had been talked and written about for a century previously. Yet it was Arabs who were made to pay the price with land and homes and olive groves that go back countless centuries. Now they continue to pay with abuse and severely oppressive conditions. They can't even vote for governing their own internal affairs without horrible consequences.

After all, events around Israel's creation as a state - especially including the bloody terror of gangs like the Stern, Irgun, and Lehi - did create the circumstances of these unfortunate people, as every honest Israeli knows. So why not some flexibility and generosity towards future peace? But we never see that from Israel. We only see one-sided conditions set even for talks decade after decade, the one-sided conditions today including the arbitrary removal of an elected government.

But Israel wasn't satisfied with just ignoring and calling an elected government names: it arrested illegally a major part of that government, literally kidnapping them. Likely, they have been tortured for information, as Israel has practiced torture on prisoners from its founding. And it boldly assassinated many other members of Hamas using Hellfire missiles from its jets, killing scores civilian bystanders in the process.

These arrests are of course on top of something like 9,000 illegally-held Palestinians in Israeli prisons, Israel releasing a token couple of hundred every once in a great while, with great fanfare and publicity, to bolster the public image of Abbas and a party which was rejected in free elections.

Hamas, of course, achieved precisely the early promise of Israel's secret service by ending up fighting Fatah. The events weakened the voice of Palestinians and gave Israel fresh themes in its ceaseless efforts against Palestinian nationalism.

Once Hamas was left with only Gaza - a weak and vulnerable place, effectively the world's largest outdoor prison camp, surrounded by fence, and with no ability to receive anything by land, air, or sea except with Israel's permission - the stage was set for today's events. Hamas in Gaza was ready to be strangled.

The leader of Fatah, Abbas - a weak and ineffectual man whose party, in fact, lost an election but "leads" and is the only figure Israel even pretends to talk to - was left in the West Bank with Israeli and American protection and help, Israel actually supplying guns to Fatah during the struggle.

Abbas appears to be a man with whom Israel can work, but that means a man with no democratic position, a weak voice, and a somewhat step-and-fetch-it public posture. What does this say of Israel's genuine respect for democracy and human rights?

The day Israel completely gives up on the idea of Greater Israel and the day it begins treating its neighbors with respect as human beings is the day we will see the foundations of peace. It truly is that simple.

For sixty years Israel has maintained what an early Zionist advocated, an "iron wall" towards its neighbors. And it has manipulated events time and again with black ops - as Shin Bet's subsidizing Hamas or the horrific attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 war in an effort to draw the U.S. in, or the assistance towards Apartheid South Africa's becoming a nuclear power in exchange for strategic materials.

Well, you cannot make peace with an iron wall.

While it's true that the Liberals needed to do something to revive their fortunes - Ignatieff is their third leader in a few years - they have acted desperately both in selecting him and in their manner of selecting him.

Canada's progressive vote is divided among four parties, and the largest of these, the Liberals, was hurt by a scandal in Quebec a few years back. The bright, relentless, frequently less-than-civil Stephen Harper has kept his new Conservative Party in power as a minority for two and a half years, making every measure before Parliament one of confidence, rarely consulting the opposition, and daring them to make his government fall.

Two weeks ago, shortly after an election no one really wanted and a loss of Liberal seats, tempers snapped with Harper's provocative introduction of three anti-democratic measures described as economic ones - they involved government funding of parties, equity for women, and the right to strike - while holding off any genuine economic measures. Three opposition parties then formed a coalition to topple Harper, something for which there is little precedent in Canada.

Harper started backing off his insulting measures almost immediately, but all trust was broken. In a poor precedent, the Governor General accepted Harper's request to prorogue Parliament until near the end of January. So on January 26, Parliament will return, Harper will likely introduce some genuine economic measures, and the Liberal Party will have a new leader to face a delicate situation.

The Liberal party executive sees Ignatieff as tough, the kind of attack-dog needed against Harper, and so, behind the scenes, his leadership opponents were pressured to withdraw - including the remarkably talented and highly experienced Bob Rae - leaving only Ignatieff and a party membership feeling it has been ignored.

Ignatieff spent years speaking for America 's global empire, allying himself with the Neo-cons in his enthusiasm for invading Iraq . He joined the ranks of ethical cowards by suggesting some modest role for torture. He since has blubbered something about changing his views, but it's what he did when it mattered that counts. Had he been in office when Bush invaded, Canadians would be killing and being killed in Iraq . Ignatieff has nothing in common with Canada 's great Liberal tradition, which saw Pearson saying no to Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and Jean Chretien doing the same to George Bush over Iraq .

Ignatieff's way to the leadership is consistent with his past. After leaving Harvard, he got his nomination to run for parliament by being parachuted into a riding where he used some questionable tactics. Here is one Toronto newspaper columnist's description of Ignatieff's efforts about three years ago:

"And snookering one potential opponent, name of Shwec, on the grounds that he wasn't a party member, although he'd paid his dues, and another, name of Chyczij, who also happens to be the association president, on the grounds that he hadn't resigned the presidency when he filed. Not to mention locking the office door ahead of the deadline so they couldn't file in time."

It sounds a great deal like politics in Richard J Daley's Chicago or President Mubarak's Egypt .

He told his constituents he would live in the riding, a suburb of modest homes, but instead lives far away in an upper-class condo district, claiming to be "a subway ride away," less than true and certainly not the same thing as living among those he represents.

Arrogance comes with the territory of national leadership, but there is a limit as to what is palatable, and Ignatieff exceeds that limit. He spent most of his adult life in other countries, serving interests often inimical to those of Canada . He has three years of political experience, no organizational experience, no policy experience, in foreign or domestic affairs. But he has a name, and some of our political insiders have tripped over themselves to thrust him forward.

But he is aggressive, arrogant, and has demonstrated Machiavellian skills. I see him as a divisive and anti-democratic figure, much as Stephen Harper.

What a poor choice is left to the people of Canada for the next election. I'll be throwing my vote to the Greens.

Obama's bright face, a keen intelligence at work in every expression, represents the greatest hope for change in America since Franklin Roosevelt. Even Kennedy, with all his gifts, did not come close. After all, Kennedy was a harsh Cold Warrior, a wild risk-taker, and he was connected to some of the most unsavory subcultures in America.

But Obama is the inheritor of one of the bleakest legacies ever in a modern state: the meltdown of Wall Street and its severe international consequences, two costly unresolved wars, war crimes against other countries, and waves of ill-will towards America for its international torture gulag.

All these, plus the problems that have bedevilled the United States for decades, matters like poor health care, the dismal state of public schools, or the immense and pervading corruption of America's politics, something to which the Bush people made their own contributions, including vote fraud and severe abuse of power, especially by the Vice President.

Bush gave Americans oppressive laws, unprecedented war profiteering, and a tax system now twisted and warped by giveaways to the wealthy. That is not a left-wing view: going back to Jefferson, it was understood that excessive accumulation and inheritance of wealth were dangerous to a republic. The United States has moved towards a society of inherited influence and entitlement, its establishment coming to resemble increasingly the ancien régime of 18th century France.

The Bush excesses largely do not upset the establishment since they were aimed at protecting that very establishment. John McCain, establishment by blood and marriage, dropped his boyish outsider stage act during the campaign, revealing himself unimaginative and unresponsive - indeed a tired, unappetizing serving of Bush leftovers.

And that was deadly to McCain's hopes. Despite the establishment's influence, ordinary Americans do once in a while manage to vote against it. Without eight years of Bush incompetence and abuse pushing ordinary Americans to anger and embarrassment, Obama's victory would not have been possible.

Any effort to correct these problems is against the great weight of America's establishment, further strengthened by eight years of abusive benefits, always the beneficiaries and keepers of America's unacknowledged imperialism. Winning a national election is one thing, but turning that victory into a long series of Congressional votes is quite another. All those Congressmen and Senators, in both parties, need constant injections of cash to operate, and they do not get it through the populist mechanisms of Obama's election campaign. The Congressmen will all face re-election in just two years.

And then there is a political party, Obama's own, that has almost no genuine purpose left other than opposing Republicans for power, prestige, and patronage. It stands for nothing anymore, and some of its members could easily be interchanged with Republicans. Its voice was not heard against illegal war, against torture, against abuse, or indeed anything important in the last eight years.

Many, perhaps most, modern American presidents achieve little in altering American society, although they may do considerable damage abroad. Bush was an exception in that he did serious damage both at home and abroad, but the circumstances permitting him were unique: blind, insane fear over 9/11. The entire period since that event represents nightmarish over-reaction to a relatively minor threat.

Presidents generally achieve little domestic change because America's Constitution was deliberately designed to make the office of the president a weak one. An American president with an opposition-filled Congress is a political eunuch, getting neither his appointments nor legislation nor treaties approved. Only in matters concerning disturbances in the empire will he invariably enjoy Congressional support.

Obama's party will have a majority in the House and the Senate, but he will not have an overwhelming majority. Progress in the Senate can always be stopped by filibuster, and you can only stop filabusters with 60 of the 100 seats, something Obama will not have. Also some of his party's senators, Lieberman for example, might as well be Republicans, and they will not support a truly progressive agenda.

Modern presidents are able to do damage abroad because the Founding Fathers made the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces. They thought they had effectively divided power and weakened the possibilities for adventures abroad by giving Congress the sole power to declare war, but we've seen over the last sixty years America's wars are no longer declared.

The Founders also never expected the Frankenstein-monster military America maintains today because they did not expect America to become a global imperial power. But most of what the more thoughtful Founders said and wrote has been vitiated by the actual history of the United States, and today we even find a Vice President accepting the view that the President's powers in such matters are unlimited.

I believe that a man of Obama's particular intelligence and sensibilities deeply understands the nature of America's great problems. They are just not subjects you can discuss in an election campaign, especially in the near-imbecile campaigns America seems cursed to fall into, with candidates barking about flag pins or accusations of "buddying up to terrorists" or suitability for military command or, indeed, "the Reds are coming."

America's great underlying problem is an overwhelming case of living beyond its means. It reflects the deliberate, corrupting praise of greed (in a grotesque American parody of Adam Smith) coupled with the fantasy that you can have it all and have it now plus the establishment's arrogance that it is entitled to order the affairs of the planet for its benefit. This is all jumbled together in the advertising slogan, "the American dream."

The slogan is rooted in America's unique post-World War II position when no other great industrial power was left standing. America's comparatively light damage (e.g., suffering roughly ½ of one percent of the world's deaths and no civilian damage) and its being geared-up for immense arms manufacture allowed it to become the supplier of everything to a war-crippled world, providing economic opportunity to ordinary Americans as no country had done before.

An unskilled American worker could, for a few decades, earn a house, a car, perhaps a boat, and generous vacations. When I worked one summer in the early 1960s as a student in the Chicago steel mills, earning what seemed fabulous amounts, it was because employees with twenty years' service received thirteen-week vacations. Those days are gone, and things have moved from bad to worse. Real wages have dropped for decades, and competition from abroad defeats industry after industry.

At the same time, American politics avoids the harsh truths of the world's historic transition towards a place with many competitors, other centers of power, and with reduced opportunity for what Benjamin Franklin called the middling people in America. Talk about re-negotiating NAFTA is as close as we get, but much of that talk is little more than coded language for anti-Mexican racism.

America has been living in recent decades as though its dream slogan were as meaningful as it was in 1955, but much of the prosperity in the last couple of decades was purchased by borrowing to consume beyond the nation's ability to pay.

Administration after administration has kept the economy "pumped" with borrowing, with easy credit, with unwarranted deregulation, and with doing everything possible to encourage mindless consumption. America's balance of payments deficit just swells, decade after decade, generating massive total debt that erodes the real economy, a disease generated solely by an insatiable demand for things America cannot afford.

Wars of the kind America has generated for half a century may be seen as just another form of consumption, the most wasteful conceivable, running assembly lines flat out and printing money and enlisting young people to destroy things on a gigantic scale, generally making little meaningful change in world affairs.

So, imagine being the first black man elected president, a young man without family wealth and influence, but a man who understands problems of which a Bush is not even aware. You are faced with needed fundamental change in America, being elected out of years of sheer despair over Bush, enjoying the rare blessing of a Congress not controlled by opposition. You nevertheless are opposed by an extremely powerful establishment, hostile to most change. You are also opposed by the limited understanding of many ordinary Americans. Do you really try to do what you may have a unique opportunity to attempt?

If you do try, can you survive the assaults of America's establishment, as dark and ruthless as the fabled Borgias of Renaissance Italy? They can make you look terrible, as they did Clinton, and they can even make you disappear, as they did Kennedy. Change is dangerous stuff in a country like America.

The anticipated miracle is the shotgun marriage of Sarah Palin's pregnant seventeen-year old and her eighteen-year old redneck (his description, not mine) boyfriend (aka, in polite Republican circles, as her "fiancé") coming just in time to save a faltering political campaign.

For those who don't know America well, big white weddings with all the trimmings remain - despite the social and sexual upheavals of the last half century, despite wars and threats of wars - an important part of popular culture.

A couple may have been living together for years, may even have had kids, but when "the guy" finally gets around to "popping the question," the world suddenly reverts to 1953, Ike and Mamie are in the White House, and Spot the dog is every child's favorite literary character.

The couple may not have a dime to spare after trips to Disneyland and a second air-conditioned SUV, but the parents are paying (an obligation often requiring a second mortgage), so who cares? Planning begins immediately on throwing away $20,000 or more in one afternoon. After all, marriage is once-in-a-lifetime, even though at least half of all American marriages end in divorce.

Well, it is by appealing to such boiled-frosting, satin-ribbon fantasies that Republicans hope to push John McCain over the campaign finish line and into the White House.

The last week or two of the campaign would be ideal timing, surrounding John McCain and Sarah Palin in a fluffy, sugar-sprinkled haze. Imagine voting against the distinguished-looking old man in a tuxedo on the front pew with the beneficent countenance of a proud grandfather? Or the mother, gowned rather than in mukluks and hunting gear, eyes moist, watching "her baby" march to the alter?

Clearly, this is not matter on which an election anywhere should rest, much less in the world's most powerful country, one staggering through war and financial crisis. Indeed, the Republican campaign, as it well deserves, has faltered on the merits. McCain is a tired old man with a sour temperament and a narcissistic personality who picked as his sidekick a person who would have reached the limits of her talent as captain of a cheerleading squad. Although certainly not the limits of her ambitions, but isn't that what America is about, your reach exceeding your talent?

The hope may not be without some basis. The event, if it happens and happens in time, will of course be exploited to the limits of broadcasting and publishing and advertising. Money will flow from the same immensely rich sources that accomplished such past miracles as a nose-job for a witness against Bill Clinton. Theirs will undoubtedly be the most publicized and costly wedding in Alaska's history.

Imagine the glamor with heads of state attending, all those with whom Sarah Palin has recently had five-minute appointments? Perhaps we'll see Henry Kissinger himself, hobbling to his seat, resembling nothing so much as Doctor Strangelove taking faltering steps from his wheelchair, declaring to his Fuehrer that he can walk.

Perhaps there'll be the president of that wealthy narco-state, Columbia, surrounded by bodyguards and arriving in an armored limousine.

Perhaps, too, the Mayor of Kabul, better known in America as the President of Afghanistan, will be there, exotic in his flowing robes.

And I'm sure there will be a large delegation from across the Bering Sea, Russian officials familiar with Sarah Palin, her just-over-the-backyard-fence neighbors as it were.

The sight of the nervous young woman marching up the aisle will remind many of the young Princess Diana. The swollen tummy might detract from the fantasy, but that can be artfully disguised by a good dressmaker. In the haze of dewy-eyed sentimentality, few will ask about the judgment of a mother who pushes a seventeen-year old girl into marriage and motherhood, or of just how the sweet young Diana turned out.

And the same with the spiffed-up boyfriend who only wanted to play hockey and "hang-out" and find more girls like Sarah's daughter at parties. He will look handsome and almost iconic, shaved and showered in his tuxedo. Few will reflect on the inappropriate pressure brought to bear on this young man by the governor of his state, or, indeed, what kind of a husband someone with his attitudes might be.

But if Sarah and her daughter cannot set this event before the election date, its importance will decline considerably, the free nose-job donors fading away, the publicity evaporating, the international guests sending regrets, and the Palins in need of a second mortgage.

The excitement generated around Palin is just as though America were again embracing George Bush - a younger, prettier version of the most incompetent person ever to hold the office of president, a judgment based on his actual achievement and not just my exceedingly low opinion of him.

She is articulate, unlike Bush, but then so are vacuum-cleaner salesman and televangelists. Being articulate is tool of leadership, but it is not the same thing as leadership. The substance of what you say matters immensely more than how smoothly you say it, especially when you might lead a powerful nation which just happens to be the center of a vast international empire.

It seemed painfully clear during the 2000 election debates that Al Gore avoided attacking Bush. I don't mean attacking him personally, I mean attacking lame statements and explanations which sounded as though they were coming from a not especially-bright eighth-grader repeating lines from an article in Senior Scholastic.

I just could not believe Gore never pounced, and I think he lost the election then (of course, Bush was not honestly elected, but it is only in close votes that fraud works, and the vote did not have to be close). I thought at the time Gore feared looking aggressive, perhaps owing to his assessment of public opinion following the ghastly circus of the Clinton impeachment. Clinton did not deserve to be impeached, but he proved to us all that he was both sleazy and a practiced liar, and there could have been no circus without his behavior first.

I don't know, but we have something of a repeat performance coming up. Joe Biden is an aggressive (if insincere and inconsistent) arguer, and he is going to be put up against this physically-attractive super-mom who drags along her entire extended family to political events, lined up like the world's largest set of Russian matryoshka dolls. Does anyone believe he will dare be aggressive? He will be in an untenable position: damned if does and damned if he doesn't.

In one of her recent interviews, Palin bragged of being the Governor of a state that produces 20% of America's energy. Well, the fact is that Alaska is responsible for less than 4% of America's energy.

That is quite a considerable difference, and it is in a subject one might think she had at least a basic grasp of facts.

Palin, like George Bush, strongly advocates offshore drilling in the sensitive environment of the North and seems to hold her belief for no other reason than that Americans use lots of energy. It is the economic/environmental perspective of a good deal suburban America where middle-class couples both work, have two- and three-car garages, and commute considerable distances to jobs that often involve more than eight hours a day, but is it a view that is sustainable in a world steeply-rising oil prices, a rapidly changing climate, and the explosive growth of competitors like China and India? The simple answer is no.

On the world controversy of Iran's nuclear program, after some furry-mouthed generalities, Palin said that we should not be second-guessing what Israel has to do for its defense, which is nothing more than a self-serving avoidance of the crucial, central issue involved here.

The fact is that if Israel attacks Iran - something which earlier had seemed settled by an American veto but which now is less clear, especially with the just announced sale of a thousand new "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel - Iran will respond, and it has a legitimate right to do so in its own defense, almost certainly with missiles. Iran's missiles are not Saddam's pathetic old SCUDS but pretty accurate medium-range ballistic missiles.

Would the U.S. be instantly sucked into a war with Iran, something which is entirely against the interests of the United States, and indeed against the interests of the entire world with Iran's ability easily to choke off the Straits of Hormuz?

And is there no issue here over Israel's self-declared right, by invoking some vaguely-defined need to protect its existence, to do whatever it wants concerning the internal affairs of other countries, even places a thousand miles away?

Acceptance of that as a working principle in international affairs truly means an endlessly chaotic world with no accepted rules. After all, every aggressor in history believed that he was protecting his country's existence or some other vital interest. Hitler was very good at making such points, twisting the truth, and even using eloquent words about peace.

We have the strongest possible evidence that Iran gave up its weapons program several years ago. Is Israel to be permitted to use American-supplied weapons to attack Iran (remembering these weapons come with supposedly iron-clad agreements that they are not to be used for aggression), a nation which has not engaged in any hostilities against Israel, just because Israel claims it does not believe that intelligence while not offering the world one scrap of proof for its doubt?

As to the business of Palin's casually discussing the possible need for war with Russia, it is the stuff of nightmares. The woman has no idea what she is talking about. It very much reminded me of Dan Quayle blubbering about ICBM throw-weights, a term he memorized to toss around for impressing the weak-minded, but her talk, while equally stupid, was infinitely more dangerous.

It is not possible for anyone to take on Russia with conventional forces. Despite its relative decline, Russia still has awesome conventional armed forces, as it so clearly showed in Georgia after Georgia's foolish attack on its former province (which was conducted against confidential American advice). Russia mopped them up in a few days and could easily have rolled over the entire country despite Georgia's American-supplied new armaments.

Even Russia's navy, weak by American standards, nevertheless is equipped with weapons over which American admirals have nightmares: for example, the Sunfire sea-to-sea missiles against which there is no effective defense. These missiles spiral onto targets in an unpredictable fashion at speeds around Mach 3 to deliver a devastating punch. America's entire fleet of aircraft carriers could be sunk in hours.

The Russians have also demonstrated new technologies for submarine warfare. A Chinese submarine, equipped with some of this, stunned the Pentagon not long ago, when it silently surfaced in the middle of a task force conducting exercises related to Taiwan. This was unprecedented because carrier task forces maintain electromagnetic "bubbles" around themselves with a battery of detection devices, extending far into the air and under the sea.

So what is the alternative to conventional war? It is the war in which the United States and Russia cease to exist. Russia has some of the most accurate and defense-evading capable missiles in the world. America's primitive efforts at missile defense - not one successful test in which the incoming warhead was not marked by a strong radio homing beacon plus a number of unsuccessful tests - do not stand a chance under conditions of a full Russian attack. The sheer number and size of warheads, the many decoys, new stealth technology, plus other technologies of avoidance mean the certain destruction of the United States.

Does any clear-thinking and sane person want someone who casually talks of war with Russia anywhere near the White House?

And what of Palin's references, more than once, to the fact that Russia is within view of some Alaskans? Is that supposed to mean she is familiar with Russian affairs? All eleven time zones of them? The observation literally is meaningless, a Dan Quayle-like observation, a complete non sequitur to any meaningful question about Russia and relations with that country.

Here's a colossally ignorant view of Palin's: she believes in a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. Even Bush knows that is nonsense because he put forward the lies that made the war he wanted for other reasons possible.

Saddam, like all absolute rulers, had no use for terrorists or underground movements of any kind. The safest place to be with regard to terror or guerilla movements is in an absolute state, something George Bush even understands since he has greatly shifted the United States in that direction. The old Soviet Union had no problems with terrorists or guerillas, and neither did Saddam.

Saddam also was a secularist and had no use for extreme Muslims. He was known to intensely dislike Osama bin Laden. Incidentally, women were better off, freer of ancient restrictions, in Saddam's Iraq than they were in any other part of the Arab world.

If there were even one shed of evidence of a connection between Iraq and 9/11 - not the stupidly forged documents we saw before the invasion - it would have been printed and broadcast in every corner of the earth by the Bush/Cheney government, which has spent immense amounts trying to convince people of many instances of nonsense.

After all, that's how they were caught red-handed exposing the CIA wife of a distinguished Republican former ambassador who refused to give credibility to what he knew was forgery, Theirs was an utterly wrong act which only showed how far these ugly men would go to have their way.

Sarah Palin seems made of just such stuff. She is uninformed combined with being a control-freak, something she has demonstrated many times already in a brief career, from trying to dismiss her brother-in-law from his state police job - the e-mails released show that much even if they prove nothing further - to dragging her daughter's poor (self-described) redneck boyfriend to the convention, a boy who (again according to his own words) wanted nothing to do with babies but was scrubbed up, dumped into a new suit, and introduced to everyone as her daughter's "fiancé." Imagine the pressure placed on this young man by the governor of his state?

I think one of the most revealing aspects of Palin's experience is her education. Here again there is a strong parallel with Bush, who only managed to be accepted and graduate because of his "legacy" status from a wealthy and influential family. No thinking person believes Bush could have been accepted by Ivy League institutions on his own merit, much less graduate from them.

Palin's experience was different as to details but leads to similar reflections on her abilities. Palin took six years in five different universities in several states to earn a bachelor's in communications, a considerably less than intellectually-taxing subject. Her records are confidential, and the various institutions will not even discuss the reasons for her many transfers.

Palin's comparison of herself, during her convention speech, to Harry Truman was inaccurate and deceptive. Yes, they both came from small places, but Truman, before being called as FDR's candidate for vice president, had spent ten years in the U.S. Senate, was associated with a powerful political machine in Missouri, and had taken a very prominent role in war-related Senate Committee work. Palin was briefly mayor of a town the size of Andy Griffith's Mayberry and has two years as Governor of a remote state whose entire population is almost identical to that of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Like Bush, Palin is a dangerous person - uninformed, poorly educated, aggressive, deeply ideological, and with extreme religious beliefs. She was placed where she is by a tired-looking man, one treated for cancer four times, who just desperately wants to cap his career with the title president, a man who has no ethical qualms about how he achieves what he wants.

McCain's actual record of ethics and behavior is rather dreary, and it is a subject which mysteriously eludes treatment in mainline media which seem always ready to treat trivia like flag pins. There are many parallels of insensitivity, anger, aggression, limited capacities, and grotesque humor with George Bush.

McCain was, quite simply, a nasty brat as a young man. There are many stories of the way he bullied others, including teachers, stories perhaps easy to make light of fifty years later, but not funny if you were his victim and, more importantly, all too similar to stories of his adult behavior. He was a poor student. He always took advantage of being the son and grandson of admirals to get away with his sometimes vicious antics and failures.

Despite his favorite public act as boyish fighter pilot, he apparently remains an often nasty man in private. Many fellow politicians, including Republicans, testify to his furious, spluttering temper and the use of the most obscene words to friends and work associates with whom he is unhappy. There is also the story, related by a Republican, of his sudden physical attack on a member of the government of Nicaragua during a Congressional mission.

When McCain's being shot down in Vietnam is discussed, the fact that he was bombing civilians is almost never mentioned. He's just lucky he survived. He might well have been torn limb from limb had he been a Vietnamese pilot shot down in Texas.

How did he survive being shot down? After all, he landed in a body of water and he was hurt. A group of local villagers, and one Vietnamese man in particular, Mai Van On, left their bomb shelters and pulled McCain from the water where he would certainly have drowned otherwise.

That brave and decent Vietnamese man, whom McCain once acknowledged, died recently, a very disheartened man that McCain never showed any real sign of thanks or reciprocity. His wife has spoken to the press on this. After all, in many cultures, someone's saving your life creates a powerful bond or debt, but apparently not for John McCain.

Apart from some fitting communication from the man who went on to become famous, imagine how even a little money order from this well-off man could have altered the lives of those who saved him?

When McCain returned home to the wife who had waited for him for the five and a half years he was in prison, he discovered his wife had been in a terrible car accident in which she was disfigured.

Instead of compassion and loyalty, McCain started a series of affairs, ending with wealthy future wife Cindy.

He left his crippled wife to marry the money. It was a pretty shabby display, reminiscent of Newt Gingrich's telling a wife dying of cancer he was divorcing her, but it did considerably help finance his political career.

During the great savings-and-loan scandals, McCain was at the center, having got a lot of money and favors from (to-be convicted felon) Charles Keating.

McCain's second wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, by her own admission. She also stole a large quantity of drugs from a charity for which she did volunteer work to feed her habit, an act which would earn you or me hard time in prison in Bush's America.

You do have to ask about the mental state of a woman who is said to be worth $300 million yet who steals the drugs she craves.

But Cindy got off with a slap on the wrist, thanks in part to the efforts of her husband. This law-and-order conservative, this defender of the hard line in the war on drugs, saw nothing wrong in using his influence. No insistence here that Cindy do the time that he and Bush insist on, and snigger over, for young black men caught with modest quantities of cocaine.

Cindy, in her efforts to soften her brittle Bergdorf Goodman image - or whatever expensive store it is in New York to which she regularly flies to buy racks of clothes - and connect with average Americans, also had the minor flap of being caught misrepresenting other people's recipes as her own. Integrity does not appear to be a strong McCain family value.

Recently McCain had a hard time remembering how many houses he and Cindy owned. Does anyone believe that that is the kind of personal matter someone forgets? If he was indeed being honest, then almost certainly Alzheimer's has set in. More likely though, he was not being honest, trying to deflect an embarrassing question. The latest count on the houses is eight.

McCain, in 2000, told us exactly what he really thinks of the Religious Right. After all, he is known as a rather irreligious, worldly man. He did endear himself to many as he lambasted the Religious Right's nasty, inappropriate influence in American politics, but practically the next day, he was crawling around on his belly, saying he was sorry, having quickly realized what he had done to his political ambitions.

And that last pattern has been typical of McCain's entire public career. Shoot off his mouth, make big noises about being tough and honest, and then crawl back quietly shortly afterward, having achieved nothing but adding a notch to the reputation he relishes as a maverick.

Of course, there never has been a bombing run McCain did not eagerly support. He embraces enthusiastically, consistently, all war measures, no matter how weak or foolish the reasons used to support them. That's why Lieberman, supposedly a Democrat, supports McCain so enthusiastically, Lieberman being another man who never saw a bombing run he did not like nor an excuse too flimsy to support one.

As for McCain's humor, nothing so reveals him for the mild psychopath that he is.

The sense his humor conveys, at least a good deal of it, is very much along the lines of what Bush's humor conveys.

As, for example, the time Bush made some twisted comment and facial expressions to reporters about the pitiful woman he refused to stay from execution in Texas despite her pleas as a converted Christian.

Or Bush's comment to reporters in Chicago when, not long after 9/11, he joked about having "won the trifecta" with his new-found popularity.

Or the story from an acquaintance of his youth about his favorite stunt, repeated many times over, of shoving lit firecrackers into the mouths of captured frogs and watching them blow up.

The disgusting nature of some of McCain's jokes is summarized here:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/uselections/2008/08/to-his-supporte.html

After eight years of Bush's incompetence and stupid brutality, are we to have another man as president reflecting many of the same qualities and views?

One recent poll showed that while nearly ninety percent of Republicans would support McCain, only seventy-three percent of Hillary Clinton's supporters would support Obama. These disaffected voters should examine closely the character of the man for whom they may vote in protest.

John McCain is certainly well aware of them. He just picked a soccer mom from Alaska as his candidate for vice president.

Some, believing the speeches but curious, ask how did a nation founded on supposedly the highest principles by high-minded men manage to become an ugly imperial power pushing aside international law and the interests of others? The answer is simple: the principles and high-mindedness are the same stuff as the loaves and the fishes.

The incomparable Doctor Johnson had it right when he called patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels and scoffed at what he called the "drivers of negroes" yelping about liberty.

Few Americans even understand that Johnson's first reference was to their sacred Founding Fathers (aka Patriots). I have seen a well known American columnist who attributed the pronouncement to Ben Franklin, a man who was otherwise admirable but nevertheless dabbled a few times in slave trading himself.

Johnson especially had in mind history's supreme hypocrite, Jefferson, with his second reference. Again, few Americans know that Jefferson kept his better than two hundred slaves to his dying day. I know a well educated American who sincerely believed Jefferson had freed his slaves. Such is the power of the myths of the American Civic Religion.

Jefferson was incapable of supporting himself, living the life of a prince and being a ridiculous spendthrift who died bankrupt and still owing money to others, the man of honor being a trifle less than honorable in paying back the money he often borrowed. When a new silk frock or set of shoes with silver buckles was to be had, Jefferson never hesitated to buy them rather than pay his debts.

The date we now celebrate, July 4, is based on the Continental Congress's approval of the Declaration of Independence, but in fact the date is incorrect, the document was approved on July 2.

Jefferson wrote the first draft of the declaration, but it was edited by the redoubtable Benjamin Franklin, and later was heavily amended by the Continental Congress. Jefferson suffered great humiliation of his pride and anger at the editing and changes.

Despite the document's stirring opening words, if you actually read the whole thing, you will be highly disappointed.

The bulk of it has a whining tone in piling on complaint after complaint against the Crown. Some would say the whining set a standard for the next quarter millennium of American society.

In Jefferson's draft it went on and on about Britain's slave trade. The 'slave trade' business was particularly hypocritical, trying to sound elevated while in fact reflecting something else altogether. At the time there was a surplus of human flesh in Virginia, and prices were soft.

The cause of the Revolution is also interesting and never emphasized in American texts. Britain's imposition of the Quebec Act created a firestorm of anti-Catholicism in the colonies. They were afraid of being ruled from a Catholic colony.

The speech and writing of American colonists of the time was filled with exactly the kind of ugly language one associates with extremist Ulstermen in recent years.

This combined with the sense of safety engendered from Britain's victory in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War)and the unwillingness to pay taxes to help pay for that victory caused the colonial revolt.

Few Americans know it, but it was the practice for many, many decades to burn the Pope in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day along the Eastern Seaboard. Anti-Catholicism was quite virulent for a very long time.

The first phase of the revolt in and around Boston was actually something of a popular revolution, responding to Britain's blockading the harbor and quartering troops in Boston.

The colonial aristocrats were having none of that, and they appointed Washington commander over the heads of the Boston Militias who volunteered and actually elected their officers.

Washington, who had always wanted to be a British regular commander but never received the commission, imposed his will ferociously. He started flogging and hanging.

In his letters home, the men who actually started the revolution are described as filth and scum. He was a very arrogant aristocrat.

The American Revolution has been described by a European as home-grown aristocrats replacing foreign-born ones. It is an apt description.

Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and many other of the Fathers had no faith in democracy. About one percent of early Virginia could vote. The president was not elected by people but by elites in the Electoral College. The Senate, which even today is the power in the legislature, was appointed well into the 20th century.

The Supreme Court originally never dared interpret the Bill of Rights as determining what states should do. It sat on paper like an advertising brochure with no force. At one time, Jefferson seriously raised the specter of secession, half a century before the Civil War, over even the possibility of the Bill of Rights being interpreted by a national court and enforced.

The Founding Fathers saw popular voting as endangering property ownership. Democracy was viewed by most the same way Washington viewed the "scum" who started the Revolution around Boston. It took about two hundred years of gradual changes for America to become anything that seriously could be called democratic. Even now, what sensible person would call it anything but a rough work still in progress.

It is interesting to reflect on the fact that early America was ruled by a portion of the population no larger than what is represented today by the Chinese Communist Party as a portion of that country's population.

Yet today we see little sign of patience or understanding in American arrogance about how quickly other states should become democratic. And we see in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, and in the CIA's International Torture Gulag that the principles and attitudes of the Bill of Rights still haven't completely been embraced by America.

Contrary to all the posturing amongst the Patriots - who few were a minority at the time - about tyranny, the historical facts indicate that Britain on the whole actually had offered good government to its North American Colonies.

Everyone who visited the Colonies from Europe noted the exceptional health of residents.

They also noticed what seemed an extraordinary degree of freedom enjoyed by colonists. It was said to be amongst the freest place in the known world, likely owing in good part to its distance from the Mother Country. A favorite way to wealth was smuggling, especially with the Caribbean. John Hancock made his fortune that way.

Ben Franklin once wrote a little memo, having noted the health of Americans and their birth rates, predicting the future overtaking of Britain by America, an idea not at all common at the time.

Indeed, it was only the relative health and freedom which made the idea of separation at all realistic. Britain was, of course, at the time viewed much the way, with the same awe of power, people view America today. These well-known facts of essentially good government in the Colonies made the Declaration of Independence list of grievances sound exaggerated and melodramatic to outsiders even at the time.

The combination of the Quebec Act, anti-Catholicism, dislike of taxes, plus the desire to move West and plunder more Indian lands were the absolute causes of the Revolution.

Britain tried to recognize the rights of the aboriginals and had forbidden any movement west by the Colonies.

But people in the colonies were land-mad, all hoping to make a fortune staking out claims they would sell to later settlers. The map of Massachusetts, for example, showed the colony stretching like a band across the continent to the Pacific. Britain did not agree.

George Washington made a lot of money doing this very thing, more than any other enterprise of his except for marrying Martha Custis, the richest widow in the colonies.

The tax issue is interesting.

The French and Indian War (the Seven Years War) heavily benefited the Colonists by removing the threat of France in the West. Once the war was over, many colonists took the attitude that Britain could not take the benefits back, and they refused to pay the taxes largely imposed to pay the war's considerable cost.

And Americans have hated taxes since.

By the way, in the end, without the huge assistance of France, the Colonies would not have won the war. France played an important role in the two decisive victories, Saratoga and Yorktown. At Saratoga they had smuggled in the weapons the Americans used. At Yorktown, the final battle, the French were completely responsible for the victory and for even committing to the battle. Washington had wanted instead to attack New York - which would have been a disaster - but the French generals then assisting recognized a unique opportunity at Yorktown.

After the war, the United States never paid the huge French loans back. Some gratitude. Also the United States renounced the legitimate debts many citizens owed to British factors (merchant/shippers) for no good reason at all except not wanting to pay.

It was all a much less glorious beginning than you would ever know from the drum-beating, baton-twirling, sequined costumes, and noise today. And if you really want to understand why America has become the very thing it claimed it was fighting in 1776, then you only need a little solid history.

What possible connection is there between the late Princess Diana and John McCain? Well, as it proves, there are connections of serious importance to American voters and citizens of the world.

There is today an unpleasant but necessary, excruciatingly-detailed inquiry into Diana's death underway in Britain. It is unpleasant because no one should have every private thought and act exposed this way, but it is necessary because the Princess's own actions and words left millions believing dark, paranoid fantasies around her death. Her remarks and notes in private about believing she would be assassinated, her batteries of obsessive telephone calls, her reported private fits of moodiness and hysteria, her going public with private marital problems - these and other events point to a person with mental instability. Detailed revelations of the inquiry come as no surprise because many sensed something more than her wonderful public charm and grace, and her family does have other such cases in its history.

McCain has all the signs of a similar personality disorder. He can be charming in public, and he has a reputation as an interesting maverick. He is sometimes bluntly truthful, as when he talked about the Religious Right in his 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination.

But McCain has the same highly inconsistent pattern as Diana in public and private behavior. In private, he is famous for a colossally ugly temper. McCain has made some absurd claims over the years, reminding me very much of Princess Diana's whispers and notes about people in high places wanting to assassinate her, all the while smiling beguilingly in public.

Recently, McCain told us he would still have invaded Iraq, even without the excuse of "weapons of mass destruction." He has learned nothing from all that pointless death and misery.

McCain promised voters in South Carolina that he'd hunt down Osama bin Laden, even if it took him "to the gates of hell." And he swore he knows just how to do the job. Good Lord, if McCain knows, why has he kept it secret all these years?

"The gates of hell"? McCain in 2000 made fun of hellfire Christian fundamentalists' role in politics, now he's feeding them their own lines.

I think we know that Osama has long been dead, despite the CIA's phony periodic tapes released to intensify the public's paranoia to support the war on terror. The government hasn't wanted to claim credit because that would make Osama a martyr. His remains are buried under a million tons of rock in the mountains that had the destructive equivalent of World War II dropped on them. And were it possible that Osama did miraculously survive, would hunting him down now be a high priority to a rational person? Two unfinished wars are underway. McCain's promise is just one for increased destruction and horror abroad.

Recently, he told a crowd in South Carolina that the state "was, hands down, the most patriotic in the nation." First, what does his utterance mean? Nothing, it is empty rhetoric of the worst kind. Two, keeping Dr Johnson's dictum on patriots in mind, who cares who is most patriotic? That way is the certainty of more war. Noisy patriotism is a valued characteristic only to the brain-washed, feeble-minded, and aggressors. Three, regardless of the meaning you attribute to McCain's statement, if you account for the historical facts, quite the opposite is the truth. South Carolina was the state that started secession from the Union at the start of the Civil War. South Carolina was also "hot to trot" back in John Adams' day under the secret promptings of anti-federal opposition leader Jefferson. Again, in Andrew Jackson's day, South Carolina pitched the national government into a crisis over a state's right to nullify federal law. Jackson threatened troops to put an end to it.

Recently, too, McCain told us he would still have invaded Iraq, even without the excuse of "weapons of mass destruction." He previously had one of his tasteless, juvenile joking sessions before reporters about bombing Iran, complete with vicious, laughing antics. The man has learned nothing from all the death and misery of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam.

McCain simply loves death and killing, just as it can be argued Princess Diana regularly flirted with death. She had deliberately turned down requests to increase the level of protection about her. She needlessly drove off on wild adventures like the ride in Paris that killed her.

After seven years of the low-grade psychopath, Bush, and the destruction on every front he leaves as his legacy, the last thing humanity needs is the smiling death's head of John McCain as commander-in-chief.

We know this for a great many reasons. One of the world's oldest terrorist organizations, the IRA, had no interest in British government and society. It was interested only in being free of their control.

We know Bush is wrong also because the people who genuinely hate democracy and freedom - the world's oligarchs, dictators, and strongmen - are people who hate terror themselves because it threatens their security.

Strong absolute states have no tolerance for terror. The Soviet Union never had a serious problem with terror, neither did East Germany, nor did Hussein's Iraq.

Absolute states are also frequently supported by, or allied to, the United States, presumably for reasons other than promoting terror. We don't need to go into the long history of the Cold War to find this. It remains true following 9/11. Contemporary examples include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt.

Bush is wrong, too, because all evidence, whether from polls or interviews or writing, shows that people living in lands without democracy overwhelmingly would embrace freedom were it available to them.

Of course, all such generalizations are statistical in nature. That is, they are about trends or tendencies that reasonably describe the overwhelming bulk of specific examples. There are always exceptions, extreme examples, what statisticians call outliers, but you cannot talk about any subject sensibly when you talk about only exceptions.

We also know, despite truckloads of publicity saying otherwise, that terror is not by any measure one of the world's great problems. The number of people killed in the World Trade Center, the largest terrorist attack by far, was less than one month's carnage on America's highways. It was equivalent of about two months of America's murdering Americans on the nation's streets.

Terror is intended to frighten and intimidate people, its secrecy and methods calculated to make deaths, even a small number of them, more shocking than everyday deaths. But if we look at societies that have undergone horrors beyond most people's ability to imagine, horrors greater than any modern terror, we find something very interesting.

Life in London carried on during the Blitz. Germany maintained a huge armaments production despite thousand-plane raids day and night. The people of Leningrad, despite 800,000 deaths from being shelled and starved during the German siege, managed to carry on a kind of society. People in Sarajevo made do through a long and agonizing terror. Even the seemingly-hopeless inmates of death camps often made remarkable efforts to maintain some semblance of normality.

Perhaps the greatest terror experience in modern history was American carpet-bombing in Vietnam. We know from Vietnamese war veterans that these were their most feared events. They were horrific, and the United States left Vietnam having killed something like 3 million people, mostly civilians. But it did leave, and the people it bombed so horribly won a terrible war.

Now all of these experiences, plus many more we could cite, have the elements of randomness for victims and methods that just could not be much more horrible. They all are experiences in terror in the broadest sense. What they tell us is that terror does not work, despite its ability to make people miserable.

I like the anecdote that following the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima, within weeks, wild flowers were spotted growing in the cracks of the pavement. I very much like to think of that as representing the human spirit.

Terror as we traditionally think of it is a method of redress or vengeance for those without great armies or powerful weapons, those at a great disadvantage vis-à-vis some powerful oppressor or opponent. Generally the grievances behind terrorist acts are reasonable demands that have been ignored or have even been suppressed for long periods of time.

Although sometimes, they are unreasonable demands, but in this they are no different than the grievances that often lead to wars or invasions or occupations by powerful states.

Terror generally kills innocent people, something no decent-minded person can accept, but what is always forgotten in the press and government treatment of terror as something alien and unimaginably bad is that war in the contemporary world does precisely the same thing.

We have a powerful trend over the last century shifting the victims of war from armed forces to civilians. In World War I, there were many civilian deaths, but most of went on at the front was the killing of soldiers. By the time of Vietnam, and even more so Iraq, literally most of the deaths are civilians, overwhelmingly so. The fire-bombing and nuclear-bombing of cities during World War II marked the first great shift, returning military operations effectively to the world Before the Common Era when sacking and raping cities was ordinary.

Why has this happened? The chief reason is increasingly destructive weapons capable of being used from a great distance. Those pressing the buttons not only don't see what they are doing in any detail, but the damage of which they are capable increases every year. A single plane today can drop enough munitions to destroy utterly a small town. In 1917, a plane could carry enough munitions to destroy a small house, if the pilot were lucky about air currents and other variables.

America makes claims about using 'smart' weapons, but these claims are highly deceptive. First, smart weapons are costly, and most bombs dropped are still 'dumb' ones. The percentage used in the first Gulf War, a time when there were many press conferences glorifying precision weapons, was on the order of five percent smart weapons.

Second, smart weapons require excellent intelligence, something you cannot have under many circumstances. The infamous bomb-shelter event in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, which incinerated four hundred civilians in an instant, happened because American officials thought there were party officials hiding there, but they were wrong.

Third, even with intelligence, decisions are made which are poor ones. The Baghdad bomb shelter is an example here, too. Even were there some party officials there, killing nearly four hundred others to get them was the kind of savage decision Israel so often makes to its shame.

Fourth, smart weapons do make mistakes with chips or programming or flight controls that are faulty.

Fifth, the better the weapons get, the more the temptation to use them, and the more they will be misused by poor judgment and poor intelligence.

There is no prospect in our lifetime that so-called precision weapons can change the tendency towards killing civilians rather than soldiers.

Terrible weapons are under constant research efforts at 'improvement.' The United States has developed gigantic flammable-liquid bombs, the size and weight of trucks. It is busy developing compact nuclear warheads that are, in the view of the kind of people associated with George Bush, both useable and practical.

The problem with modern weapons is not only their great power and complete removal of users from ghastly results, it is their capacity to alter the psychology and morality of those possessing them.

Where great power exists, it tends to be used, sooner or later. This intuitive idea was part of the reason in the eighteenth century for opposing large standing armies. Expert historians have attributed at least part of the cause of World War I to huge standing armies and a ferocious arms race.

It is hard to think of a horrible weapon that has not been used fairly soon after its development: the flame thrower, poison gas, germ warfare, machine guns, landmines, cluster bombs, napalm, and nuclear weapons.

Imagine the psychology of politicians and war planners in Washington, sitting in air-conditioned offices, perhaps just returned from expense-account lunches, discussing developments in, say, Iraq. They don't see or hear or smell the misery of a people without sanitation or electricity - these having been deliberately destroyed by the United States in the previous Gulf War and never repaired. These planners, looking at charts on their expensive laptops, only know from certain graphs that they have what they see as a problem and that they have the ability to reduce it or make it go away, almost like wishing away something you don't like.

The solution comes down to such pragmatic considerations as to whether Tomahawks or B-52s or a wing of fighter-bombers will best meet the 'need,' and perhaps the availability of each, and perhaps even comparative benefit-cost ratios (kills per buck), also charted on their laptops.

If this isn't the banality of evil, I don't know what is. And when the planners decide which weapon or combination of weapons will best alter the graph, the orders go out, the buttons are pressed, and no one but the poor half-starved people living in dust and squalor have any idea of what actually happens, which people in the neighborhood have their bodies torn apart or incinerated, which houses are destroyed, which children mutilated. The people who carry out these acts see only puffs of distant smoke.

This is modern war as practiced by an advanced society.

On a smaller scale than Iraq, we've all read the endless reports of Israeli incursions and assassinations: an entire family wiped out on a beach by distant shelling, an apartment building full of families hit by a missile intended for one resident, pedestrians cut into pieces as a missile hits a targeted car on a crowded street. All of it is put down to stopping terror, all of it is done from a safe distance, all of it kills mainly civilians, and all of it is indistinguishable from terror.

If challenged today for a definition of terror, I doubt anyone could produce a sound one that limits the meaning to the acts of those constantly in our headlines. Rather those acts are now reduced to special cases of something a great deal larger.

Which was the more ghastly act of terror, 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq? 9/11 killed about 3,000 people and destroyed a building. The invasion of Iraq killed more than 600,000, destroyed the irreplaceable records and artefacts of an ancient civilization, and left a nation of more than 20 million desperate for work, clean water, and electricity. And it should be stressed that although 9/11 came first, there were no connections between these events, except that the one was used as an excuse for the other.

When we hear the word terror in the news, we are conditioned to think that only civilians have died, but how is it different now for news of an attack by American forces or a reprisal raid from the Israeli army? It isn't. We know immediately that civilians die every single time. Indeed, what we often do not know is whether any "bad guys" were killed.

Just Released by John Chuckman - "The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power"

Actually, nothing is easier to fake than an amateur device like this. It takes little sophistication, and there is low risk of discovery.

The CIA has just released papers it terms the 'family jewels' which concern many dark matters from decades ago. While these papers are carefully selected to make the CIA look more ineffectual than it is and to give it a public-relations boost in light of its torture and kidnapping activities today, they still document a perfect willingness to engage in the most unethical behavior.

Mr. Brown has just taken office, and expectations are high that he will distance himself from Blair's foreign policy, a policy many thoughtful people regard as foolish, destructive, and rather servile.

In the United States, paranoid games have been regularly - such as phony terror alerts and ridiculous arrests -played concerning threats to keep fears fired up.

***
Just Released by John Chuckman - "The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power"

China's explosion of a thermonuclear warhead not many years ago that proved through chemical analysis of atmospheric samples to resemble America's best at the time, the W-88 warhead, lead to a McCarthy-like campaign to track down a betrayer of American secrets. Attention focused on a Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos Laboratories, and the New York Times, undoubtedly prompted by the FBI, conducted a terrible campaign of innuendo. The FBI charged the man with a ridiculous number of things, a favorite technique of political police trying to get a plea on something, but the lack of any evidence saw him released with his career ended and his reputation muddied. It seems never to have occurred that China's new army of clever scientists and engineers, always seen going about with the best laptop computers in hand much the way British businessmen in London once all wore derbies and carried umbrellas, might just have developed this technology themselves, or largely so, of course benefiting from the bits and pieces garnered from others that always support new work anywhere.

China has put a number of satellites into orbit, including a manned one, and has a very ambitious space program, including plans for landing people on the moon. The American military sees near-earth space as its most important base for future "projection of power" over the planet, its militarization of space well underway, so China represents a potential challenge not yet felt from India. The huge noise made by Republicans under Clinton's administration over the remote possibility that China may have secretly contributed to an American election gave us a heady whiff of the paranoid fears that reside in some quarters of American society.

Most recently, China launched a vehicle into space designed to destroy a satellite. An obsolete Chinese weather satellite in an orbit about 500 miles above the earth, roughly the same orbit as that occupied by many of America's fleet of spy or global-positioning satellites, was the target for this apparently successful test. The message was clear: China is now capable of destroying the satellites which are now America's eyes for war. The news was especially dramatic coming as it did not long after America's admitting that a powerful Chinese laser, or other directed-energy beam on the ground, had, a while back, swept an American spy satellite over China, temporarily blinding it.

The satellite-killer led to a lot of noisy accusations about China's aggressiveness and its militarizing space, but these claims are quite inaccurate. The United States has been militarizing space for many years, gradually and in many surreptitious ways. The space shuttle program, for example, was always a military one, the shuttles actually being very costly, inefficient vehicles for science, sometimes even leading to delays in the launch of important science projects.

America's fleet of military and spy satellites, many of whose capabilities remain secret, is used actively today as a weapon. Nations friendly to American policy are given priceless data to support their efforts while opponents are left at a serious disadvantage. This was done, as just two examples, in supporting Iraq's invasion of Iran and in supporting Israel's assault on Lebanon - both examples, by any sensible reckoning, of America's using these sophisticated machines not for defense but to support aggression it regarded as being in its own interest at the time.

Perhaps, the clearest militarization of space is America's new anti-missile missile program, a program not just of research but of deploying actual weapons. No matter how ineffective the existing American system is - it has failed many tests, and independent scientists advise us that the computer programming for such a system is truly beyond our existing ability - America's spending new billions on it has to make China and Russia uneasy. The same scientists and other experts warned some years back that a new American "Star Wars" program would start a new weapons race, and they were right. The Russians have already announced the development of a new warhead that spirals unpredictably when heading for its target. It also may put into service a mobile version of its highly-accurate Topple-M intercontinental missile.

China's response includes its ability to destroy spy satellites needed as eyes for such a system plus an increase in the number and quality of its intercontinental missiles. China's DF-31A missile is its first solid-fueled intercontinental missile, meaning it can be fired more quickly than its existing liquid-fueled ones, and it is the first Chinese intercontinental missile that can reach all parts of the United States. It could be made mobile, and a submarine-based version is under development. It should be noted that China's nuclear deterrent until now has been extremely modest, consisting of about two dozen known missiles plus some element of uncertainty as to whether there are in fact a limited number more.

China used the anti-satellite test to get America's attention for negotiations over the anti-missile missile system. They did get American attention, there being a very unpleasant reaction in Washington, but it is not clear that any kind of negotiations will follow. China's immediate offer to negotiate a treaty against the militarization of space was ignored. America's stubbornly-held view of anti-missile defense is that it is part of its overall anti-terrorist efforts, an argument which stretches credibility rather thin, especially in view of plans for basing some of these anti-missile missiles in former Soviet satellite states, plans that are highly confrontational towards Russia. There has also been talk of American anti-missile missiles being placed in Afghanistan, intended for Chinese I.C.B.M.s, again a highly provocative idea, going towards creating uncertainty in China's sense of its nuclear deterrent.

Another recent military surprise from China was the unveiling of the new Jian-10, swept-wing fighter. The project to develop this plane apparently was a closely kept secret, hence the surprise at its appearance. It is the same general type of fighter represented by America's F-16 or the Eurofighter Typhoon or Russia's MIG-29, although its capabilities are not well understood. Whether or not it meets the performance standards of these other front-line, supersonic fighters, the plane represents a remarkable technical and manufacturing achievement by the Chinese, portending also the day when China learns to compete in civil aviation. China's current military philosophy of husbanding its resources for only the kinds of projects best fitting what are deemed its greatest future needs has apparently permitted it to compete in this costly field of high-tech aviation which includes only a small number of nations.

China's new investments in its military are, like so many things about China, heavily criticized by the American establishment. The truth is they represent a small fraction of what the U.S. spends, no matter what accounting you use. Widely accepted, published data put China's military spending at about 10% of America's, although some say it may be about half again more than that through hidden spending. They may be right, but they ignore the reality of a great deal of hidden spending in America, particularly when it comes to so-called black programs, and the unquestioned fact remains that America accounts for fully half of the entire planet's military spending.

China's new spending is to a considerable extent driven by what it sees as American imperial attitudes and behavior. Recall the incident of the American spy plane flying right up against Chinese air space early in Bush's administration and being forced down by the Chinese. This was an extremely provocative act, somewhat resembling the flight of an American U-2 over Russia just days before a scheduled summit between Eisenhower and Khruschev. During the first hours of this recent, smaller crisis, the new Bush administration took a hard-line approach, making no apologies (a Chinese pilot had died bringing the spy plane down) and demanding the plane and its crew be returned immediately. After a while Bush relented, reportedly after his having consulted his much more knowledgeable father, and took a more accommodating approach. China then promptly allowed the crew to be flown home and returned the spy plane, after a bit of time, disassembled in a crate, mimicking a much earlier American exploit, one that undoubtedly had provided many laughs over the years at the Pentagon, when a defecting Soviet pilot landed one of the U.S.S.R.'s most advanced fighters in Japan. No one knows how successful the Chinese were in studying the spy plane's top-secret electronic gear, but generally such machines are destroyed by explosive devices detonated by the crew when crashing or being forced to land. Things can be learned even from demolished mechanisms. Then again, those devices don't always work.

China has not challenged American world leadership, nor has it set it as a goal to be able to do so, but this incident of the spy plane was interesting for a number of reasons, mainly in that it demonstrated China's willingness to confront America behaving aggressively in China's own backyard. Had it come to shooting, China could not have won, but much of the world's public opinion was on China's side in what clearly was reckless American behavior.

Few Americans appreciate the extent to which such high-risk behavior characterized American activity during the Cold War. Intrusive American military over-flights of the Soviet Union in the 1950s were common, indeed Krushchev was irritated and angry over the extent of these flights which Eisenhower observed once would have started a war had the Russians behaved the same way over the territory of the United States. There were also many confrontations with nuclear submarines, including a number of scrapes and collisions owing to close approaches on Soviet boats. Indeed, it has been reported, and there is some evidence from photographs for believing, that the advanced Russian submarine, Kursk, which sank during tests in 2000, sending its crew to a slow death, was the result of a torpedo fired in error by an American commander whose boat was closely observing the Kursk's maneuvers. If so, it might help explain what many regard as a rather kid-gloves approach Bush has taken towards the Russians despite a belligerent history and many differences over policy.

America invaded Iraq for two main reasons. First, it wished to sweep what it regarded as a chronic problem, Hussein's Iraq, off its foreign-affairs plate. Second, it wanted to remove Israel's most implacable opponent.

I would add the personal element, without emphasizing it too much, yet aware that it is important in the backrooms of history, of a man obsessed by a fairly extreme love-hate relationship with his more distinguished father, although some readers may be unaware of the times George Bush had to be stopped from going to fisticuffs with his father or of the flip way he introduced himself years ago to Queen Elizabeth as the family's black sheep. Iraq did seem to offer the magical opportunity to do what his father had avoided doing and for once in his life achieving something big on his own, a psychological force not to be completely discounted.

The invasion was not about oil. It related to oil in that continued future oil revenues promised to keep Hussein going a long time. It also related to oil in that Bush's people aimed to place those resources into hands friendlier to American policy, a straightforward extension of America's general approach to imperial rule: use locals but only the locals friendly to American purposes.

The neo-cons, a narrow group that has enjoyed great influence over Bush, expected, or so they claimed, other desirable side-effects. One was striking fear into the heart of an autocratically-ruled Middle East where resources flowed in opposition to the American policy fixation with Israel. This came to be reflected literally in the rather Hitler-like concept of Shock and Awe.

The neo-cons also proposed that an invasion could spark enthusiasm, in some undefined manner, for democratic government through the region. The desirability of this, at least for neo-cons, is predicated upon the belief that democratic government would in future be more friendly to American policy, a very naïve belief indeed.

One has to believe, for some of the neo-cons are bright people who merely lack judgment and humanity, that the democracy business was a pleasant fairy story because there is no historical record of the United States, and especially its right wing, being a genuine promoter or defender of democracy. Neither is there an historical record anywhere of bombing and strafing people into democracy. The only vaguely realistic interpretation of this notion I can imagine is that democracies can on average be more easily bribed and manipulated, activities in which the CIA engages regularly.

Insincere defenders of democracy behaving as they have in Iraq only succeed in calling into question over much of the developing world, the human-rights values of countries embracing that form of government. When the United States makes its depressingly pompous statements about democracy in the world, it is playing on the near-universal belief that democratic government is associated with positive, humanistic values. But history tells us that that is not necessarily true, and America has only once again demonstrated the fact.

It is now clear, to all but an ever-diminishing circle of Bush devotees and former drinking buddies, that the crusade has been a total failure. Yes, Hussein is gone, but America has achieved the bizarre result of having ordinary Iraqis telling reporters they would be better off were he back.

And they are right. A once prosperous and advancing country, one certain to have become a democracy in not too many more years along the natural path by which all growing countries eventually become democracies, has been torn apart and set back a very long time.

Only a new strongman is likely to hold Iraq together, a conclusion, I'm willing to bet, Bush's people have already reached in secret. But where is that strongman and how do you gracefully insert and support him with all the blubbering about democracy? Otherwise, Iraq is likely to split into three smaller states, full of resentments and eager to compete for foreign military assistance and power. In other words, America has achieved instability over the foreseeable future, something that is hardly in anyone's interest, and certainly not Israel's.

The failure is far greater and more pitiless than most Americans even suspect. A colossal fortune has been spent by Bush and his spineless Congress, and yet much of Iraq still has no dependable water, electricity, or jobs. You simply cannot build any kind of society whatever on that basis.

And the United States cannot continue to spend funds at the level it has spent them for four years, much of the shrink-wrapped pallets of freshly-printed hundred-dollar bills secretly flown-in having gone to corruption, bribery, insane private armies, and subsidizing the fortunes of American firms like Halliburton. This grotesque spending came on top of a balance of payments and general government-deficit spending that seem out of control. The excesses of the American economy have put great strain on the dollar, even raising the serious issue of its future as the world's reserve currency.

Iran's position in the region has been strengthened by the invasion, a matter presumably of considerable concern to Washington, and Shia Muslims, who dominate great swathes of the region and who also are not particularly friendly towards Washington, have been invigorated and strengthened by America's massive strategic blunder.

Terrorism - that pliable word used to describe those with whom you disagree, whose views and interests you utterly ignore, and who are driven to desperate measures because they are at the mercy of superior military power - has never had a better recruiting impetus than America's well-publicized brutality and insensitivity in the occupation. Nor has it ever had a better, more realistic and effective training ground than America's Iraq.

Those learning by doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are gaining priceless experience to share with others, experience one could never have imagined coming from bin Laden's small, isolated cluster of tents in the mountains.

Israel, its bullying hubris rising to new heights under the influence of Bush and his phantom conquests, came to think as perhaps never before that it was free to do whatever it liked. Then, in its pre-planned invasion of Lebanon, feebly excused by the kidnapping of two soldiers who were themselves likely on a questionable mission inside Lebanon, Israel ran into Hezbollah, a Hezbollah strengthened by the example and experience of those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The long-held view of Israel as an unstoppable military force evaporated. Not that Hezbollah came anywhere near to matching Israel's sophisticated weapons or its American intelligence assistance or its capacity to inflict horrific damage quickly, but Hezbollah demonstrated the kind of resistance we associate with Russia's armies stopping the Wehrmacht.

Israel has always wanted part of Southern Lebanon as part of its national territory, and its leaders are on record to that effect, always exploiting the idea of Katysha rockets hitting Northern Israel, most people being unaware that these small rockets are primitive and ineffective unless fired in the huge barrages for which they were designed and that Hezbollah only fires them when Israel violates the Lebanese border, something it has done regularly and secretly for years.

Israel's savage attack on Lebanon - leaving behind 1,500 dead, thousands of homeless and mangled, and a blanket of hideous cluster-bomblets for Lebanon's children and farmers to discover in future - proved as complete a failure as America's crusade in Iraq when viewed on Israel's own terms. I like to think the revulsion of the world's people and especially the stunned reaction within Israel have brought something of a psychological and political turnaround to the region, at least the beginnings of a turnaround.

The world is weary of Israel's relentless refusal to spend anything but words on peace. A sequence of bloody regional failures - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southern Lebanon - just might set the stage for new a new ordering of priorities and policies. Bush's ignorant pride has been damaged, as has been Israel's, and everyone must look to something new.

And in the United States, the not-to-spoken truth that Israel's grinding injustices and America's tireless efforts to defend them had a great deal to do with 9/11 and many violent events after it may just be sinking in. Important and fair-minded people have written published on the excessive, corrupting influence of Israel on American policy.

The U.S., for the first time in years, has shown interest in talking to Syria and Iran, countries with vital interests in the area, long ignored. Perhaps, it finally means the beginning of the end for the destructive idea of Greater Israel, the beginning of some degree of justice and hope for a people, the Palestinians, long without either. Perhaps it means genuine effort towards peace, rather than the tiresome, ongoing fraud of a "peace process."

I'm hopeful, but not too optimistic. Ignorance, prejudice, the great industry of war, and jingoism are mighty powerful foes.

American use of ethanol blended into gasoline actually represents a hidden subsidy to corn farmers, a subsidy on top of other subsidies, because American corn production itself has long been subsidized. The American program, to be expanded now by a leader widely recognized for wisdom and insight, George Bush, subsidizes farmers hurt by the abundance of their own subsidized production.

Subsidies plus the extent of Midwestern farmland suitable for its production are why America produces such an abundance of corn. Its use in motor fuel on any scale started as a way to stretch America's fuel supply in the face of Arab anger over foreign policy.

But it does not really do this. Although numbers naturally change over time, ethanol has roughly 70% the energy content of gasoline, yet it costs about 40% more to produce and distribute. In order to deliver this economic bargain to motorists, the government forgoes taxes paid by the users of gasoline, taxes which, of course, pay for important government services.

You don't need to study economics to appreciate that as a bad bargain.

In the years since the original strategic argument, arguments for the use of ethanol in fuel have developed around its being a benefit to the environment. It is no surprise that many embrace this at first hearing: growing something for fuel just sounds cleaner and healthier than using a minerals dug out of the ground.

But this is a false argument, false at several levels. If you have a certain distance to drive, requiring a certain amount of energy, you will have to fuel up more often, and you will be paying the same or more for this privilege with ethanol as part of each fill-up.

The motorist, re-fueling his or her car, will not be aware that significant amounts of petroleum products go into growing corn before any fuel is manufactured. Tractors, harvesters, trucks, and conveyor belts don't run on alcohol, and agricultural chemicals aren't derived from it.

It will be the furthest thing from the motorist's mind that ethanol for fuel cannot be shipped by pipeline, the cheapest form of shipping liquids and gases, because ethanol picks up water on it way underground, so ethanol must use more expensive truck transport, and what do the trucks run on?

The motorist also likely will not be aware that while burning some ethanol with gasoline reduces carbon dioxide emissions, if you account for the carbon dioxide emissions of the corn's production, there is almost no net gain.

A recent, published finding that ethanol increases ozone in the lower atmosphere is also unlikely to drift through his or her thoughts while squeezing the pump handle. Ozone is a constituent of smog which affects those with respiratory problems. Ironically, ozone in the lower atmosphere is itself a greenhouse gas.

Now, corn is a staple food for many poor people, especially throughout the Americas, and it is a simple matter of supply and demand that if large quantities of corn go to fuel, poor Mexicans and others will be eating less because its bounty in the food supply will drop. In very small quantities, this effect is almost invisible, but in large quantities - and what is the use of such programs if they do not become large? - it will become painfully obvious.

Canada's Conservative government , a government whose previous environmental minister became an international embarrassment to the country, is in a desperate search for some environmental goodness to smear on its face as political war-paint and has discovered the mumbo-jumbo of ethanol.

Recently, it has run a television ad, over and over, done in fake cinema verité style showing vignettes of an odd little man with the sardonic smile of a skull asking citizens on the street about growing "our own fuel." It even features a scene of the would-be comic dancing spontaneously on the sidewalk with someone in celebration of growing your own fuel. It ends with another man announcing proudly to the astonished little man that his great hulking SUV actually uses ethanol. Will wonders never cease?

Why do governments do this kind of thing? Well, ethanol as fuel allows you to brag about doing all kinds of good things - of course, the bragging is done by stating partial truths, but isn't that what all advertising is, partial truth? - while you dish out a new subsidy to some of your constituents. And you get to advertise what you are doing at the expense of your listeners.

Ethanol-as-fuel's other great attraction is that politicians get to hide for a while from the real solutions, such as simply raising vehicle efficiency standards, which require some courage. What a sweet scam.

Note from John Chuckman: coming soon: THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE through Magpie Books, London

The nation is pretty much at ease with ugly imperial government. Liberalism, and I mean liberalism in the broadest, richest sense of the word, is a topic of bathroom humor.

We read and hear a great deal about the Democrats' sizable victory in mid-term elections, and I suppose after six years of Bush's near-insanity, people have a right to a little excitement, although one is sobered by the recollection that the same people returned him to office just two years ago. At least, the world can be grateful that Bush has been hobbled for his last two years.

The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff. No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans.

The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished. It's a blockbuster version of the Homecoming Game with guys in uniforms and cheerleaders and flags, and there is no hint of death or decay. Anything beyond that kind of performance is welcomed like the kid who couldn't make the team.

I doubt there is widespread concern that Iraqis still huddle in homes with no reliable electricity or clean water, no jobs, and fearful to step into murderous streets. I doubt there is much guilt over having killed half a million of them. I doubt there is guilt about running a secret gulag and torturing helpless captives. I doubt there is guilt about blood-spattered holes like Abu Ghraib. Because if there were such guilt, there would have been a revolt against Bush's criminal government.

The American tendency to quickly tire of things is mightily reinforced by the depressing consciousness of having lost. Americans are conditioned in the great booming engine of Social Darwinism they call society that there is no substitute for winning, and winning in a chest-thumping way. Losing is for losers, and loser is a favorite American expression of contempt for others. They hate losing, and yet the simple fact is that many of the conflicts into which they thoughtlessly are led end up lost.

I am sure Americans are tired of images and commentary about Iraq on television, tame as they have been deliberately kept. They're tired of knowing that cute little Steve and Susie graduating high school this year can't just join up to have their college paid and be heroes in uniform without risking their health.

The greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity, the suppurating body of Iraq, is unlikely to be attended by Democrats. They want the White House in two years, and they do not want to be left holding Bush's "tarbaby." Instead, they will scrutinize and highlight every twist and turn of Bush's bumbling, murderous efforts as he struggles to leave Iraq. American politics are just that brutal. No wonder there are so many wars.

Harper said that his government supports a two-state solution in the Middle East. That is the policy of most Western governments, and there was nothing original in Harper's way of stating it. It was the kind of vague, tepid stuff we might hear from Olmert himself.

"Our government believes in a two-state solution -- in a secure democratic and prosperous Israel living beside a viable democratic and peaceful Palestinian state."

It is interesting to note the lack of symmetry in Harper's "secure democratic and prosperous Israel" versus "a viable democratic and peaceful" Palestine. I don't know why prosperity does not count for Palestinians, but as anyone who understands developmental economics knows, prosperity is key to developing modern, democratic institutions. You only get the broad middle-class which makes democracy possible out of healthy growth.

I suspect Harper was signaling, while calling for peace with two states, hardly a stirring theme for a B'nai Brith audience, that he saw no equivalency to the two sides. If not, perhaps he will explain another time what he did mean.

Harper did not define what he means by viable. Palestine, as anyone familiar with the situation knows, cannot be viable as a walled-off set of postage-stamp Bantustans, the only concept of a Palestinian state Israel has ever considered.

The key element in Harper's statement is what he means by democratic and peaceful. Those words are not so self-explanatory as they may first appear. Both these adjectives are regularly twisted in meaning, particularly by the United States.

Hamas won an honest and open election in Palestine, internationally scrutinized, but the result of that election was rejected by Harper and others, inducing chaos into Palestinian affairs, the very thing Israel's secret services likely intended when they secretly subsidized Hamas years ago to oppose Fatah. Hamas has not learned the required mantra about recognizing Israel, yet Hamas is no threat to Israel, or plainly Israel's secret services would never have assisted it in the first place.

Hamas is not well-armed, nor is it, surrounded and penetrated by Israel, in a position to become so. Israel speaks as though not recognizing Israel is an unforgivable defect, but governments often fail to recognize other governments. The United States has a long list of governments it has not recognized in the past and ones it does not recognize now. This is not always a smart thing to do, but it is not a crime, it is not even a faux pas, and it may just be a negotiating point.

Hamas has not invaded Israel, nor has it conducted a campaign of assassinating Israeli leaders - both actions Israel has repeated against Palestinians countless times. Every time some disgruntled individual in Gaza launches a home-made, ineffectual rocket, Israel assassinates members of Hamas or sends its tanks into Gaza, killing civilians. Presumably, a peaceful Palestine would be one either where there were no disgruntled people or where an efficient police-state stopped them all.

This is a preposterous expectation. It simply can never be. With all of Israel's violent occupations and reprisals, it has never been able to impose absolute peace, not even on its own territory. There have been scores of instances of renegade Israeli settlers shooting innocent Palestinians picking olives or tending sheep, and there have been mass murders of Palestinians a number of times, as at the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount. How much less able is any Palestinian authority to enforce absolute peace when Israel allows it pitifully limited resources and freedom of movement?

Realistically, the expectation for absolute peace should be interpreted as a deliberate barrier to a genuine peace settlement. Why would Israel use a barrier to peace when its official statements never fail to mention peace?

Because most leaders of Israel, probably all of them, have never given up the frenzied dream of achieving Greater Israel, a concept which allows for no West Bank and no Palestinians. Not every leader has spoken in public on this subject, but a number have. Other prominent figures in Israel from time to time also have spoken in favor of this destructive goal.

There seems no rational explanation, other than wide support of this goal, for Israel's persistent refusal to comply with agreements which could have produced peace, the Oslo Accords perhaps being the greatest example. Israel worked overtime to destroy the Oslo Accords, always attributing their failure in public to the very Palestinians who had worked hard to see the Accords born. More extreme Israeli politicians openly rejected the Accords from the start.

The crescendo statement in Harper's speech, his voice rising in force and his audience literally rising to its feet, was, "The state of Israel, a democratic nation, was attacked by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization -- in fact a terrorist organization listed illegal in this country," and "When it comes to dealing with a war between Israel and a terrorist organization, this country and this government cannot and will never be neutral."

Harper's definition of democracy appears to be the American one: those governments are democratic who agree with American policy. We know America has overthrown many democratic governments in the postwar world, including those in Haiti, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala. Today it threatens a cleanly-elected government in Venezuela and utterly ignores a cleanly-elected government in Palestine.

America shows itself always ready to work with anti-human rights blackguards when it feels important interests are at stake, General Musharraf of Pakistan and some of the dreadful Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan being current examples. There were dozens more during the Cold War, including the Romanian Dracula Ceaucescu and the Shah of Iran, put into power by a coup that toppled a democratic government. The American definition of democracy is highly selective at best.

Israel has demonstrated a similar understanding of democracy from the beginning. Israel was ready to help France and Britain invade Suez in the 1950s, an action which represented a last ugly gasp of 19th century colonialism. Israel worked closely for years with apartheid South Africa, even secretly assisting it in developing and testing a nuclear weapon (weapons and facilities were removed by the United States when the ANC took power). Savak, the Shah's secret police, whose specialty was pulling out people's finger nails, was trained by American and Israeli agents.

Harper's statement of total support for Israel in Lebanon is not in keeping with traditional Canadian views and policies. Canadians want balance and fairness. Unqualified support for Israel is tantamount to giving it a free pass to repeat the many savage things it has done, things most Canadians do not support.

Israel has proven, over and over again, it needs the restraining influence of others. Criticizing Israel does not make anyone anti-Israeli. Israel, sadly, has done many shameful things that demand criticism from those who love freedom and human rights, starting with its keeping a giant open-air prison going for forty years.

Harper should know that when Israeli leaders such as Olmert or Sharon speak of two states, they do not mean the same thing that reasonable observers might expect.

They mean a powerless, walled-in rump state in which elections must consistently support Israel's view of just about everything, a state whose access to the world is effectively controlled by Israel, and a state whose citizens have no claims whatsoever for homes, farms, and other property seized by Israel. The hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, living on property taken bit by bit since the Six Day War are there to stay. Palestinians' property rights to homes and institutions in Jerusalem, from which they are being gradually pushed, are being voided.

Israel has invaded Lebanon twice with no legitimate justification. It killed many thousands the first time and about 1,600 the last time. It flattened the beautiful city of Beirut the first time and a fair portion of the re-built city last time. It dropped thousands of cluster bombs, the most vicious weapon in the American arsenal, onto civilian areas. In effect, this action created a giant minefield, an illegal act under international treaty, with mines which explode with flesh-mangling bits of razor wire.

The Hezbollah that was Israel's excuse for invading Lebanon last time never invaded Israel. They launch their relatively ineffective Katysha rockets only when Israeli forces violate the border, which they do with some regularity in secret. Hezbollah's main function, despite all the rhetoric about terrorists, has been as a guerilla force opposed to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel has long desired to expand its borders into that region, and there are statements on record to that effect, another aspect of Greater Israel. Israel occupied southern Lebanon for many years after its first invasion, and still held on to an enclave after its withdrawal.

Democratic values are not just about holding elections now and then. Otherwise, apartheid South Africa would have deserved our support. So would Northern Ireland when it repressed Catholics for decades. So, in fact, would the former American Confederacy. These states all had elections but only some people could vote, and other people were treated horribly.

Democratic values must reflect respect for human rights, which apply to all, something about which Israel has been particularly blind. There are no rights for Palestinians. Indeed, Israel has no Bill or Charter of Rights even for its own citizens because of the near impossibility of defining rights in a state characterized by so many restrictions and theocratic principles.

The relatively small number of Arabic people given Israeli citizenship, roughly 19% of the population, descended from 150,000 who remained in Israel after 1948, mainly those who were not intimidated by early Israeli terror groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang into running away or who simply could not escape. Despite subsidized immigration to Israel, accounting for the bulk of Jewish population growth, Israeli Arabs have managed roughly to keep their fraction of the population through high birth rates. They are, however, under constant pressure, often being treated as less than equal citizens. On many occasions, prominent Israelis have called for their removal.

According to a recent study of Jewish Israeli attitudes, 41 percent think Arab citizens should be encouraged by the government to leave Israel, and 40 percent want segregated public facilities for Arabs. The survey also found 68 percent of Israeli Jews would not live in an apartment building with Arabs, and 46 percent would not let Arabs visit their homes.

Harper's dichotomy between democracy and terror, the crescendo subject of his speech, is simply nonsense. It mimics Bush's garbled words about terrorists versus American freedoms or everyone's being with us or against us. Israel is not so admirable a democracy nor is Hezbollah so terrible a group as he would have us believe.

The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere. France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere. The United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere. China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere. India and Pakistan, 13, all underground. South Africa (and/or Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979.

From a purely statistical point of view, North Korea's test does seem a rather small event. You must add the fact that my title, North Korea's Bomb, is aimed at being pithy and is thereby unavoidably inaccurate. Having a nuclear device is not the same thing as having a bomb or warhead, much less a compact and efficient bomb or warhead. North Korea still has a long way to go.

But North Korea's test is magnified in its effect by several circumstances. First, war in the Korean peninsula has never formally ended, and American troops might well be vulnerable to even a school bus with a nuclear device. Just that thought is probably horrifying to many Americans who are not used to being challenged abroad, but I'm sure North Korea has already been warned that that would constitute national suicide.

Two, the test comes when Bush has been exploring military means to end Iran's work with nuclear upgrading technology. There is no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons, but, being realistic, I think we have to say it's likely. Iran faces nuclear-armed countries, hostile to its interests, in several directions. Security of its people is an important obligation of any state.

I doubt Bush intends invading Iran - invasion's extreme advocates, neo-con storm troopers like David Frum and Richard Perle having proved totally wrong about Iraq - but that doesn't exclude some form of air attack. Iran has deeply buried its production sites, so the usual American bombers and cruise missiles will be ineffective. There has been talk of using tactical nuclear warheads, but I think there would be overwhelming world revulsion to this. The Pentagon may be considering non-nuclear ICBMs, there having been talk of arming a portion of the American fleet with non-nuclear warheads to exploit the accuracy and momentum of their thousands-of-miles-an-hour strikes for deep penetration. But Russia's missile forces are on hair-trigger alert against the launch of any American ICBM, and the time for confirming error with shorter-range sea-launched missiles is almost nonexistent.

Bombardment of Iran may now be more questionable, something we may regard as a good outcome of the North Korean test. How do you justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in one country when you have done nothing of the kind in another that actually has them? This is even more true because Iran, while not Arabic, is Islamic, and public relations for America in the Islamic world already are terrible.

Third, what many analysts fear most from North Korea is its selling weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea sells a good deal of its limited military technology to others, although this does not make the country in any way special, the world's largest arms trafficker by far being the United States. Many would argue that American weapons have supported terror, those used in Beirut, for example, ghastly flesh-mangling cluster bombs dropped on civilians. The answer to this fear about North Korea brings us to the simple human matter of talking. The U.S. must give up its arrogant, long-held attitude against talking and dealing with North Korea, for here it is certainly working against its own vital interests.

It is an interesting sidelight on North Korea's test that at least portions of its technology came from A. Q. Kahn's under-the-table operations in Pakistan, America's great ally in its pointless war on terror. Perhaps Kim Jong Il should volunteer troops for Iraq. This would undoubtedly change America's view of him dramatically. Cooperation won a lot of benefits for the dictatorship in Pakistan regarded by America as a rogue nuclear state just a few years ago.

All completely rational people wish that nuclear weapons did not exist, but wishing is a fool's game.

Efforts for general nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure at this stage of human history. Why would any of the nuclear powers give up these weapons? They magnify the influence and prestige of the nations that have them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, give up obtaining them? Moreover, technology in any field improves and comes down in cost over time, and it will undoubtedly prove so with making nuclear weapons.

The entire Western world has conspired to remain silent on Israel's nuclear arms, even when Israel assisted apartheid South Africa to build a nuclear weapon. If nuclear weapons are foolish and useless, why does little Israel possess them? Why did South Africa want them? Why did the Soviet Union, despite a great depression and horrible impoverishment after the collapse of communism, keep its costly nuclear arsenal?

If Western nations can understand the dark fear that drives Israel, why can they not understand the same thing for North Korea? The United States has refused for years to talk and has threatened and punished North Korea in countless ways. When the U.S., under Clinton, did agree to peaceful incentives for North Korea to abandon its nuclear work, it later failed utterly to keep its word.

Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and threatening attitude he has so many others. How on earth was this approach ever to achieve anything other than what it now has produced?

We keep hearing that North Korea is irrational and unstable, but I think these descriptions are inaccurate. A regime that has lasted for more than half a century can be called many things, but not unstable. Soviet-style regimes were very stable. It was when such governments attempted reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives that they toppled, but there seems little likelihood of a Gorbachev assuming power in North Korea.

North Korea has done some bizarre things over the last fifty years, but I do not think a careful speaker would describe the nation as irrational. North Korea has been isolated and ignored by the United States. It is American policy that frequently has been irrational, Bush's mob having been especially thick in their behavior towards the country.

I may be exaggerating when I write of bizarre North Korean acts, for since World War II, what nation has done more bizarre, damaging things than the United States? Over forty years of costly hostility and terror against Cuba? The insane, pointless war in Vietnam? The insane, pointless invasion of Iraq?

Harsh sanctions against North Korea, already advocated by the emotionally-numb Bush, are a foolish response. North Korea's rulers would not suffer any more than did Saddam Hussein under American-imposed sanctions against Iraq after Desert Storm. Only ordinary people would be driven to misery and starvation, just as they were in Iraq where tens of thousands of innocents died.

How much easier and more productive just to talk.

Fascism certainly is not the same thing as communism, although both these systems are represented by strongmen or tyrants and the state apparatus needed to support them. Those who like the nomenclature of the French Revolution might say that the two political extremes, right and left, almost meet somewhere in a bend of political space.

Private enterprise, of course, has been regarded as incompatible with communism, although contemporary China with its New Economic Zone begins to confuse the issue. Things have always been quite different with fascism. Fascist governments are favorable to the interests of enterprise, at least the interests of large-scale enterprises. Great private combines existed and were encouraged under Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Fascism represents, if you will, a kind of large-scale, public-private partnership.

Fascism, much like the mental image of Mussolini, tends to be about power, generally a raw display of political and military power. These two things are welded together in a fascist state. Flags, banners, strutting, and marching feature prominently, with political occasions sometimes difficult to distinguish from military ones.

Fascism's strutting-peacock displays serve several purposes. One, with their rise to power, fascist parties brag about getting things done (the reality of entrenched fascism proves another matter altogether), as opposed to the mundane, boring inefficiency of ordinary deliberations. This kind of promise appeals to the frustrations of many people who yearn for decisive change. Their yearnings may concern anything from building public projects to imposing moral rules..

There likely is a built-in component in human beings which finds authority attractive, at least over certain limits. Society mimics the show of power in many institutions from popes to presidents.

The display of power also intimidates enemies. Political opponents are not a common feature of fascist states, which always feature secret police, secret prisons, and heavy domestic spying, although they are sometimes allowed to exist in a neutered form for show or internal political purposes.

Aggression is closely associated with fascism. Partly the aggression is simply the result of having large standing armies and all the state and corporate apparatus associated with them. Large standing armies simply tend to get used - historians have offered this as one of the important explanations for the First World War - and the impulse to use them is undoubtedly increased by the psychology of fascism.

The psychology of fascist states tends to include penis-fixation - big guns, big flags, and big monuments. Aggression is a direct outgrowth of all the strutting, bragging, and marching.

Aggression also grows out of the fascist tendency to regard the nation as somehow specially blessed or endowed or entitled. There follows an assumed inherit right or even obligation to rule over others or at least to direct their destinies.

When you consider these characteristics, every one of them is an intrinsic part of contemporary American society. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that America is a kind of fascist state, certainly a softer-appearing one than some in the past, but then America excels at marketing, perhaps its one original intellectual gift to the world.

America does cling to ideals of human rights, something which it never fails to remind the world at international gatherings, but the truth is international gatherings are only regarded as useful for just such announcements. Despite clinging to human-rights ideals, at the very same time, America refuses to deal with others on the basis of these rights, and it often fails even to enforce the rights of selected categories of its own citizens.

This ambiguity about human rights is not so odd if you consider the many American Christians who enshrine Jesus' great commandment and the Ten Commandments and yet stand ready at a moment's notice to kill others in meaningless wars.

Genuine respect for human rights is surely more a matter of prevailing day-to-day attitudes in a society than words written on old pieces of paper.

But America is a democracy, isn't it? It certainly has many of the forms of a democracy, but when you closely examine the details, as I've written previously, American democracy resembles a badly worn wood veneer. The ugly structural stuff underneath sticks out the way elbows do in a threadbare coat.

The failure of America's military could be explained by the notion that failure is only what happens when you seek the wrong success. A poorly-governed people, as Americans certainly are, keeps being sent to wars in which they have no vital interest or commitment. Whatever the reason, the record is unmistakable.

It includes Korea after MacArthur's insane march to the Chinese border.

It includes Vietnam, where, despite the slaughter of millions, the US left in shame, abandoning desperate associates clinging to helicopter undercarriages.

It includes America's smaller-scale but long and vicious war on Cuba. The US was embarrassed by failure time and again, shamefully resorted to the terror tactics it now claims to despise, and wasted immense resources supporting thousands of hangers-on. Fidel Castro outlived two generations of American presidents and over six hundred assassination plots.

The record of failures includes the American military's confusing its humanitarian-assistance role in Somalia with Gary Cooper facing down the bad guys in High Noon, an error which gave it an ugly surprise and saw America turn and go home.

The record includes Reagan's poorly-considered landing of Marines in Lebanon. A base blown up by resisting guerrilla forces, the Marines left with a battleship hurling sixteen-inch shells into the hills, killing who knows how many innocent civilians and having achieved nothing.

Of course, in battles or war generally, victory is not always easy to determine. There were many battles in history where victory was claimed or loss assumed in error.

Higher casualties don't always mean losing a battle or even a war. The sacrifice of great numbers sometimes improves a strategic or tactical position, as General Grant in America's Civil War well understood. Vietnam's General Giap understood this also, for despite a horrific slaughter of his people, America suffered defeat.

It was an early sign of the coming defeat when body counts began to dominate American news. It is easy to kill large numbers of people, especially when you have complete air superiority and high-tech weapons, but constant killing may mean little progress against a serious opponent. Often, as in the Blitz, bombing people is completely counter-productive.

In recent weeks, body counts re-appeared in Afghanistan, much the same way opium poppies re-appeared after America's claim to victory over the Taleban (who had suppressed opium). The bodies are supposed to be Taleban, but who can tell whether a dead villager is Taleban?

Even when the body is Taleban, how do we regard that as a victory? The Taleban is a loosely-knit organization, a kind of political party and anti-invader guerilla force, bound to conservative traditions in a hardscrabble land of tough mountain people. Death does not intimidate where people typically live to forty-seven.

Except in the bizarre mind of George Bush, the Taleban is not a terrorist organization,. So when one of them is killed, does it really represent a victory? Or is it viewed by many in Afghanistan as murder by unwelcome foreigners? Clearly, this is the view of many because the Taleban is becoming stronger, surprisingly so according to expert observers.

The recent refusal of NATO countries to commit more troops and resources to Afghanistan was telling. Pressure from the US must have been immense, but the response was virtual silence. Of course, most NATO countries are simply looking after their own best interests. Many of them understand terrorism far better than does the US, having lived with it for decades, and none of them are exhibiting death-wishes or dementia.

They know Al Qaeda has been scattered to the four winds - anything but an achievement from a security point of view - and they see little point in trying to occupy Afghanistan for years. They understand the impossibility of significantly changing so ancient and poor a land. They are not taken in by American Potemkin village projects for bettering life there, after having bombed the hell out of the place. NATO countries in general do not accept Bush's tale about everyone's security depending upon success in Afghanistan for the very good reason that it is false.

On the other hand, those supporting the US in Afghanistan are following Bush's interests, whatever those are, for I'm not sure Bush ever has had a clear grasp of what he is doing himself.

The other lost war is, of course, Iraq. American efforts there have done little but kill civilians and destroy the economy and now threaten to destroy the country itself. Even in Washington, the reality of civil war is dawning. America's real goals in the war are not going to be achieved, the major one of which was to establish a regime friendly to American policy, especially as that policy pertains to Israel. Instead, years of bloody chaos lie ahead. The outcome, who knows? Three separate warring rump states, each willing to do almost anything to gain an advantage, including taking assistance from those most hostile to American policy?

But the American loss in Iraq is far greater than this. The illegal and unjustified invasion has muddied America's reputation, aroused suspicions of its intentions, and put new geopolitical forces into play only dimly perceived at this time.

When are we going to learn how stupidly unproductive war is? And when is the US going to learn how bad it is at war despite its monstrous expenditures preparing for it?

The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II - industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats - has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.

The American establishment's vision of the future, implicit in its behavior and policies, has been that traditional manufacturing jobs will pass to developing countries while greater value-added high-tech jobs and intellectual property rights will provide America's economic strength.

But that is a somewhat arrogant vision, because competitors like China and India do not plan to do only lower value-added work, and they are uniquely gifted to succeed. The Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have an extraordinary reservoir of natural mathematical and engineering talent - every international competition or test shows this starkly - that is only now beginning to be harnessed. There is every reason to believe that over any substantial time the US will decline to a secondary role in high-tech. China or India each likely have something on the order of three or four times the natural mathematical endowment of the US. Their new high-growth economies and emerging modern infrastructure prepare the way for full application of this priceless talent.

There are more forces at work on the place of the American Empire than the emergence of other economic powers, important as that is. Major studies of the decline of empire - from Edward Gibbon to William Shirer - speak to the overwhelming importance of the moral dimension in a society and of the crucial role of capable and responsible leadership.

Polls show that three years after launching its pointless war in Iraq, nearly half of Americans still believed that Iraq was involved in making weapons of mass destruction. Five years after 9/11, better than forty percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Both of these ideas have been proved complete fairy tales. But the concentration of American media and their shared establishment interests with George Bush have produced a fabric of omissions and exaggerations as great as we might expect in a non-democratic society like China.

So-called liberal media, the New York Times being the best example, do almost nothing seriously to correct these misunderstandings. Indeed the Times helped drum America into Iraq, an unforgivable manipulation from people who had the resources to know better, and it did the same thing for horrific failures such as the war in Vietnam. The American people are desperately misinformed. What is the good of a ballot where grave ignorance prevails and is indeed actively promoted?

A menagerie of vitriolic radio and television commentators plus a vast apparatus of phony think-tanks, propaganda mills subsidized by right-wing interests, help greatly in the effort to confuse public understanding. The vitriolic commentators, little more truthful or civil in their speech than those doing the same job for third-world dictators, reinforce popular myths and prejudices, appealing to people's lowest instinct to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of others. The phony think-tanks, much like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pulling levers to generate puffs of smoke and dramatic noise, offer what passes for learned analysis. Both groups receive an immense amount of broadcast time and publication space in the United States.

Going back to the beginning, it can be argued that many parts of the American Constitution - regarded by Americans with a reverence usually reserved for scripture and a document that is close to impossible to change in any meaningful way - are seriously flawed and promote neither responsible government nor democratic principles. The right-wing commentator and think-tank crowd always play up to the quasi-religious notion that the Constitution is the most perfect political document ever conceived. A disgraced, crooked, nasty right-wing politician, Tom DeLay of Texas, always bragged of having a copy folded in his pocket, almost like a priest carrying a bottle of holy water.

The Constitution's flaws leave little optimism for substantial political and policy change in the United States. It's as though all important political institutions were trapped in amber. Without changing the Constitution's flaws, it is hard to see how America's destructive policies at home and abroad can be altered. There are many such flaws, but I'll mention just a few.

One is the Electoral College. Many Americans do not understand that their vote for president technically does not count. The Electoral College, besides being remarkably anti-democratic, promotes corruption in elections with its winner-take-all provision in states. It is amazing that a country more than two centuries old and making great claims for democracy still can't hold honest national elections, both of George Bush's victories, but especially the first, being as dubious as something in an emerging nation.

Another ugly flaw in the Constitution is the power of the Senate. It can veto the more democratic House's legislation. It must approve all major Presidential appointments and treaties. It is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution, for much of American history not being elected at all, but even now being elected in a staggered fashion that insulates its membership from issues of the day. Its internal sixty-percent rule for debate is plainly undemocratic. You only have to look at photos of American Senators to see the swollen, crinkled faces of arrogant (mostly) men, faces of bloated entitlement, grasping power into their seventies and eighties. They resemble the faces of heads of powerful families in the 16th century or, what is almost the same thing, Mafia godfathers. Surprisingly often sons, or other relatives, follow fathers as though they had inherited fiefdoms or money-minting American evangelism ministries.

The Senate's two members for each state is an archaic nonsense that makes members from large states virtually unreachable demigods. The two senators from California each "represent" sixteen million people. The huge expense of mounting media campaigns in large states, where a member could never hope even to offer a live smile to most constituents, turns senators into full-time Fuller Brush salesmen soliciting funds. The expense creates two classes of constituents, those who give and the rest. Lobbyists naturally exploit the situation, meaning policy reflects virtually only the interests of the small group with meaningful access.

Dependence upon advertising means tight control over what is disseminated, with voters expected to believe the actor posing in a white lab coat on a patent medicine commercial is giving genuine information. Advertising and brief appearances on favorably-rigged talk shows generates attitudes of aloofness and celebrity dangerous to the public interest. Thoughtfulness and real debate at the national level have become uncommon.

The designation of the President as commander-in-chief has proved an unfortunate provision with effects the founders never foresaw. Many Americans do not realize that it was the Parliament of Great Britain against which the early Patriots railed. They saw the British Parliament as acting without the beneficent King's full knowledge, understanding fully that the King's powers were already heavily curtailed by the evolution of British parliamentary government. The idea of the King as tyrant was built up later during the Revolutionary War as a propaganda device, and it has been played on by elementary text books since.

So in America's constitutional arrangements, command of the armed forces was granted to the new king-substitute, the President (many founders had favored a lifetime or long-term president who would be "above politics"). This authority was supposedly offset by Congress's having the only authority to declare war. But as we all know, over the last sixty years not one of America's many colonial wars has been formally declared. The power to declare war has become almost meaningless, but the power of America's Frankenstein armed forces taking orders from a president-commander (often not even honestly elected) is anything but meaningless.

The President does not himself suddenly launch a war, although he clearly has at hand intelligence and other agencies of limitless resources, whose leaders serve at his pleasure, capable of constructing compelling myths for what he wants done. He consults with key Senate and Congressional leaders, all under the intimidating shadow of being branded as cowards (or almost worse in America, poor patriots) in a fashion that is little different to what a late-eighteenth century monarch would have done with key parliamentary figures.

For that matter, few Americans realize that even a dictator with such dreadful power as Hitler, for the most part, did not summarily order dire events. Hitler consulted and argued with other prominent members of government concerning major turns in policy. Factions and other centers of power exist even in dictatorships. It is just the people who are not effectively consulted.

The United States, under George Bush, has spent itself silly on the military and security. It has also foolishly spent much, if not all, of its moral authority in the world - something derived from the many world institutions and arrangements established at the end of World War II when America felt generous and expansive - by going ahead with pointless destruction, ignoring world opinion, as though the very act of doing so were the same thing as bold leadership rather than the bullying it is. Bush is almost a parody of poor leadership, believing himself a convincing figure with his jaw squared, his eyebrows knit, while he mumbles what millions recognize as platitudes and bald-faced lies.

The business of Bush wearing a radio device concealed under his jacket for debates or press conferences or important meetings - an indisputable fact from pictures of his back taken at many angles - is a damning revelation of how under the American system an incompetent can serve two terms as President. It is damning, too, of the mainline media which never pursue such matters, choosing never to embarrass a man who has done a great deal of harm to the nation.

America's history is important to understanding the attitudes of its people, although we perhaps should judge American democracy today more by its external actions which include invading pretty much any country it chooses, violating the free elections of other countries, toppling democratically-elected leaders, supporting the oppressive regimes, assassinating leaders, frequently imposing destructive economic sanctions, and generally behaving the way you would expect a bully to act who happened also to be the richest kid in town.

Even an honestly elected government which behaves without regard for those outside its territory, which treats others as though they had no rights, can hardly be called democratic in any meaningful sense.

The War in Iraq has been called by an American expert the worst strategic mistake ever made by the United States, and I believe that will prove a deadly accurate assessment. How do all those American patriot types, clutching their private arsenals in paranoid fear of government tyranny, fail to see how millions of others, like the Iraqis, view American government tyranny abroad? The enemies America has made in destroying and occupying Iraq will engage it for many years in totally needless war and terror.

The Middle East has become more unstable and less predictable for decades thanks to George Bush. All recent American policies have been almost the opposite of what would have proved appropriate and effective to a better future.

The glaring injustice of giving Israel its way in almost anything, including bombing women and children in Beirut, while the U.S. invades Muslim lands can only generate frustration and despair beyond measure. Israel has become a garrison state, a grossly inefficient economy, subsidized by the United States, that maintains a nuclear arsenal and one of the world's most powerful armies, spending an extraordinary portion of its GDP on unproductive military and security apparatus. It is now walling itself in and preparing to carry on with little or no reference to the millions with which it shares its part of the world, except to bomb and rocket them whenever it feels rankled. This is a national vision from hell. The vision has no long-term viability without endless subsidy, an indefinite drain on American resources and the world's patience and a painful injustice for millions of the region's people.

Condoleezza Rice's disgusting words about children and others torn apart by Israeli cluster bombs in Beirut representing the birth pangs of a new Middle East pretty much speaks for itself. Democracy? Democratic values? Human values? Nonsense. Rather, they are words about as far removed from these values as you can get.

I do not believe that any nation which ignores the serious flaws in its democracy and treatment of others can maintain the moral authority in the twenty-first century required for leadership in the world. The world generally is evolving towards democracy and respect for human rights. This is not a result of American policy, it is the natural evolution of human affairs, it is what happens as countries grow and prosper.

It is true, too, that any nation which spends so much on its military, holding dear the anti-democratic and anti-human rights values of any military, cannot maintain that same moral authority. Eisenhower's predicted military-industrial complex is not a friendly face on the world, but it is indisputably the face of America today.

Just consider, as one tiny aspect of this, the disgraceful relationship between Vice-President Cheney and Halliburton Corporation. Halliburton has prospered mightily from Cheney's role as a powerful advocate of war, and Cheney, the company's former CEO, has openly prospered from Halliburton with all kinds of special payments since first running for office. It is an open disgrace, but no more of a disgrace than the way money runs American elections. The world outside America sees all this clearly, and what else can the knowledge generate but cynicism and disgust? How on earth can a man of this quality address the great principles of humanity without causing listeners to snicker? How can anyone be expected to take America's high-sounding rhetoric seriously?

The American international structure carefully built up after World War II is beginning to crumble, although it is not always obvious yet since good appearances are carefully maintained. A prime example is the crumbling of NATO. The grass is still kept well-trimmed at headquarters, but America's insistence on making unnatural demands on this alliance, such as those it has made in Afghanistan, are surely destroying what was once a powerful international organization.

It may be just as well, for Europe has a future more independent of the U.S., and perhaps the decline in NATO only reflects an unavoidable changing reality. Europe's commercial know-how and technology make a natural marriage with Russia's vast natural resources. America has for a couple of decades worked to suppress this development, especially with respect to Russian natural gas exports, but it must in the end prove a losing battle.

Britain's Tony Blair has been exploited by the U.S. to spike European aspirations, much as Margaret Thatcher was previously. Because of a shared history with the former colonies, a good deal of residual xenophobia regarding people on the Continent, plus a sense of its own special importance engendered by memories of empire, Britain remains confused about its role in Europe, and the United States keeps playing on this confusion to avoid a more cohesive E.U. Such American policies in the long run can leave only bitterness over manipulating Europe's affairs, and they cannot prevent what physical facts and natural self-interests dictate as destiny.

So, too, with respect to Europe's relations with the Middle East. Israelis sometimes talk of Europe as being anti-Semitic simply because Europeans are more critical of Israel's policies. But Europe simply sees the problem of Palestine/Israel in a clearer light than the U.S. where religious fundamentalism and other powerful factors blur vision. Europe also naturally wants to cultivate the best commercial relations with the owners of the world's great reservoirs of crude oil, so commercial incentives add to the force of the moral view. Not only must Europe look to its future energy supplies, but the E.U. is expanding, and Western Asia is becoming a next-door neighbor.

These are just some of the reasons we can expect a decline in the relative influence and importance of the United States over the next decades. A more balanced, multi-polar world is emerging. Unfortunately, the people who seem least ready to deal with it are Americans.

The U.S. either could not or would not produce any evidence, yet it insisted the Taleban was behaving in bad faith and harboring criminals.

To this day, the public has not been given one genuine piece of evidence that ties bin Laden to 9/11. I'm not saying he's innocent, only that there was no proof at the time Bush used him as an excuse to invade Afghanistan.

Bin Laden certainly did not like the United States, but was he in any way responsible for a great crime? How would his apparent happiness with events distinguish him from the group of Israeli spies in the New York area who were photographed, reported to police, and arrested (later being quietly deported) after dancing and shouting atop a truck as the World Trade Center billowed into flames? To this day, the FBI wanted-notice for bin Laden does not mention 9/11.

I am sure that with a real campaign of pressure - diplomatic, legal, and economic - America could have secured bin Laden's extradition. Bush's government didn't really try. Invasion was an attractive option for many reasons. These include satisfying the bellowing, belly-over-the-belt types that are Bush's natural constituency, doing something for Bush's missing leadership credentials, gaining new influence over a nuclear and uncooperative Pakistan, building a long-planned trans-Afghanistan pipeline, and, importantly, preparing the way for an invasion of Iraq, something discussed and advocated for years before in Bush's Neo-con crowd.

Afghanistan is an ancient, backward civilization with an average life expectancy of 45 years. Those who really know a lot about the country tended to say from the beginning that it was unrealistic for the U.S. to expect to make meaningful change there. This interpretation agrees with generally accepted principles of economic development, in particular the principle that social and political changes only come gradually with steady economic growth. One is tempted to say that the U.S. could have brought more genuine, positive change in Afghanistan and Iraq by dropping planeloads of dollar bills rather than bombs.

Although American military destruction in Afghanistan appears to have been less than in Iraq, this largely reflects the fact that there was little infrastructure in Afghanistan to start with, especially when compared with what existed in Iraq, once the Arab world's most advanced country. Still, relative terms are what count here, and destruction in Afghanistan was considerable. Now that the financial costs of the two wars and the instability and risk of the occupations have proved much greater than anticipated, Bush is not able to execute even rushed, poorly-made plans for reconstruction. This is not a formula for long-term success even if you are a Neo-con visionary.

Making change there - beyond getting rid of bin Laden and the boys and removing the Taleban government - was never the American purpose, although it features heavily in all propaganda supporting the invasion as though it were a central purpose.

Canada's Conservative government today plays a cover version of the same tired song, hyping a military mission supporting American withdrawal from its fiasco as a noble nation-building project. Canada's Prime Minister Harper whom Bush affectionately now calls "Steve" - tries to distort the simple freakish fact that 30 Canadians died in the World Trade Center into a grandiose argument for spending billions on a delusional War on Terror. More Canadians than that die every month in traffic accidents on roads in the United States.

The U.S.-placed government in Kabul has a sensible and reasonable man as President, however he has almost no power, nor is there the prospect of his gaining any. The U.S. would have to re-conquer the country - a huge, ugly, and perhaps impossible job against the warlords who helped them the first time - if it really wanted to change things. The warlords who made a cheap American victory possible are the very reason the President can have no real power over the country, a vicious cycle if there ever was one.

But it is a misnomer to refer to an American victory, even a cheap one. In ancient lands, things, including guerrilla wars, move at a pace not understood by those blackberrying around Washington making presentations from notebook computers. Dispersing the Taleban so that the Northern Alliance could rule for a while is hardly victory. America and its allies now are trapped in an impossible situation. Other than wishing all opposition somehow would disappear, it is not even clear now what would constitute victory.

British commanders have told Blair recently that hostile activity in the area of the country they occupy has so increased that they cannot succeed without more troops and equipment. That comes as very unwelcome news to Blair whose popularity in Britain is even lower than Bush's in America. More troops, more coffins, more money.

Jason Burke, a journalist with considerable knowledge of Afghanistan, wrote the following as part of a column in The Observer. It offers, in an off-hand, matter-of-fact way several realities of Afghanistan and the Taleban generally not appreciated in North America.

Walk out of the gates, past the bored British soldiers in their guardhouse, past the Afghan troops on the outer wall, past razor wire and take the dusty path through the ramshackle cemetery. Go past a new, whitewashed villa built for a local 'businessman' and on through the labyrinth of narrow alleys and traditional mud-walled homes and then turn left through a passage way and there you will find the scruffy bazaar of Lashkar Gah and the Taliban.

Two men, both bearded and wearing the trademark thick-coiled black turban, were sitting in the shade behind a friend's workshop. They had agreed to talk to The Observer. 'I am proud to be a Talib,' said Fazl Rahman, 40. 'Why should I deny it? Why should I be afraid?'

'The foreigners are here for their own reasons,' said his younger comrade. 'If they were here to help us, everyone would be living better. But look.' He pointed to the dirt street outside, the shacks, the sagging electricity cables, the thin trees that provide scant protection from the heat of the early afternoon sun and then waved his hand towards the camp a few hundred metres away, the longest-established British base in Helmand province. 'All foreigners are our enemy,' he says. 'You are a journalist, so we don't harm you. But if you were a soldier we would kill you. Afghanistan is the castle of Islam and the foreigners are destroying our religion.'

The Taleban, in other words, are easily found even near a British military base. They include the most ordinary-looking men. The American effort at building-up the country, if it ever was serious, is a failure.

Burke's report suggests the Taleban cause strongly appeals to feelings against foreign occupation and in defense of religion. What Americans do not understand is that the Taleban is not a fixed organization but a fluid alliance of interests. The fierce mountain men of Afghanistan move back and forth between one alliance and another, depending on changing needs and advantages. The sad state of American achievement was demonstrated by recent bragging headlines about one old, crippled warrior chief changing sides, leaving the Taleban. Afghanistan is the land of ferocious (male) libertarianism if ever there was one, something you might think Americans, with all their rhetoric about freedom to bear arms against tyranny, would understand.

How can anyone influence the new explosion of drugs from Afghanistan? The economy is a shambles, and poor farmers can only make a living with poppies. Any aggressive effort to end the crop simply creates new opposition to the existing government. Anyway, there
is no effective central government to undertake this task. Even in Kabul the government's authority remains weak. The government's allies, the warlords, profit from poppies.

The technology and know-how of guerrilla fighting steadily improves in Afghanistan. Of course, it has always been so with guerrilla operations, the IRA, for example, having increased the deadliness of its efforts dramatically over the years. Iraq's huge guerrilla movement is becoming adept at creating new devices and tactics, exporting them to Afghanistan, and an angry Iran is there to offer lots of help and encouragement. The U.S. knows this. That's why it won't stay for a great deal longer in Afghanistan. Even in Iraq, the American commander has referred already to plans for some withdrawal of troops despite being in the midst of murderous storm.

There is no reason to feel hopeful or idealistic about anyone's role in Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Iraq are neither wars in the traditional sense nor humanitarian projects. They are foreign occupations of people who do not want to occupied. The idea that you can successfully occupy a hostile land into peace remains a delusion of consultants on big expense accounts in Washington. Just ask Israel nearly four decades after the Six Day War.

Now, in many countries with multi-ethnic populations, most people would see this as charming and flattering. Canada's anthem has two official versions, French and English, and were a group of immigrants to offer it in Ukrainian or Mandarin, most Canadians would be tickled. It would undoubtedly be featured on CBC.

But in America, the broadcast of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner has aroused a somewhat different response. Charles Key, great great grandson of Francis Scott, offered the immortal words, "I think it's despicable thing that someone is going into our society from another country and … changing our national anthem."

"This is evoking spirited revulsion on the part of fair-minded Americans," offered John Teeley, representative of one of innumerable private propaganda mills in Washington commonly dignified as think-tanks. Mr. Teeley continued, "You are talking about something sacred and iconic in the American culture. Just as we wouldn't expect people to change the colors of the national flag, we wouldn't expect people to fundamentally change the anthem and rewrite it in a foreign language."

A foreign language? There are roughly thirty-million Spanish speakers in the United States. The analysis here is interesting: an immigrant singing an anthem in his own language resembles someone changing the national flag. This argument does, perhaps unintentionally, reveal the real concern: Hispanics are changing our country, and we don't like it.

So it is not surprising that the American low-life constituency's political and moral hero, George Bush, should declare: "I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English."

Never mind that the American Constitution says nothing about language. Never mind that waves of immigrants from Europe about a hundred years ago founded countless private schools and cultural institutions in the United States where German or Italian or Hebrew were the languages used and promoted. Never mind that after a generation or two, minority immigrants always end up adopting the language of the majority, something which is close to an economic necessity. And never mind that xenophobia in a land of immigrants should have no place.

An entertaining historical note here is that Francis Scott Key did not write the important part of The Star Spangled Banner, its music. Key wrote a breast-swelling amateurish poem whose words were fitted to an existing song. The existing song, as few Americans know, was an English song, To Anachreon in Heaven, a reference to a Greek poet whose works concern amour and wine. The Star Spangled Banner, in any version, only began playing a really prominent role in America during my lifetime, that is, with the onset of the Cold War. In Chicago public schools during the early 1950s, we sang My Country, 'Tis of Thee, another breast-sweller, written not many years after Key's, by another amateur poet, Samuel Smith, sung to the music of the British national anthem, God Save the King.

It shouldn't be necessary to remind anyone in an advanced country that things change, and they change at increasing rates. Even in the remote possibility, a century or two from now, Spanish or some blend of Spanish and English were to become the dominant language of the United States, what would it matter to today's angry and intolerant people? After all, the English language came from another land, and it grew out of centuries of change from Latin to early versions of German and French layered onto the language of Celtic people.

Throughout history, fascism is closely associated with xenophobia, but then we find many other unpleasant aspects of fascism - from illegal spying to recording what people read in libraries, from torture to illegal invasion - feature in George Bush's America.

Ordinarily, the firing of some middling CIA officer is not an event to interest many other than John Le Carre fans and those who linger over cappuccino at the CIA's Langely cafeteria. Not just conservative throw-backs recognize the need for secrecy in many intelligence matters.

Ordinarily, the fact that some CIA agent has broken his or her oath of secrecy would not cause much disturbance outside the unhinged James Angleton types who make up some portion of any intelligence community. Surely, out of tens of thousands of employees, this is something that happens with regularity.

But Ms. McCarthy's case is different, and it is of interest to the world. She is responsible, reportedly by her own admission during a furious round of polygraph tests, for information supplied to The Washington Post concerning the CIA's vast secret prison system.

This CIA-run gulag, and there is no name more fitting, does not resemble the case of a new secret weapon or of a mole planted somewhere abroad. The existence of a secret gulag goes to the heart of democratic values.

Is the population of any democratic country not entitled to be informed of so vast and creepy an enterprise? To exercise their franchise based on facts? At some point, any secret operation, if it becomes large enough and affects the lives of tens of thousands, risks undermining the very legitimacy of the government running it.

The reputation of the United States abroad has suffered perhaps irreparable damage from the excesses and stupidities of Bush's War on Terror. So much so that Americans are now advised by their own State Department to guard their behavior and even identity when traveling abroad. Are Americans not entitled to be informed of what has caused this? Of what has been done in their name?

If you can keep tens of thousands secretly locked away and subject to torture, what prevents this number from becoming millions? Where are the limits without public information? The inherent integrity of American government officials, you say? Three-quarters of the world's people today would laugh caustically at the suggestion.

But if you are genuinely interested in discovering the truth, there are plenty of sources for first-hand information. And anyone taking a little time to search through some of these comes away with a sick feeling.

From several ex-soldiers comes a vivid image of America's house-to-house methods of searching for "insurgents." A small block of C-4 plastique is fixed to the front door of a house, the door is blown in, and several armored giants rush through the shock and smoke with their automatic weapons at the ready. Women and children are held to one side at gunpoint, while any men are taken roughly for questioning. In most cases, the men have nothing worthwhile to say, but they and other members of their families are left with a terrifying experience they will never forget.

These violent procedures have been repeated thousands of times, both in Iraq and in the mountain villages of Afghanistan. Could this be part of what Condoleezza Rice meant when she said recently in Britain that despite thousands of tactical mistakes, America's basic strategy was sound? Can you imagine her saying the same thing if Washington-area police blew her door down and stormed into her home in Chevy Chase or whatever other exclusive area she lives, perhaps looking for drug dealers or murderers, suspecting her home because she is black?

Another aspect of America's crude tactics has been their way of responding to periodic mortar fire. The American forces use a high-tech radar gizmo that tracks the path of such shells supposedly to permit accurate return fire by artillery. Unfortunately the gizmo often does not work properly, and even when it does operate well, the tactics of mobile guerillas firing a shell from a truck or car and driving away leave the data of the gizmo useless. Well, not completely useless, because American artillery still responds. It's just that all they hit are innocent residences or businesses.

The trigger-happy nature of Americans at check points is a well-established fact. These boys, many of them having joined up for benefits like money for college, do not want to be in these places, and they are irritated by the strange tongues and cultures and the blazing heat and sandstorms. They simply shoot first and ask questions after. I suppose this tactic might have been appropriate on the Eastern Front in World War II, but it is totally unsuited to a place you are occupying after having invaded, a place where the overwhelming majority of people with which you interact are just ordinary people going about their lives.

There have been dozens of pictures on the Internet of whole families obliterated in their cars by American soldiers. Children have been pumped full of holes. A kidnapped Italian journalist almost lost her life on her short journey back to freedom. The brave Italian secret service agent who had secured her freedom and was accompanying her to freedom was pumped full of holes. Yet this car and its contents were well known and had been identified to American forces.

It is extremely unlikely this was an error, the Italian journalist being someone hated by American occupation authorities for her critical stories. Such a number of unarmed journalists have been shot by American troops that the idea of the accidents of war is not credible. Of course, the recent revelation in Britain that Bush actually discussed bombing offices of Aljazeera adds another dimension to these events.

A number of British soldiers, Britain's pathetic Blair being America's only true ally in the phony coalition America's press never fails to name, have gone on record about American tactics. These include several senior officers, an unprecedented criticism of an ally during war. What they have said to the press is that American tactics are brutal and thoughtless, almost certain in the long run to produce more enemies than friends. Few forces in the world have more genuine experience than Britain's after decades in Northern Ireland, yet all their advice is treated with contempt by arrogant American commanders and politicians.

It seems both public and press have forgotten the words of Donald Rumsfeld not long after the U.S. triumphed in Afghanistan, the words being among the most shameful in American history and certainly ranking with anything a dread figure like Reinhard Heydrich uttered. On what to do with the thousands of prisoners taken in the invasion, Rumsfeld publicly stated they should be killed or walled away forever. It does appear he was taken at his word, for thousands of prisoners disappeared around the time. There are many eye-witness reports - a documentary film was made by a Scots director - about Afghan prisoners having been taken into the desert in trucks to suffocate in the blazing heat. American soldiers, if they didn't actively help, just stood around and let it happen.

In the early part of the invasion of Afghanistan, tens of thousands of emergency de-hydrated food packets were dropped by American planes in some of the same areas that cluster bombs were being dropped. As pictures on the Internet testify, the bomblet canisters (pressure-sensitive cans packed with something like razor wire and high explosive) and the food packages were virtually the same optical yellow color. Imagine how many hungry peasants and children were attracted to these deadly areas by the food packets, only to be torn apart?

Bad publicity all over the world did stop the Pentagon's grotesque practice, but the question of using cluster bombs near civilian populations remains. It was done both in Afghanistan and Iraq. The brave journalists of Aljazeera took dozens of pictures of what these bombs did to children in Iraq, their publication providing one of the reasons for the Pentagon's and Bush's intense hatred of the network.

The revelations about the behavior of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison are well known, although the last round of abuse and torture pictures released did not include the worst stuff that American Senators saw in closed session a while back. It's almost as though the "tamer" stuff was released to defuse demands for more information. America's great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has said the worst stuff included boys being raped by American soldiers.

How many senior officers or officials have paid for these horrors that absolutely had to be known to them? The answer is none. What did Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina suffer for the mass murder and rape of women and children in Vietnam a few decades ago? Not much, and their seniors nothing at all.

Of course we know from many sources including amateur plane spotters and flight records that America runs a gigantic secret prison system. Sources in Europe say that 14,000 are held in Iraq alone. There are also secret prisons in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and at Guantanamo. All of these prisoners are held with no legal rights whatever, just as though they had disappeared into Stalin's Gulag.

In most cases the prisoners are simply people who fought Americans in their invasions of two lands. Since when do we do this to the fighters who oppose us in war? Americans themselves in the past have joined foreign wars as idealists or as mercenaries. This happened in South Africa, various African anti-colonial wars, Central America, South America, Indo-China, Spain, and other places. It's an old tradition going back to Lafayette and Pulaski in the American Revolutionary War. The men, and boys, America now holds with no rights were doing no more than what tens of thousands of Americans and others have done previously.

As I have written before, if you want the rule of law, you cannot stand outside the law and claim its moral support. What America is doing in its "war on terror" is little more than freshened-up fascism. It wants a pipeline through Afghanistan and a subservient government in Iraq, and it dresses up the brutal tactics used to achieve these goals as a war on terror.

Even if you do not believe that bin Laden is dead, what is beyond question is that American activities in Afghanistan and Iraq are building a vast reservoir of resentments and a training school for future terrorists. Tens of thousands of disaffected young Muslim men not only now have something to deeply resent but they have the operational conditions to perfect their arts of covert war. According to countless witnesses from Afghanistan and Iraq, America's brutal, thoughtless tactics have only inflamed tempers. Canada's good name should not be associated with this.

The previous government's making an under-the-table deal with Bush to place Canadian troops in Afghanistan surely does not make it our war. Your continuing, rather shrill, insistence still does not make it so. The deal was, of course, an effort to placate Bush for our not supporting his illegal invasion of Iraq. America is Canada's neighbor, but it is a fatuous and immoral argument that you help your neighbor in criminal activities just because he is your neighbor.

You and other voices from Western Canada have made much of reforming Canada's democratic institutions, and I agree that a number of them do need reforming. Yet no greater vice to democracy can exist than a government's committing the lives of young people and the whole nation's reputation to war without any consultation or debate. If you believe in democratic values, as you claim, you cannot support such behavior.

The argument is all the more powerful when war is the behavior of a minority government. Your government represents the will of less than forty percent of Canadians. How can you believe then that your views on the war should be the views of most Canadians? Through polls and every other indication of public opinion, the majority of the Canadian people have made it clear they do not support America's wars in the Middle East.

The Canadian general in charge of operations in Afghanistan has made public statements that are shameful to Canada's reputation in the world. Stuff about going over to do some killing. He sounds like an American wannabe raised on Rambo movies.

Canada did have a terrorist incident every bit as dreadful as 9/11. I refer to the bombing of the Air India flight years ago. Taking account of Canada's size, this event killed proportionately more Canadians than 9/11's American victims. While the outcome of that investigation has been disappointing, Canada never contemplated bombing Sikh communities because of it. America's logic in the war on terror is simply that ridiculous.

Harpers minority-government party went from 29.6% of the vote in 2004 to 36.3% in 2006, hardly a mandate for change, and certainly not revolutionary change. Even Conservative diehards, while blowing about victory, were perceptibly disappointed: you could almost hear the breath whistling through their teeth. The new Conservatives remain decidedly a minority party.

When we consider that the Liberals were divided by their change in leadership, plagued by scandals and rumors of scandals, and ran an unappealing campaign, the still-small vote for Conservatives gains is telling.

Stephen Harper's muzzling of the Conservatives' Social-Neanderthal Wing, largely resident in Alberta, during the 2006 campaign also must be taken into account. In 2004, several of Harper's religious-right throwbacks made embarrassing public statements about social policy, reminding Canadians voters that they might just be letting a gang of Jehovah's Witnesses into their living rooms. Harper silenced these people in 2006.

Harper himself spoke more calmly than he did in 2004, when he sometimes resembled a flat-footed, angry kid, and I truly believe Canadians, determined to punish the Liberals, with their usual sensible and practical approach to politics, realized that a minority Harper government represents little threat.

Harper simply will not be in a position to change any of the major social policies most hated in heavily American-influenced Alberta. Even if Harper were in a better position to try, Canada's enlightened courts stand ready to strike down any poorly-conceived legislation. In some cases, notably that of gay marriage, it was the courts themselves that brought important human-rights issues to the point where legislation was required.

Harper has already spoken of the courts. I don't know why it is, but right-wingers always castigate courts for doing their jobs. Thomas Jefferson, the intellectual godfather of the American extreme right, absolutely hated federal courts, and it had nothing to do with democracy because Jefferson didn't believe in democracy, and his Virginia was a place were a tiny portion of the population – white, male owners of substantial property (roughly one percent of the population, even after the Revolution) - got to vote.

Jefferson was ready to have Virginia separate, more than half a century before the Civil War, over the issue of the Supreme Court's interpreting the Bill of Rights. Jefferson thought the words were just fine as advertising, but any attempt at their enforcement threatened his comfortable world as slaveholder, local aristocrat, and narrow-minded states-righter. His view reflected his own life in which he wrote many high-sounding phrases as a false legacy while living off the avails of slavery and believing blacks and women and others were not suited to play a role in government. A toned-down version of this nasty American intellectual heritage crops up in Alberta frequently, and Harper sometimes mimics it, though admittedly with a less hateful tone than that of its chief American exponent, ex-cockroach exterminator and big-time political money-launderer, Tom Delay of Texas.

The new Conservatives did pick up their first seats in Quebec, but despite Quebec's reputation as a progressive society, we should not forget that it was not all that long ago a base for social credit, that strange amalgam of conservatism, rural values, and financial mysticism. The Bloc Quebecois stretched hard to sweep the province over Liberal scandal but only succeeded in sounding tired as well as highlighting its disingenuousness over the connection between it and separatism. Who else was there to turn to? The NDP is viewed as a boring troop of Anglo Boy Scouts in Quebec.

So long as Harper sticks to reforms like sensible new rules for government accountability, no one can object. Other relatively minor changes, likely to be supported by one or another party, will do no harm.

There is one change that will be regrettable if Harper can get support from another party in parliament for it. The Liberals did a lot of work at building a genuine national day-care system, an important concept in a society where more than three-quarters of women work.

In places like the violence-plagued Jamaican areas of Toronto, real day-care is badly needed and the city has planned, based on agreements with the Liberals, to create many new sites. But Harper's campaign promise is instead for a monthly cheque, kind of a super baby-bonus, although not large enough to buy day-care for anyone. A cheque will be welcomed by anyone getting it, and will be especially so by Harper's stay-at-home, mothers-in-apron crowd, but will it do anything to create good day-care where it is most needed? Does any honest person believe that a cheque will do what a well-organized, easily-accessed system would do, especially where serious problems already involve poor parenting?

The greatest threat Harper's minority represents is agreement with the Bloc Quebecois to de-centralizing programs with cash flowing to the provinces. The reason for the Bloc's support of such programs is obvious.

I do not oppose specific new agreements where old ones are out of date, as for example involving disproportionate impacts of immigration on a city like Toronto. But wholesale changes are fraught with difficulties. You only have to look at Bush's colossal blunders in reordering American taxes, depleting the American treasury while rewarding segments of society with windfall wealth, and yet spending like a drunken sailor on the things he thinks important. Gigantic tax cuts like Bush's have huge long-term implications for a society, many of them unpleasant or destructive.

Just one example of such destructive tax changes, perhaps many Canadians do not appreciate, is the tremendous burden that has fallen on American local governments, many of which are poor because they are home mainly to poor people. Property taxes on homes in many U.S. cities have reached extortionate levels, further driving people to distant suburbs and encouraging mindless sprawl and the choking off of healthy cities. Another example is multilevel income taxes in the U.S. with individual states generally having their own separate systems, rules, and forms - this even involves some people filing and paying income taxes to more than one state. Many American cities, too, now levy taxes we do not associate with urban jurisdiction.

Canada already is a more de-centralized society, dangerously so in some aspects. The informal coalition of a Quebec separatist party and the implicitly separatist sentiments of Harper's Alberta crowd is a risky combination for the nation's future health and stability. This is exactly the path by which Quebec separatism is truly dangerous: federal politicians making gradual cozy arrangements which weaken the bonds of national identity. Any referendum on separation with a clear question, under prevailing arrangements in Canada, cannot produce a majority in Quebec, much less a convincing majority. The Bloc's behavior and results in this election, even at a time of heightened resentment over past federal Liberal behavior, demonstrates this forcefully, as do endless polls over many years, and as does the last referendum with its impossibly-ambiguous and complex question. Even were it possible to imagine a referendum producing a yes, the years of detailed negotiation over assets and liabilities required to sort out a fair divorce would soon exhaust the momentum for change.

In Alberta, we already have a government that doesn't know what to do with its new-found wealth. What on earth would it do with more? It's all code for a form of separatism, a severe weakening of the national government. If you listen to some Alberta voices, you hear silly things like you might expect from a pimply teenage rock star that has overnight become a multimillionaire. Alberta has simply lucked out in the tarsands with world oil prices exploding. None of the province's new affluence is due to the wisdom of its premier, Ralph Klein, or to the philosophy of Harper's crowd. Klein balanced the budget with an unanticipated flood of cash, something with which any premier could balance a budget. Were world oil prices to collapse, all of the braggadocio over right-wing intellectual nonsense like "not being afraid of excellence in Alberta" would dry up like prairie grass in a drought.

Important social programs that almost define the character of Canada need to apply, with accommodating variations, coast to coast, and they need the resources from wealthier parts of the country to assist the poorer parts. When we seriously depart from this principle, Canada will have become the United States North.

I hope the Liberals take their rebuke by the electorate seriously, making it abundantly clear before the next election that the party is thoroughly clean and repentant. That and a sympathetic new leader, perhaps an altogether fresh voice, are the sine qua non of coming back before the Conservative-separatist axis inflicts too much damage on the country.

Harper's almost wet-eyed puppy attitude towards the United States is dangerous over any extended period, especially at a time of American unapologetic imperial hubris, the kind of thing that makes the ongoing, pointless destruction in Iraq possible. If the Liberals do things right, Harper will not have the time.

We can expect, in the not-too-distant future, American-led action against Iran. With America's over-stretched military forces, the bad taste in many Congressmen's mouths of a unbelievably costly, failed policy in Iraq, plus new lows in Bush's popularity, actual invasion seems unlikely. However, severe sanctions and bombing or missile attacks seem likely. The price of oil will soar yet again since Iran is one of the world's great crude oil reservoirs, sending a great, unpleasant shock through the economies of Western nations. Islamic countries will yet again feel insultingly stung by the unbalanced justice of American policy. Will Prime Minister Harper embrace such a de-stabilizing policy that is not in Canada's long-term interest but is solely guided by America's will to re-order the planet?

I do believe we all know to whom Harper is tipping his hat with these words. George Bush, author of two wars which have killed more than a hundred thousand innocent people and the champion of an ugly set of repressive laws in the United States, says "God Bless America!" every chance he gets.

Some might say Bush uses the line because he has nothing else to say, and I don't doubt this is part of the truth. But slogans of this kind are always used to protect dangerous people from criticism. The words are used also as code, a kind of insidious political wink, to bloodthirsty supporters, the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell types. They says things that cannot be uttered in public.

Bush usually says it in front of a set of gigantic, eagle-topped American flags, reminiscent of nothing so much as the days when Germany's leader spoke and sputtered in front of platoons of monstrous, threatening flags.

Bush also always wears a prominently-placed American flag pin on his lapel, just in case you forget where he's from. I can never help thinking of the image of Hitler wearing his quiet Iron Cross on an otherwise plain, neatly-tailored uniform. Neatness and patriotism for the cameras instead of troops sloshing through human blood.

The belt buckle of the German legions which murdered their way across Europe were embossed with "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) over a fierce eagle grasping the swastika. This is only to say that there is a record in fairly recent history of the use of religious slogans in politics to cover horrors. I recall a photograph of American Marines, having illegally invaded Iraq, kneeling for a quick blessing before going out to kill more Iraqis in their own land.

Were I to dip further into European history, I would name the countless wars and persecutions in which God Bless Something Or Other! was invoked over the bodies of burning, bleeding, or broken victims.

Religion does not belong in public life, and Stephen Harper's efforts to drag it in says a great deal about him to those choosing to listen. This principle is as much a defense of freedom of religion as anything else: millions of Christians have been slain by other Christians over subtle differences of belief.

Religion in politics violates Canadians' traditional political civility. While God may be understood as a translation for Allah or Jehovah, the name is completely unsuitable for those embracing Buddhism or Hinduism or Humanism or no religion at all. This usage opens wounds where none need exist.

Even among today's Christians, God does not have the same meaning to everyone. To a Pat Robertson, God is someone who destroys communities with hurricanes when they fail to recognize the truth of Pat's preaching. Pat's God is also someone who sanctions the assassination of democratically-elected leaders who happen to oppose American policies.

And please, make no mistake, a core portion of Harper's Alberta-based party are people with just such views.

Not a lot of Canadians understand that a large portion of Alberta Crown land was taken up by Americans looking for farmland at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. There was a heavy in-migration of American attitudes from the province's beginning. This was reinforced by the development of oil and gas in the 1940s and 1950s, and has been reinforced further still with the recent development of the tarsands.

Look at the Alberta government's Internet site where Ralph Klein lists himself under the heading Executive Branch, a purely American expression not even applicable to parliamentary government. Look at Klein's ugly public outbursts which remind one of nothing so much as a Tom Delay or a Newt Gingrich.

Remind yourself of Harper's record of saying things like Alberta should build a firewall around itself, an American gated community on a grand scale. Look at the city of Calgary whose lighted glass blocks are positively eerie at night in a city which virtually empties to the suburbs at five or six o'clock, American-style. No street life, none of the flavor of Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal. A colony of dangerous Dallas.

Remind yourself that Harper strongly advocated Canada join America's illegal invasion of Iraq. Most disturbingly, Harper advocated this bloody policy, not on the basis of sharing Bush's dark beliefs, but on the basis of catering to Bush's favor over trade. Harper said, again and again, Canada should join an illegitimate war because it was what its major trading partner was doing. Blood for gold. You just can't take a lower ethical path. I'll take a ten-year old scandal anytime.

If Stephen Harper heads a minority government, you may be sure he will continue to show the kind of artificial restraint of language he has shown for much of the campaign. Does any critically-thinking Canadian believe this will continue if he succeeds in gaining a majority? He is already criticizing Canada's courts, a favorite activity of Texas's poisonous Tom Delay. One of Harper's senior advisors, Tom Flanagan, is an American ex-patriot bristling with the perspectives and attitudes of the Midwest where he was raised.

The United States is almost certainly the worst example possible in the advanced world of a civil and cohesive society. Canada's arguing between provinces seems civilized compared to the dangerous pressures in American society where a President can be impeached for a dribble on a dress or where a boy washed ashore can be kept from his loving father and home in the name of freedom. A place today where dissidents face arrest or spying and travel-bans or, at best, are told to get out if they don't like it. Only the drumbeat of jingoistic patriotism, reinforced with religious slogans, holds a people together who are full of conflict and anger over their country's activities and policies but feel almost powerless to change anything.

Canadians must think hard when voting. The nation has been prospering without Harper's policies and it has avoided at least one pointless war. In politics, you have to pick your battles carefully because no one party can represent all the issues about which you care. Peace and civility and dedication to broad human rights are priceless and may well be put at risk with a Harper majority.

Although his image is well known, there is no official photograph on file with American border control, and he has never been fingerprinted or body-searched. Most disconcerting of all, he delivers parcels to children all over the world, including the children living in the Axis of Evil. His intentions with this activity are not understood beyond some fuzzy generalization about kindness and generosity to all. Clearly, here was the world's largest unplugged pipeline to potential terrorists.

It was only after receiving no response to several urgent letters from the State Department requesting an immediate meeting in Washington that a decision was made to approach Santa's North Pole solitude. As usual in such matters with the people now running America, a wing of America's most lethal killing machines was employed for the purpose. You never know what you might encounter in such a forbidding place.

As the planes first zoomed over the icy silence of the North Pole workshop, one of the pilots decided to swoop down for a closer look. He was one of those daring fly-boys, and his tail struck the only wire for thousands of miles around, the North Pole Telegraph, sending his plane hurling into the workshop in a ball of flames with tons of ammunition and missiles exploding.

Santa and Mrs. Claus rushed out of their snow-blanketed gingerbread house to see what was happening, trying to calm the terrified reindeer running from their stable at one end of the house. The elves, too, scurried towards the stable, trying to stop the reindeer from running or flying off.

Above, in the dark vault of sky, the other pilots observed the explosion and saw missile trails smoking into the air. They also saw the frantic activity below and quickly concluded their comrade had come under anti-aircraft attack. So they swooped down in attack formation, rapid-fire canon tearing into everything ahead of them.

Most of the reindeer fell in the snow, spurting warm blood across the bluish-white surface. Most of the elves, too, fell gasping for life. Mrs. Claus received a wound in the head and instantly fell limp. Santa tried heroically to reach his wife but realized the situation was hopeless and turned, running into the darkness accompanied by Prancer, the only surviving reindeer.

The only witness to the massacre is one surviving elf now living somewhere in Canada under an assumed identity, fearful for his life. It is only from his testimony that we know anything about Santa's fate.

Realizing the horrific mistake they had made, the pilots dropped white phosphorus bombs with the intention of incinerating all evidence. The entire North Pole lit up and Santa and Prancer could be seen in the distance on a huge block of ice drifting off into the dark sea, the ice everywhere cracked and weakened by the combined effects of white phosphorus and years of global warming.

Within in a few hours, the beating sound of a black helicopter approached Santa and Prancer. The elf, from his hiding place in a snowdrift, could only make out intermittent sounds across the howling coldness, but it seems armed men emerged from the helicopter, shot Prancer and shackled Santa, shoving him into the dark, beating machine. The elf heard a word that sounded like Guantanamo and Santa has not been heard from since. Reports of his fate reached the International Red Cross and organizations like Amnesty International, leading to inquiries, but these have been met only with silence from American authorities.

Guerilla warfare, terrorism, and fanatical causes are not new to the 21st century, they are as old as human society, and governments have had many ways of dealing with them. This goes so far as governments changing around those regarded as terrorists and heroes, according to the needs of the time, much the way victors in a war define who were the good guys and bad guys.

One thing history surely does tell us is that nothing is more dangerous than Condeleezza's tendency to speak in sweeping, virtually meaningless generalizations about the people she regards as foes. Every war of aggression, every wave of state terror, every deadly fanatical cause has used just such terms. People are described with de-humanized slogans, making them easy to hate and abuse. We should all go on a personal terror alert when powerful figures talk this way.

The assertion of a special case or status in the current situation is utterly dishonest. It is more than dishonest: it is a deliberately constructed logical fallacy calculated to elicit the idea of special measures from listeners. It is America's special measures that Condoleezza went to Europe to defend.

The special measures of concern are secret prison camps and torture. Condoleezza's basic approach at the start of her trip was to assert that the United States doesn't do anything nasty or underhanded while at the same time just telling everyone to mind their own business. That didn't get her very far, and she had to adjust her words in the face of incredulity, frustration, and anger.

Then Condoleezza demonstrated a remarkable ability to turn around American policy or at least to seem to be doing so. In one day, she went from firmly stating that Americans abroad were exempt from certain international commitments of the United States in treating prisoners to saying they were bound. European leaders were publicly contented with what seemed a concession, but the truth is they were just not prepared to stand up to threats Condoleezza whispered in their ears.

"The United States has not transported anyone and will not transport anyone to a country where we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured." Condoleezza Rice

I wonder then what could have been happening then when a German citizen was kidnapped in Macedonia about two years ago, drugged, flown to Afghanistan, kept for five months, tortured, and finally left abandoned in some bleak place in Bosnia when his American Gestapo captors apparently learned they had made a mistake?

I wonder what was going on when a Canadian citizen whose plane made a stopover in the U.S. was removed, imprisoned, and denied his rights? He happened to be a dual citizen with the country of his birth, Syria, so instead of sending him where his wife, children, and home were in Canada and where he repeatedly asked to be returned, he was deported to Syria for a year of (totally predictable) brutal imprisonment and torture.

There are many such cases known, and they must be regarded as more than administrative glitches. What are all those mysterious places in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Romania, Poland, and as far away as Diego Garcia, now run by American crew-cut thugs and to which there is no access? What are all the many hundreds of flights recorded by dedicated amateur plane spotters and checked back to registration? Are we to believe the US is not running a huge, illegal secret prison and torture system?

How could such an enterprise possibly conform to international agreements and treaties? Are there really thousands of people looking for free trips in shackles to nowhere courtesy of the CIA? Thousands ready to give up all rights and years of their lives voluntarily to satisfy the urges of American paranoia? Of course not, to ask the question is to know the answer.

I don't want to quibble about the meaning of torture. The CIA term "enhanced interrogation technique" is straight out of the horrors described in Orwell's Politics and the English Language. If, as one wag put it, it isn't torture, then why not use it on Cheney in getting to root of current scandals in Washington? Of course, it's torture.

So simple a thing as deprivation of sleep can reduce a healthy human being to delusions in a short time. One of Israel's favorite tortures has been to keep captives' heads in a large hood, shaking them vigorously while their heads bob and bounce around inside the hood, making them dizzy and anxious, perhaps feeling their necks might be snapped. Sounds like no big deal compared to pulling out finger nails? Try it on your kids for a week or two. The CIA is known to use "waterboarding," submerging a victim strapped to a board in just enough water to cause him to gulp, gurgle and gasp, panicking him into thinking he is being drown, over and over.

Nothing, I repeat nothing, the United States thinks it is protecting itself from is worth this descent into moral hell.

"The United States will use every lawful weapon to defeat terrorists" Condoleezza Rice

That statement is a platitude, useful only to stir blood at a Fourth of July speech in Muncie, Indiana. It tells us nothing. It is inherently evasive because the lawfulness of tactics being used is the very issue in question.

We all recall with a frown or a grimace Bill Clinton's playing with truth when he testified, "It depends on what you mean by the word is"? Although his statement concerned a relatively trivial matter, it is actually representative of something far greater and more sinister that has grown to become an integral part of American political culture. American politicians and their creatures like Condoleezza simply have become expert in the art of giving an interview or a speech and avoiding saying almost anything meaningful. Artful lying, subtle avoidance, and giving an answer different than the question asked have become a basic set of political job skills.

Members of the American government, more and more, resemble those sleazy well-prepared witnesses on the stand who just can't recall point after point or a cheap lawyers who rephrases a statement to a similar-sounding one and assure you, yes you have his word on that.

The string of lies and misrepresentations leading up to the invasion of Iraq alone are enough, in the words of Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, "to make the Testament leap from her [the witness's] hand."

Only recently, after a year of denials about using napalm at Fallujah, despite the words of witnesses and the charred bodies of victims, we learn that white phosphorus was used. Indeed, Marines are trained to use white phosphorus to drive people out to places where they can shoot them, only the people are supposed to be soldiers, not civilians. Now, I am not sure people whose flesh is roasted to bubbling globs care whether the Marines used napalm or white phosphorus doing it.

But on such fine distinctions and guarded answers stands the word of the United States today. "No, Sir, I don't understand how those good folks got roasted, but I can assure you we did not use napalm." So when Condoleezza asserts, as she did a while back on a trip to Canada, that "the word of the United States is as good as gold," you just have to smile bitterly.

Another Canadian, David Frum, made it all the way to the White House with his custom-tailored scribbling. So too such a genuinely dangerous American as Pat Buchanan. How does a man like Thomas Friedman pick up prizes writing advertising copy for the Pentagon? As I said, loyalty is handsomely rewarded.

David Frum and Pat Buchanan both fell from grace, but there is little danger of Ignatieff's doing so. He almost perceptibly pants and gasps when he applies words to the imperial splendor of which he stands in awe.

Ignatieff, while running what is essentially a marketing program for America at the forty-billion dollar endowment called Harvard, has kept in touch with Canada. Every once in a while he is interviewed by someone at the CBC or the Toronto Star. The interviewer's tone typically is toe-scrunchingly along the lines of, "Here is one of the age's great intellectuals, and he's from Canada!" Certain Canadians do have an embarrassing tendency that way.

So I am familiar with Ignatieff's quietly arrogant tone. Oddly, it is almost the tone of a minister of the Gospel, educated and polished to be sure, one of those New England clerics safely ensconced in a sinecure at some dignified pile of stones where he only has to address a small, blue-haired congregation once a week to earn his keep, but a preacher none the less. Ignatieff doesn't give speeches or write essays, he gives sermons, rather dull sermons with just a hint of suppressed rage under the surface. The rage, perhaps regarded as appealing or even sexy by some, if you listen carefully, is directed at people who do not embrace his views.

Yet I have only now discovered the immensity of Ignatieff's arrogance. You see, he's been dropped into a federal riding (for American readers, the equivalent of a congressional district) to run for Canada's Parliament. He is being dropped by national leaders of the Liberal Party in search of "star" candidates for an approaching election which is expected to be close, but he has been dropped into a riding where a substantial number of Liberal faithful disagree with his alien views. Moreover, he has written in one of his books, as we shall see, words insulting to many residents of the riding.

Here is one Toronto columnist's description of Ignatieff's proud path to achieving the great honor of his life:

"And snookering one potential opponent, name of Shwec, on the grounds that he wasn't a party member, although he'd paid his dues, and another, name of Chyczij, who also happens to be the association president, on the grounds that he hadn't resigned the presidency when he filed. Not to mention locking the office door ahead of the deadline so they couldn't file in time."

It sounds a great deal like politics in Richard J. Daley's Chicago or President Mubarak's Egypt.

Ignoring requests for his withdrawal, Ignatieff spoke at the riding association meeting to tell them what a great honor - the greatest of his life, as he put it - it was to be acclaimed candidate. In this case, however, the words were almost lost in catcalls and heckling from members of his own party. At one point about a third of the audience got up and walked out of the meeting. At the end of a truly shabby performance, Ignatieff's handlers helped him through a side door to a waiting car.

You cannot completely judge Ignatieff's tone from printed words. You had to have heard CBC Radio's report with his voice to catch the full nuanced snottiness. One of Ignatieff's lines was "You must understand" that being dropped into a riding the way he was being dropped was an old party practice. "You must understand" to people whose democratic rights he was opposing!

At the same time he pontificated, "I have stood all my life against intolerance. Do you seriously think I would insult any community in our country?" Here the self-appointed candidate leaned on his role as self-appointed secular saint. The tone was exactly that of some earlier words of his, with reference to Canada's honorable stand against joining Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. He said then, "If you oppose America, you pay," with a slight but discernable emphasis on "pay," almost relishing the word.

Ignatieff's "Do you seriously think" concerned Ukraininan-Canadian objections to demeaning descriptions in his writing. Judge for yourself, here is one of the most offensive passages from his 1993 book, Blood and Belonging: ''I have reasons to take the Ukraine seriously indeed. But, to be honest, I'm having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of peasant embroidered shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots . . . ."

The attitude on display is perhaps best explained in an article by Sarah Schweitzer in Toronto's Globe and Mail where she gave the following précis of Ignatieff's family history:

"His paternal grandfather, Count Paul Ignatieff, was minister of education for Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Following the Russian Revolution, the family moved to Canada, where Ignatieff's father, George, became a leading diplomat during Cold War era. Ignatieff's maternal great-grandfather, George Munro Grant, was a well-known Canadian advocate of British imperialism in the late 19th century, and an uncle, George Parkin Grant, was a conservative political philosopher."

Almost certainly there's an arrogance gene, the Russian aristocracy having been notorious for arrogant behavior.

The people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore Riding in Toronto were not just expressing their anger at past words. This great worker for human rights has been a consistent advocate for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq - that is, for the mass murder of one hundred thousand innocent civilians and the utter destruction of their country as a decent place to live. Ignatieff is also on record as a supporter of "mild" torture. Here is an apologist for international lawlessness and selected barbarism, so long as they serve those who provided his sinecure.

These are not views the majority of Canadians support. Since there are many rumors that this unpleasant man is to be groomed as a potential future prime minister, there is great cause for concern.

Paul Martin, Canada's current prime minister, is essentially a decent man, and I don't wish his government harm, but it is important to end the horribly archaic and anti-democratic practice of dropping candidates into ridings where they don't live and with which they have no attachment. Martin could only enhance his credibility by quickly finding a way to dump Ignatieff.

It's more important still to stop this barely-disguised American Neo-con from securing a future in Canadian politics where he can serve little other purpose than a kind of fifth-columnist for destructive interests. I will watch the election in this riding with more interest than the national contest, hoping people in Etobicoke-Lakeshore demonstrate genuine courage and independence.

And you needn't worry about Ignatieff's future. He has all bets covered. In preparation for his glorious entrance into Canadian politics, he recently became a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, having sought a two-year leave from Harvard. His New England sinecure and its wealthy blue-hair congregation quietly await his return.

"All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. "

You might ask how is it possible to choose victims more indiscriminately than by bombing cities? The Pentagon doesn't even attempt to count Iraq's dead, civilian or military. Two serious efforts have been made to count the civilian toll of the barbarism called "Shock and Awe." One, an effort to count bodies all over the country in morgues, hospitals, and other likely places, came up with more than 25,000 killed. Another scientific study of Iraq's national mortality tables, published in the British medical journal Lancet, came up with about a 100,000.

What is Bush's understanding of this "clear and focused ideology"?

"Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism."

Bush uses these coined-by-neocon advertising slogans to describe an ideology, but in fact all they do is attempt to re-package plain old religious extremists. I cannot help wondering how we would distinguish them from Franklin Graham preaching about using nuclear weapons following 9/11 or Pat Robertson speaking about assassinating a democratically-elected leader or the crazed preaching of heavily-armed American cults?

"We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites."

Do you believe the audiotapes and videos periodically broadcast any more than you believe the proved-fake documentation of Hussein buying uranium in Niger? Are any of these so-called sources any more believable than the ridiculous video CNN broadcast after the invasion of Afghanistan in which dogs were being killed in a secret mountain weapons laboratory run by men wearing sandals? How about spy satellite shots of mobile weapons labs that never existed, evidence solemnly presented by Colin Powell before the UN?

Do you even believe Osama bin Laden is alive? Bush has no reason ever to reveal Osama's death, an act which would convert Osama from leader in hiding to Martyr. Of course, if you are reading this piece, you likely are the wrong kind of person of whom to ask such questions. Bush's words are crafted for people who let CNN do their thinking for them.

"Now they've set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror."

Bush follows a dubious quote from bin Laden with a preposterous conclusion. There were, before Bush's invasion, no terrorists in Iraq. Iraq's secret police hardly afforded a refuge to terrorists or any other potential conspirators. Moreover, Hussein, the secularist, and bin Laden, the religious fanatic, are known to have hated each other.

Post-invasion Iraq is crawling with resistance fighters from many places and of every possible description. In the words of the head of Canada's intelligence service, CSIS, Iraq has become a training ground for thousands who will threaten Western security for years to come. We all have Bush to thank for this development.

"The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution."

I can't imagine words that better describe America's reaction to 9/11. About twenty people committed a terrible crime. Instead of going about the business of identifying and trying any others who were responsible, Bush launched two wars he promises to continue for years to come.

A culture of victimization? America is the world authority on that odd subject. Following 9/11 everything from the giant street signs at doughnut shops to blinking signs on gas pumps insisted that Americans must never forget. There were even sweatshirts being sold in supermarkets and gardening centers. It was all one huge, confused, and dangerous reaction spurred on by an incompetent man at the top muttering about "with us or against us."

"And they exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power."

What modern technology? The men who died carrying out 9/11 possessed weapons like box cutters to take over the planes. The young men in the London Underground bombing carried backpacks with relatively crude bombs in them.

Bush deliberately confuses the resistance in Iraq with terrorists in other places. The resistance in Iraq now does have some improved technology for attacking American armored vehicles. But why should this surprise anyone? Many of these people have military experience and they have resources that were stored away by Hussein. Besides, everyone learns quickly during the deadly intensity of military conflict. During a few years of World War I, new technologies for killing emerged quickly, including tanks, machine guns, poison gas, and air bombardment.

"The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. "

Bush's cynicism and dishonesty here are off the meter. The Russians have carried on for years a hideous war against Chechen independence. Journalists from Europe have reported almost indescribable horrors. The Chechens are desperate for vengeance against so powerful and ruthless an opponent. People who have experienced the treatment they have experienced are indeed capable of almost anything. Were Russia still the old Soviet Union, Bush would be sending weapons and encouragement to Chechnya.

"He (bin Laden) assures them that his -- that this is the road to paradise -- though he never offers to go along for the ride."

Coming from someone who avoided military service during a major war so that he could carry on a carefree frat-life, someone whose National Guard records have been mutilated, presumably to hide failings, this is quite a statement. It is, moreover, quite wrong. Bin Laden, whatever we may think of him, fought bravely in Afghanistan against the Russians, gaining an almost legendary reputation. He is now, assuming he is alive, a man whose age and health would rule out military service.

"When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple -- the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. These militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity. We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags, and the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields."

Bush has killed and mutilated thousands of Iraqi children. It cannot be otherwise when you bomb heavily in a country where so large a fraction of the population is young.

"And Islamic radicalism, like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure."

Bush repeats the phrase "like the ideology of communism" a number of times, trying to establish a comparison that doesn't exist. Communism controlled a number of major nations in the world. The opposition of these governments to Western freedoms came directly out the fact that you cannot run a highly centralized state and permit freedom as we understand it. Islamic extremists control no states.

"Those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation, decline, and collapse."

Bush here applies an idea that does not fit from theories of economic development. This was always the case for communist governments whose abuse of basic economic principles doomed them to eventual decline. Nevertheless, for decades did America behave as though the analysis were true? No, America spent trillions, literally trillions, of dollars in a quasi-religious war against communism. In the end, communism did collapse of its own contradictions.

From the American point of view, the purpose of the Cold War, at least once the truly dangerous, paranoid Stalin was dead (early 1953), was to secure American hegemony through much of the world.

"…the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, who was chief of al Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf…."

Mastermind? One suicide bomber in a small boat approached the Cole and blew a hole in her hull. How does that require a "mastermind"? The man in the small boat was determined, and the crew of the American ship was lax guarding it - end of story.

"Second, we're determined to deny weapons of mass destruction to outlaw regimes, and to their terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation. The United States, working with Great Britain, Pakistan, and other nations has exposed and disrupted a major black-market operation in nuclear technology led by A.Q. Khan."

Outlaw regimes with weapons of mass destruction? Doesn't that exactly describe Pakistan? And before 9/11, that was pretty much the official American view. General Musharraf is a coup-installed dictator, and his government developed atomic weapons in direct opposition to American policy. Yet today, magically, he is listed with democracies in the fight against terror.

Mr. Khan is Pakistani and is regarded as father of the country's atomic-weapons program. Despite assertions otherwise, it seems inconceivable his covert activities in spreading nuclear know-how were unknown to his government.

"The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they're equally as guilty of murder."

Has Bush heard the name Luis Posada Carriles, a man who blew up an airliner full of people and is kept from facing trial in Venezuela? Of course he has, and that makes this statement ridiculous.

"The terrorist goal is to overthrow a rising democracy, claim a strategic country as a haven for terror, destabilize the Middle East, and strike America and other free nations with ever-increasing violence. Our goal is to defeat the terrorists and their allies at the heart of their power -- and so we will defeat the enemy in Iraq."

This is preposterous. Guerilla forces do not work this way. The hide, harass, and make life unpleasant for those they oppose. Taking control of a state only invites retaliation against a clearly-defined target. Look what Bush did to the city of Fallujah, thinking it was a hotbed of terrorists. Marines turned it into a ghost town, yet resistance still flourishes.

"With every random bombing and with every funeral of a child, it becomes more clear that the extremists are not patriots, or resistance fighters -- they are murderers at war with the Iraqi people, themselves."

No, what they mainly are is one side in a civil war precipitated by Bush's invasion, and civil wars are always the nastiest wars.

"Some observers question the durability of democracy in Iraq. They underestimate the power and appeal of freedom."

Democracy and freedom are not the same thing. Majorities often deny minorities their rights and freedoms. America has a long history of government with democratic trappings that has denied freedom to others. Ask the people of Hawaii. Ask Hispanics in Texas or California. Ask almost any black American.

Sunnis and others in Iraq feel Bush has stacked things against their interests with the new constitution, and they are right.

"We're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow."

But the people Bush calls terrorists often are the dissidents in their own lands. Bin Laden certainly could claim this description in his native Saudi Arabia.

"Iraqi soldiers are sacrificing to defeat al Qaeda in their own country."

Al Qaeda? Is that really Bush's enemy in Iraq? Surely, even he does not believe that. His enemies there include the normal resistance fighters against invasion we would find anywhere, native minority groups whose interests are threatened by the government he installed, and undoubtedly many angry young men from other lands who see grievous injustice in Bush's invasion.

The name War on Terror is itself perhaps the darkest example of Bushspeak. You cannot have a war on ideas, or a war on religious beliefs, or even a war on people's feelings of grievance and injustice. The War on Terror is code for belligerent interference in the Middle East. It is also code for the suppression of dissent in America, something dear to the kind of people with which Bush surrounds himself, people who lie, cheat, and profit from billions of dollars being squandered. And all this crashes over us as a result of what the intelligence community calls blowback from bad policies and neglect of years ago.

The Pentagon has become concerned about the site, and rightly so. It is a public relations disaster, especially in the Arab world where such pictures must burn deeply. Karen Hughes peddling American Sunday School stories in the Middle East can hardly compete with the visceral impact of this stuff. It is not just the images themselves which evoke disgust, but the implicit idea that Americans take such pictures and regard them as legitimate currency for pornography.

One Pentagon official was quoted saying something about the people engaged in the trade breaking all kinds of military regulations. I'm impressed with ethics like that: it is fine to disembowel people or burn them to crisps, but it is a serious breach to publish photos of your handiwork.

When I was a little boy growing up in the south side of Chicago, I saw many unpleasant things. Somehow, I understood at a young age that there are people who enjoy destruction and horror and inflicting pain. Likely all the legends of ghouls, vampires, and other staples of horror literature derive over centuries from genuine human experience.

They seem to constitute a minority of human beings, otherwise humanity's penchant for destruction would outweigh its impulse for creation, and a form of human entropy would reduce society to chaos. But they are a sizeable minority, and there is nothing special about America which prevents its producing a full share. If we believe that nurture, as well as nature, plays some role in producing these dark creatures, American society may well produce more than its share. They are after all, at least the milder, non-lethal cases, the very people who take pleasure in injuring complete strangers through business fraud, computer viruses, and vicious politics - all prominent features on the American landscape.

There is a persistent tendency for Americans to believe this can't be so. The influence of Christianity is important here. Since the idea of America is often emotionally blurred with the idea of a secular Church, complete with its own Apostles' Creed and Holy Scripture (Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, etc.), it is not surprising that there is widespread belief in the intrinsic goodness of America's soldiers. But that belief is as scientifically baseless as the one about "curing" homosexuals or the one about "creationism" being a legitimate school subject - both, please note, held by tens of millions of Americans. We might add also the American Catholic Church's dreamy ideas and stubborn refusal to take responsibility for conditions of a priesthood that encourage countless cases of child molestation.

Those who enjoy violence and destruction always have been part of human society, likely representing a genetic thread, and in ancient days they were just the kind of people you might want on the ramparts defending your city. The trouble is America doesn't keep them at home. It insists on sending them abroad to practice their ghastly arts on others.

I have to suppress a bitter laugh when I read things in the liberal press calling on soldiers to hold on to their humanity. Would those be the sons of the soldiers who cut the throats of tens of thousands of civilians in night raids during Vietnam? The sons of the ones who collected human ears? Relatives of CIA officers running an international torture network? The words serve no purpose for those actually possessing humanity. Equally, they are a waste of breath for those with the bad genes. You can't tell someone with a serious, violence-inclining mental disorder to kindly behave him- or herself.

We have a choice in society. The people who have such uncivilized tendencies may be kept in check by rational laws and policies. America with its high rate of incarceration, its continued use of the death penalty, and its endless fascination with redemption clearly recognizes in some distorted way the importance of doing this at home. What civilized people all over the world want to see is America exercising restraint abroad.

How utterly reckless to just casually start wars without realizing that releasing the human monsters from their cages always is part of what you are doing. If Americans ever come to understand that simple fact, the world will be a better place.

Columnist Paul Krugman repeated Monday, September 5, a Chicago Tribune report that the U.S.S. Bataan, a military ship with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, and the machinery to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, sat off the Gulf Coast since Monday (August 29, when Katrina struck) without any patients.

On September 2, Krugman repeated the following from an editorial in Biloxi, Mississippi's Sun Herald: "On Wednesday, reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"

Germany only just before these events experienced horrible floods, but that country's government acted decisively and promptly to limit human suffering and damage. Britain, despite my reservations about some measures taken, acted with remarkable speed after the London Underground bombings. One of the world's great cities in crisis was quickly managed, with emergency organizations and police immediately deployed.

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, bravely rode the Underground the next day to reassure citizens. By comparison, the Mayor of New Orleans and the President of Jefferson Parish were reduced to screams and tears on television by the lack of response from Washington.

When Bush got around to visiting - incidentally, holding up the urgent delivery of food supplies by planes grounded for his security - what we got were photo-ops like the staged start to repairing a damaged levee. In safely-selected meetings with a few area residents, Bush, suddenly appeared in a checkered shirt instead of his usual silk suit with overly-padded shoulders. He exchanged such fascinating anecdotes as the fact that Trent Lott had also lost a home (one of several) and that he, Bush, looked forward to sitting with Trent on the porch of his new, better house.

How would Tent's new house be a better one, I wondered reading these words? Because Trent would have no trouble more than replacing his loss through manipulating the bounty of one Federal program or another? Because Trent had already got the President's ear on his personal misfortune? Few of the desperate people clinging to roofs or the relatives of others floating face-down in filthy tides while Bush spoke could anticipate such bounty.

No one in the press, so far as I am aware, seems to have caught the fact that Bush, in his pathetic effort to say something comforting, referred to a man who was pushed from his high position in the Senate because of a history of associations and words that can only be called Klan-friendly. Compassionate Bush was offering this anecdote in a place where most of the dead and truly hopeless are poor blacks. Also unnoticed by the press was just how Bush would be aware of so insignificant a matter as Tent's loss when the desperate Mayor of New Orleans couldn't reach him on the phone.

Brains and character do count in leadership, and it has long been obvious to much of the world that George Bush possesses neither. Why did you re-elect this wretched man, America? There is almost nothing ghastly enough to say about his performance in a catastrophe. It is a virtual repeat of what he did to Iraq, but you really don't seem to care about the horrors he has inflicted abroad. Perhaps, now, finally, you will care.

I do not believe, as some do, that George Bush is a racist. George Bush doesn't have enough common human feeling to be a racist. He is a dull, droning, unfeeling man who has always enjoyed immense privileges while avoiding all responsibility and genuine work.

I do not believe, although the metaphor is tempting, that George Bush is Nero, for Nero, despite utter corruptness, actually had some intelligence. The appropriate Roman metaphor for Bush is the horse, Incitatus, which the ghoulish monster Caligula kept in the Imperial Palace and was reported to have appointed a Roman Consul. In this analogy, Caligula represents America's insatiably-greedy Right Wing who put Bush where he is.

What so many Americans still do not appreciate is that Bush's criminally negligent behavior concerning a hurricane in New Orleans closely parallels his and other Republican behavior before 9/11. Such simple, relatively inexpensive measures as secure cockpit doors and improved standards of security at airports would have made 9/11 impossible (just as improved levees and proper evacuation plans would have made the losses of New Orleans impossible). These were sensible measures being advocated then, not just in view of potential terrorism, but owing to the then considerable threat of hijacking, and they would have cost a tiny fraction of war in Afghanistan (I don't include the cost of the bloody horror in Iraq since it has literally nothing to do with terror).

So, too, the total failure of the CIA under George Tenet to anticipate what was happening with some of its own human assets from the Middle East, while Israeli agents, arrested in the United States and expelled afterwards, seem to have been totally on to Atta and the boys. Reportedly, Tenet has written a twenty-page response he intends to publish if the draft of the report on CIA negligence is published in its existing form. Tenet's piece apparently implicates Bush and his people in the failure.

If we must stick to comparisons with historical people rather than the horse of a Roman Emperor, Bush resembles the ne'er-do-well son of one of those putridly corrupt dukes in France's Ancient Regime who would kill a servant in a fit of rage or ride over a peasant in his path. Such a person, in the rare event his deed was brought to the king's attention, also pretended some vague, unaccountable mistake had been made and routinely was let go.

My God, look at the words of this man's mother, a woman everyone who knows the family says closely resembles him both in intelligence and attitudes. Barbara just may have surpassed Marie Antoinette's fabled (Marie never said it), "Let them eat cake!" Here is a quote from Mother Barbara on a tour of the Astrodome relief center:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.

Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged ... anyway, so this--this (chuckling slightly) is working very well for them."

Although her earlier comment on deaths in Iraq, made on national television, would be hard to beat for words devoid of human feeling:

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths...? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

The apple does not fall far from the tree.

Pat Robertson is one of the Christian Sideshow's longer-running acts, periodically adding some new nightmare to his grim repertoire. Oddly, Pat regards himself as a kind statesman-preacher, a latter-day boondocks version of Talleyrand, Talleyrand having started his remarkable and utterly unprincipled career as a Bishop. Pat regularly mixes the tax-free benefits of religion with the promotion of nasty politics. He has run for President, started quasi-religious organizations to promote his political ambitions, and freely offers his uninformed advice on national and world affairs.

Talleyrand had his various church properties and offices to support him in princely fashion while he worked at politics. Pat supports his public-minded work on resources gathered through one of America's greatest money-changer-in-the-temple careers. The fortune generated through decades of his appeals to unhappy, lonely people watching television gives him access to a genuine commercial empire, from so-called Christian broadcasting to oil refining.

A key difference between Talleyrand and Pat is that Talleyrand was frightfully clever and was a breathtaking success at politics. I put the difference, in part, down to style. Talleyrand in person might remind one of the late Archbishop Sheen, snapping and twirling his scarlet cape and watching his listeners with penetrating eyes - to all that would added something of Lord Byron's fascinating stench of corruption. Robertson has never quite escaped the Jesus-on-the-dashboard flavor of his early career. Pat is pure Super Duper Auto Parts, Aisle Six, smiling salesman for mud flaps and sequined sets of big dice, but with enough animal cunning to have risen to running every Aisle Six on the continent.

Pat recently announced on national television that America should murder the elected leader of another country, President Chavez of Venezuela. Previously Pat restricted himself to insulting the religion of a billion people, Islam, or insulting the victims of natural disasters in the United States. After a hurricane in which old men, women, and children died, Pat blamed the victims for their fate by claiming God was punishing America's immorality. His latest effort breaks new ground, being, by any meaningful definition, public advocacy of terror.

Why won't Pat Robertson be treated as a terrorist? Believe me, if you said what he said about any of America's current leaders, you would be arrested quickly under the Patriot Act and locked away. Why will Pat Robertson's broadcasting empire not be classified as an organization supporting terrorist activities? Perfectly legitimate organizations in other parts of the world have been declared outlaw in the United States for having less direct association with terrorist hate-speech. Several bloodthirsty-sounding Muslim clerics, completely unrepresentative of their faith, have been jailed recently for speech closely resembling Robertson's.

At the very least, Robertson should be charged under hate-speech laws. But such laws are weak in the United States, and many Americans fear the idea of hate-speech laws. So radio and television broadcasters continue spewing hate and dishonest claims in the exalted name of free speech.

We really do know why Pat Robertson won't be treated as a terrorist. It's for the same reason Bush's former Attorney General of the United States could tell a group of decent, honest, hard-working American Muslims that they should count themselves lucky they weren't being treated the way Japanese Americans were during World War II. It's for the same reason that Bush protects a mass murderer named Luis Posada Carriles from extradition and trial. It's for the same reason that American troops have made a horror of the lives of millions of innocent Iraqis. It's for the same reason a distraught mother who lost her son in Iraq is vilified by Right Wing savages. It's the same reason why the morally-contemptible Bush is President.

The reason is the worship of power and greed. While it's true that a great deal of America's history has to do with worshipping power and greed, never in my memory has it been so openly expressed, so contemptuously embraced as it is today. It is a sad to reflect in my twilight years that almost everything I was taught as a boy has proved to be wrong. I don't mean subjects like math or English. I mean values. Most of the evidence of my adult life tends to support the opposite of every moral lesson of my youth, certainly as they apply to the land of my birth, a place where power and greed now trump everything.

I was taught murder always is wrong. I was taught lying always is wrong. I was taught that lusting after money and power is wrong. I was taught that good men prevailed and evil men sooner or later paid for their acts. These lessons came from a ferociously-honest and brave mother who alone raised two boys on the South Side of Chicago. They came also from the church I attended. And they came from some wonderful books and stories I read.

The success of vicious Pat Robertson and his even more vicious President, George Bush, provide almost perfect allegories for the soul-dead thing America has become.

Religion, politics, journalism, and even academics serve the American worship of power and greed. I had a brief exchange recently with an exalted fellow from one of America's many well-financed propaganda mills tarted up to resemble research organizations. This exalted fellow had been on a national radio interview, interestingly enough on the same subject of Venezuela. Apart from inaccurate claims about a new broadcast network established in Venezuela while he made a case for American interference, when reminded that Mr. Chavez was democratically elected, he chimed in with, "So was Hitler!"

Hitler, despite huge expenditures and desperately hard campaigns, never received more than just over a third of votes. He was appointed Chancellor, after a long series of backroom manipulations, by the Republic's ancient and exhausted President von Hindenburg. Hitler's rise more closely resembles that of some of America's favorite shady men in Iraq and Pakistan than it does that of a man whose election was closely scrutinized and declared fair by international watchers.

I couldn't let such an inaccurate claim stand and looked up his outfit on the Internet. There, on a page resembling something from a university or research center, was a large quote from Rush Limbaugh about the tremendous job they were doing. What kind of a research institution quotes Rush Limbaugh? There were also, importantly, links for bequests and gifts. And there was an e-mail link to the man on the Venezuela case.

My particular exalted fellow answered at length, accepting the truth of my correction, but making a mighty effort to turn someone's getting one-third of the vote into a de facto election. There were paragraphs of labored reasoning larded with unnecessary facts, perhaps from a history text quickly consulted before replying. He missed the point entirely of respecting a genuinely democratic decision. Here is the kind of analysis being touted across America in an effort to influence the world. And these people do influence the world. The same people helped bring you the murderous disaster in Iraq.

Goddam that woman!!! Can't she see I'm having my vacation? Jeez, I'm the War President and Commander in Chief of this here whole United States. Ain't I entitled to a little R and R without being bothered? I get mighty tired spending ten and half months a year being President. Talking to damn foreigners and asshole reporters, trying not to doze off in briefings I couldn't give a shit about, staying up past nine o'clock and missing my favorite T.V. shows. God, they ought to know I never held down a regular job in my life!

Ain't she got nothing better to do than standing around with her damned flag like no one else was a good enough American? Anyway, you can't be a good enough American when you don't support the War President. That goes without saying.

Boy, I'd like to send a bunch of Teamsters in there to bust her gang up a little. That's what old Dick Nixon would do. But the V.P. says there's other ways to bust her up. He's working on it right now. He said he might bring in that cement mixer wife of his as special White House consultant. She's enough to scare the bejesus out of anyone.

I told the whole goddamn staff that cost is no object on this one. Hell, the Party spent a fortune trying to get that weasel pervert Clinton. They bought up his damned antique chair and had all the stains tested for DNA before burning it. They even gave some woman a nose job for testifying. They can't do less for the War President.

I just heard Karl put out the word on her! Karl's friends will make her sorry she ever messed around with the War President. Them people of his is like a posse in the last stages of rabies! God bless Karl. He's a mighty good man. I don't care what he did to that other bitch at the CIA.

I got feelings, too, whatever they say. Ain't nobody got more feelings about them boys than me. Fact is I get downright sick of hearing about dead Marines. I can't enjoy my supper. Spoils my T.V. watching, I'll tell you. Costs votes every damn time a bunch goes and gets themselves blown up. I know what they're going through! Haven't I been through hell? I'm still suffering withdrawal symptoms at least as bad as any damn combat flashbacks.

I'm a man that knows fear, that's for sure. I run away from more shit than I can remember. I don't know how many times I nearly crapped my pants caught goofing off. Now, I got to spend my vacation looking like I'm sitting through an Easter sermon.

Dick says she's nuts and he's right. Dick's always right. Family values got nothing to do with nut cases. Half them people out there with her look like the weirdoes I used to throw the switch on when I was Governor. I should have got rid of more of them pukes when I had the chance!

What's the matter with Tony? He can't even make that wife of his shut her mouth!!! Can't he see how Laura's trained? Tony's wife opens her mouth and you can see the goddam fillings in her molars. And she dresses like a bus driver's wife going to a fancy restaurant for the first time. I swear I don't think she's wearing a girdle half the time. Laura flutters her eyelashes and gives her little lines like a pro. And she looks right for the job with a girdle as stiff as a Marine flak jacket, wearing them Laura Ashley pilgrim suits with lacey stuff. They cost a fortune, custom-made, but I'll tell you, they're worth every penny.

I confess I do sometimes get worried about them girls of ours having a few too many in some bar one night and saying something that ought to stay strictly in the family. Oh, they do take after their old man that way, I mean about having one too many. Ha, ha. Though they better not go trying some of what the old man did. Girls don't table dance naked, least not no girls of mine. Other girls is just fine. But we got plenty of Secret Service on them, trained to yank them home faster than Homeland Security hitting the button on another terror alert.

Can't a Brit tell a Brazil from an Iraq? You go doing that kind of thing and next thing you know they'll have every damned homeless person like Cindy Sheehan marching in London. Why can't Tony just throw suspect scum in jail same as we do? Hell, you don't need to go telling anyone. Let them rot and everyone's happy is what I say.

Is Tony running a government or some damned tourist information booth? What's all the leaks over there? Goddam top secret stuff spilling out all over the place!!! Good thing most Americans don't read. That's a fact that's saved my sorry ass more than once.

[This is as far as work on the papers has gone at this time.]

The theme of the column is captured by one of the pithy bromides of which he is so fond, "Guess what: words matter." To make sure that you understand, Friedman repeats this a number of times with slight variations, a favorite technique of propagandists and, for that matter, police interrogators. You can't help smiling for here is a man who has spent his entire adult life twisting and torturing words to give imperial hubris a happy face.

As we will see, the words that really matter to Friedman are the ones that disagree with his view of the world and current events. Like an unpleasant, spoiled child Friedman uses a tantrum in print to get what he wants.

Friedman starts in his usual breezy, know-it-all style, "I wasn't surprised…. And I won't be surprised…" at discoveries by English police at a bookstore in Leeds. These include video games, Islamic video games. Friedman ominously explains, "The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents." I couldn't help thinking of General Ripper darkly telling a stunned Peter Sellers as Mandrake about fluoride, children, and water in Doctor Strangelove. Good God, Friedman lives in a country up to its armpits in violent video games, violent books and magazines, violent music, and a hell of a lot more genuine violence than the English can even imagine.

Friedman asks, "If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?"

Note the cheap trick here of identifying Islam in general with the world's terrorism problem even while ostensibly distinguishing between life-affirming and death-cult Muslims. Islam in general bears the burden of correction for its minority of extremists. These are the words of someone with murky and undeclared motives.

Terrorism, like any other criminal behavior, is the sole responsibility of those committing the acts, not of the religion or the people with which they happen to be associated. The number of people involved in events in New York was about twenty. The number in London maybe a dozen. The world has about a billion Muslims. Friedman simply has no shame.

He glosses over, another favorite technique of Friedman's, the death-cult wing of every religion, letting it apply only to Islam. What about lunatics in America who turn Christianity into death cults like those of Jim Jones (900 deaths) or Waco (about 100 deaths)? There are dozens of these, not to mention the weird Aryan-nation people who live in the woods and mountains armed to the teeth. American fundamentalists have gathered innumerable times on hillsides awaiting the end of the world. Many of them stocked their basements with guns, ammo, and freeze-dried provisions awaiting the calamity that was supposed to occur when the calendar turned to the year 2000. What about the pictures of Marines earnestly kneeling at some make-shift alter in Iraq before they head out to kill people? What about America's Eric Rudolphs? its Timothy McVeighs?

And how can you apply the adjective life-affirming to thousands of ferociously angry settlers in Gaza determined to rip down every brick in place, cut down every tree, root up every vine, people who have been widely reported to be poisoning the land they will have to surrender? It seems to me that Israel itself represents the focus of just such a struggle going on in Judaism, the only difference between it and what we see in Islam being one of numbers.

One thing is certain, if you tried smearing Judaism in general with the bloody excesses of Israeli settlers or charming figures like the late bloodthirsty Rabbi Kahane and his followers, you'd call down a firestorm of anti-Semitism accusations on your head. Yet this is precisely what Friedman feels perfectly free to do with Islam.

Friedman answers his own question, as he always does, another technique familiar to propagandists the world over, "We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others."

If he stopped at the first sentence, he'd have my support. There is a need to shine light on hatred, genuine hatred, something that is abundant in Friedman's homeland. Radio, television, and newspaper columns pour out hatred in the United States around the clock. Dozens of columnists and commentators spew the stuff. Actually, it is this cacophony of hate pervading American media that allows people like Friedman to pass for reasonable, but he is not reasonable by comparison with what is heard and read in other Western countries.

The State Department's annual human rights report is a document with ghastly shortcomings. Perhaps Friedman likes it because it reflects many of his own qualities - arrogant, insulting, inaccurate, and deliberately incomplete. Everyone outside the United States recognizes the report as biased and used mainly as a bludgeon against countries from which the United States seeks concessions of some kind, usually economic. Incomplete? Just ask Amnesty International, the United States itself very much belongs on any such list compiled without bias: police and prison brutality there are routine, daily events.

Having laid down a principle that seems plausible, Friedman goes on with another of his favorite techniques, casually stretching a principle beyond recognition, trying to make it fit a case it plainly does not fit. Friedman says, "We also need to spotlight the 'excuse makers,' the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed."

Events in London and New York are not related to Iraq or Israel or imperialism? Then why is Bush's mob intensely pressuring Sharon to quickly complete the evacuation of Gaza? And why are the Bush people suddenly talking about troop reductions in Iraq after all the "stay the course" blather? Of course, they're related. "It's the injustice, stupid!" should be on a plaque over Friedman's desk.

Here is some of what Friedman is actually saying in this passage. He doesn't care that lists themselves are chilling things, having such horrible associations as the NKVD's lists for arrest, Senator McCarthy's lists of Communists, and Nixon's enemies' list (disproportionately featuring Jews). We need a list of "despicable" excuse makers.

And never mind, he is saying, that such lists always are abused. America's no-fly list contains thousands of names included in error or by deliberate abuse, and there is almost no way for individuals to remove their names from this job-threatening list. One of the earliest abuses discovered was Ted Kennedy's name on the list, but most people do not have Senator Kennedy's influence to have their names easily removed.

The most frightening thing Friedman is saying is that people who discuss terror and its causes in terms other than his own are "despicable." Yes, words matter, and despicable is a very strong word, a hate-word if there ever was one.

So here is Friedman saying he hates people who disagree with his way of thinking on a subject, blithely managing to identify the people he hates with haters. This reminds me of the time Friedman, in true 1984 Inner Party fashion, tried to get suicide-bomber and all associated terms expunged from the English language, even advocating official penalties for heads of governments in the Middle East who dared use the word martyr.

Friedman is also saying, as he has so many times, that large numbers of people act irrationally. They blow themselves up for no good reason, just for hate. He says, "There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: 'These terrorists are what they do.' And what they do is murder."

This is demonstrably false.

Most haters are averse to killing themselves. Haters are generally cowards. Hitler went on until the Russians were almost at the bunker door and only killed himself for fear of falling into their hands. Stalin was only stopped by Nature's good timing or secret assassination from launching yet another wave of arrests. I don't know of a single instance of those lynching thousands of black Americans who gave up their lives to get at their object of hate. America's "Reverend" Jimmy Swaggart threatened to kill any homosexual making a pass at him and weekly spurs his flock to hatred, but he has never offered to lay his own life down for the cause of his seething hatred.

On the other hand, has anyone ever described the Russians who laid down their lives in waves to stop Hitler as haters? I've never seen the Japanese Kamikaze pilots who tried desperately to stop the U.S. from reaching their homeland described as haters.

Something is desperately wrong with Friedman's way of looking at things, and if people like him win the struggle for hearts and minds, the ugly Patriot Act will be only the smallest reason for truth no longer having a place in America.

Maybe that Joe Stalin mustache Friedman sports represents more than a cosmetic effort to add some character to his face?

Hitler's decision to invade Russia was a horrific turning point in history, certainly the most consequential decision of the twentieth century and likely the most destructive in all of history. We still live with some of its terrible results.

In material terms, America's invasion of Iraq cannot be compared to the invasion of Russia. Germany took on a gigantic opponent, arrogantly regarded as its inferior in civilization and technology.

America's invasion was of a country with one-twelfth its population and, of more importance from a military point of view, with roughly one-twelfth its per capita income. America's tiny victim was sick, too, with water systems, electricity, and other vital infrastructure demolished by the first Gulf War, ten years of sporadic bombing by U.S. planes supposedly enforcing a no-fly zone, and a cruel embargo which took countless lives.

Germany greatly underestimated Russia's strength. Hitler said privately it would all be over in three weeks. Naturally, with the prevailing ethos of "working towards the Fuehrer," more accurate assessments had a limited constituency. Besides encountering what must rank as the most heroic human resistance in history, the Germans were shocked to find that the Russians were not quite so backward after all, the T-34 tank for example proving superior to much of German armor. The invasion of Russia gave us history's most terrible battle, Stalingrad, and its greatest tank battle, Kursk. It left 27 million Soviets dead, a loss that dwarfs the loss of any other country in any war.

The military capability of Iraq was grotesquely over-stated before America's invasion. Iraq's actual capabilities were well known to a number of experts, including weapons inspectors, intelligence services, and a number of international agencies and governments - not just its lack of sophisticated weapons but the terrible state of its basic infrastructure and the sheer physical exhaustion of its people. Informed voices were literally drowned out by propaganda and manipulation. Skewed editorials, planted news stories, deliberately provocative opinion pieces, forged evidence, and phony expert books tumbled from all the outlets of America's Ministry of Truth to make the declared enemy seem far more menacing than he was.

Bush has quickly managed to forget weapons that never existed, but to this day he continues to deliberately, falsely blur terrorism with the invasion of Iraq, although every informed person on earth knows that absolute governments like Hussein's are the most unfriendly to terrorism or any other "ism."

Both Bush and Hitler came to office determined in favor of invasion. Their decisions reflected no informed judgment of new developments or the discoveries of intelligence services. It was quite the opposite in both cases. We know Hitler viewed the western Soviet Union in precisely the same way that the early United States viewed western North America - as a vast reservoir of resources and an expanse promising immense economies of scale for future agriculture and industry. He wrote about these matters as he served a brief prison term for the 1923 putsch. And his thinking on this was not original. There had been Germans of the extreme right - politicians, military men, journalists, and others - who thought in these terms for decades.

The decisions in neither case reflected genuine assessments of the risk involved. Hitler's risk was immense, as events proved. The only risk Bush saw was the alienation of constituencies for which his political circle already had only contempt. There was never any question whether America could defeat Iraq's armed forces. An apt comparison for the invasion might be a dozen well-fed bullies beating up one poor, crippled man.

Of course, Bush's genuine risks, the ones of which he took no account whatever, were also large but longer-term. Unthinking people tend to ignore the long term and anything requiring some imagination. You might be able quickly to defeat Iraq's army, but could you defeat an angry people humiliated by the squalid mess America made of their country? Could you stop the intense sense of injustice and anger at such treatment sweeping through the Islamic world? Could you keep American forces occupying Iraq for years to come? Could you stop the deep unease felt by many old allies at such high-handed tactics?

We know from good anecdotes that from the beginning of his administration, Bush was ready to invade Iraq were there an opportunity, and we know from the Downing Street Memos that Bush realized he had been given his opportunity after 9/11. After all, the Neo-cons, upon whom he seems to depend for his only association with anything superficially intellectual, had advocated an invasion for a decade as the way to end America's complicated, nasty involvement with Iraq. And nothing could better please the majority of American Jews, who traditionally support Democrats, than knocking out Israel's most implacable foe. I think many Neo-cons advising Bush, apart from their usual sheer relish in advocating military force, probably believed an invasion offered the foundation for a new national political coalition in the United States. In this at least they may have been correct.

Strategic thinking clearly is not part of Bush's mental endowment, but the Neo-cons stand ever ready to supply the deficiency. It wouldn't take great arguments to convince Bush because always in the background, there was Bush's murky relationship with his father, predisposing a weak son towards one-upmanship and revenge. We don't know for sure, but Hitler's fairly successful and apparently brutal father, may well have helped set him on the path of destruction.

Attacking a relatively insignificant country is an easy way in America for a shabby politician to gain credentials for strength and determination, Americans already possessing considerable suspicion and contempt for the strange ways of faraway places. It's a tired old political act, performed many times, but it still works.

Hitler and many Germans viewed Russia as a threat, one that could only grow over time as the Soviet Union developed economically. The invasion was justified in terms of stopping a menace before it became unstoppable. Long before the invasion, Hitler repeatedly appealed to the prejudices of Western countries concerning the horrors of a growing Bolshevik monster. Bush's obtuse "Doctrine" concerning pre-emptive attacks on those regarded as threats is an exact mimicry of Hitler's attitude towards Russia.

Hitler's way of explaining to Germans his vision for gaining resources and the economies of scale to assure Germany's future greatness was the word "lebensraum." He hoped to duplicate the economic advantages of America's size through a single great stroke in Russia.

Bush's invasion was supported by a more modern and limited notion of lebensraum. Generally over the last half century of America's world ascendancy, force is no longer used to extend the lands under direct American rule. There are minor exceptions, but directly ruling large additional portions of the world would be costly, inefficient, and often counterproductive. America's homeland long ago reached a size adequate to guarantee it many future economic advantages. Locals may rule abroad so long as they do not question American policies and privileges. Force is used to intimidate or eliminate those who disagree.

The reason for the invasion of Iraq was to crush Israel's chief opponent, a man who regularly put difficulties in the path of American freedom of action in the region, while putting great oil resources into friendlier hands and striking terror into any Middle Eastern leaders in whose hearts might lurk such evil as questioning America's role. Bush and the Neo-cons like to talk of this last effect as bringing democracy to the region, but there is no basis for accepting such fatuous language. You don't "bring" democracy to people, especially by killing large numbers of them and building air bases on their territory. We may be sure the Neo-cons will be happy to see the region's clutch of suitably intimidated presidents-for-life and princes continue with their ways altered just enough to make Washington feel no sense of challenge.

Hitler gave no serious thought about how Germany would manage the tens of millions of Slavs falling under his rule. The long-term prospects, even had the invasion proved more successful, were not bright. Talk about reducing them to slavery to serve the Reich was easy enough, but just what would be entailed in such a vast scheme? The migration of Germans into the region, pushing Slavs from their homes, also would be a vast and long-term project. Would the German army have to occupy these lands in force indefinitely? Would they fight guerilla war for decades against enraged people? Perhaps some awareness of these problems generated Hitler's demand for absolute ruthlessness in the conquered territories. Whole categories of people and officials were murdered outright. Prisoners were treated with no regard for law or humanity.

Bush faces something of the same problems on a smaller scale, and all indications are that little thought or planning was given to them. Hussein's party had spent decades favoring friendly and tribal groups over the Shia majority and the Kurds. Huge amounts of land had been redistributed to the favored, and the original owners want their places back. The pressure on the U.S. would be all the greater since any effort to even begin establishing democratic institutions, Hussein's repressed majority would be the people with whom you must work.

The Sunni whom Hussein favored are naturally at the heart of the fierce resistance movement that now has emerged. They not only lost their favored positions and good jobs but face the possibility of losing homes or farms. The resistance has in turn created such feared conditions that little progress has been made to repairing the vast destruction done to the country. Bombings in the occupied country within a week of the London Underground bombing killed many times as many people. People are still without work and without such basics as dependable electrical service. They must stay in broken homes without electricity, in fierce temperatures, avoiding the streets. All this might well have been anticipated, but thoughtless ideologues aren't interested in such gritty realities when they launch their grand schemes at the expense of others.

American forces may not be engaging in assembly-line murder, but their behavior has been deplorable. The worst horrors of Abu Ghraib prison have been kept secret, including the rape of children. A gulag of secret prisons has been established in several locations of the world, including Afghanistan and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and nobody knows what goes on in these places. Activities at the Guantanamo torture chamber, approved and supported at the highest levels of the American government, rightly have damned any claims the nation has as being a leader in human rights. The CIA has such an extensive system of transportation for torture abroad there is a special name for it, rendition. The CIA also has murdered suspects. The disappearance of about three thousand Afghan prisoners still has received no official explanation, although witnesses say they were horribly murdered by warlords with American troops quietly watching. No one should forget Rumsfeld's Reinhard Heydrich-like statement at about that time that prisoners in Afghanistan should be done away with or walled away for life.

Hitler was a fervent believer in raw Social Darwinism. He actually was a convert to a form of brutal paganism, captivated by the notion that brutality offered the necessary infusion of strength for a people somewhat enfeebled by the ethical norms of his time. He regarded Christianity as a weakness, although he could not openly speak that way. He often clearly misjudged who in fact were the fittest, but his enthusiasm was palpable when talking of the necessity for his generation of Germans to show utter ruthlessness in order to earn future greatness.

The talk of American Neo-cons is more tempered, but it comes from exactly the same moral and intellectual root stock. Social Darwinism and worship of force are conspicuously on display in Washington. Rather than hating Christianity, the Neo-cons have harnessed it, at least a substantial American portion of it, to their purposes.

Importantly, the Neo-cons have different Christian material with which to work: America's fundamentalists display many attitudes and behaviors more in keeping with paganism than Christianity. This is particularly true when it comes to war and the military. America's Jesus, the one embraced by millions of fundamentalists, seems to be heartily cheered by war. He doesn't appear to oppose hate either since preaching against groups like gays comes pretty close to an obsession for many of His most prominent ministers. He can't be opposed to money changers in the temple because that's the main work of all those financial empire-building evangelists.

The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan is not isolated. Reports of American troops recently firing on Syrian troops along the border intensify concerns about threats towards Syria and Iran, and although the ongoing mess in Iraq makes another invasion seem unlikely that says nothing of other aggressive or surreptitious acts. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that 9/11 was a direct result of the CIA's huge dirty war in Afghanistan and that Al Qaeda is - or was, for I doubt its continued existence as an organization despite silly reports that somewhere on the Internet it continues taking credit for many acts - in great part an American creation.

What the Neo-cons call terror is not the true focus of their frenetic efforts. What they are after is control over change in key parts of the world that are now changing rather quickly. And their concern is not just with western Asia. China has become the target of new verbal attacks in Washington. American politicians, always friendly to foreign ownership so long as it is Americans doing the buying, have made ridiculous statements about China's efforts to buy North American companies, particularly Unocal.

The Neo-con's idea of a globalized world is one in which America owns all that it wishes abroad while getting to choose which nations abroad are acceptable to own something in America. This is quite revealing of the nature of their commitment to a globalized world, not a world of international give and take, relatively free trade, and fairly negotiated agreements but a world which operates by a biased set of rules laid down and enforced by the United States. It is free trade and internationalism according to the arrogant and oleaginous Thomas Friedman.

It occurs to me, part of the attitudes now on display in Washington go back a very long time, far before the Cold War. The cliff-hanger movie serials of the 1930s were filled with them. From Ming the Merciless, ruler of the planet Mongol, in Flash Gordon to the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates, China has been a troubling psychological presence in the American mind. Western Asia featured heavily, too, in serials about the Foreign Legion. An early one, called The Three Musketeers, had an American adventurer-pilot (John Wayne, in an early role) throwing in his lot with a group of Legionnaires somewhere on the Sahara fighting the evil of one El Shaitan, head of a secret organization called the Devil's Circle opposed to the French. Everything about this pot-boiler prefigured the saga of Osama and Al Qaeda by half a century. Most interestingly, the secret identity of El Shaitan turned out to be some kind of vaguely western merchant.

The recent words of Rumsfeld on the threat of China's new build-up of arms read almost like black humor. Here is a man a man who has presided over two invasions, a man who actually called for killing prisoners, a man who supports torture, a man who encourages a new generation of "usable" nuclear weapons, and a man who has a military budget greater than the combined military spending of half the planet, expressing concern over China's modernizing of some of its military forces. Washington's just-announced plans for nuclear cooperation with India are threats aimed directly towards China.

Ironically, important parts of China's modernization, more and longer-range missiles, represent precisely the response experts warned Washington of if it insisted on proceeding with its high-risk project for missile defense which, of course, carries a threat of neutralizing the nuclear deterrents of China and Russia. Russia earlier had announced a dramatic new technology for its long-range warheads to avoid interception as a response to the same American developments. Other parts of China's build-up reflect concerns over American threats to block China's claim to Taiwan, a claim Washington accepted in writing under Nixon, but one over which Neo-cons today are making all kinds of threatening noises.

American hostility towards China is all the more fascinating since China with regard to the external world has been a relatively peaceful country for half a century. Over that same time, America has chalked up dozens of bloody interventions and wars. Fifty-five years ago, when China did enter the Korean War, it was only after strenuous efforts to warn Washington that MacArthur's army must not approach North Korea's main border with China, the Yalu River, warnings that simply were ignored.

Bush's Washington has been periodically bellicose towards China from the beginning, taking cues from the Neo-cons who singled out a rising China years ago as a potential case for Cartago delenda est. But now the pace of threatening gestures and remarks is becoming steadier and more dangerous. Any one who knows anything about modern China understands that serious American efforts to undermine China's claim to Taiwan will result in conflict. The case is just as certain as someone provoking the United States by claiming California is ready for independence and actively working to promote it. This does not necessarily mean all-out war, for the Chinese are subtle and understand American technical superiority (for now) in advanced weapons. There are many ways for China to strike at the United States, including at the extreme of allowing some of its excellent missile technology and nuclear know-how to fall to the spies of hostile lands.

Bush is working hard to give us a world characterized by divisiveness, resentments, suspicions, and violence because that is the kind of world in which America may freely act as arbiter, seeming to stand above the turmoil like Zeus with his thunderbolts. In part this derives from lack of understanding, in part arrogance, but control over the lives and institutions of others is the greatest motivator for Bush, just as it was for Hitler. Of course, he believes, or pretends to believe, that he is working towards a world of peace and democratic values, but it is to be a world where peace, democracy, and rights are defined exclusively on his terms. Recent events in London and earlier in Spain show exactly what Bush's legacy is to be, a world full of people seething with resentment over what the U.S. has done, angry and frustrated enough to attack even those browbeaten and bribed into the fatuous Coalition of the Willing. The London bombers appear to have been home-grown, not imported. Moreover we live in a world, particularly considering Eastern and Western Asia, where there are far more of "them" than "us."

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."
USMC Major General Smedley Butler

Our Supreme Court has decided a murderous beast, Rwandan exile Leon Mugesera, will be deported to face justice, while a mass murderer who blew up an airliner full of people and unquestionably engaged in many other acts of violence, Luis Posada Carriles, is protected by the President of the United States from receiving justice in Venezuela.

I'd rather have a Prime Minister who sometimes dithers - although, as a pure politician, Mr. Martin has demonstrated breath-taking skill in outmaneuvering his opponents - than a President who seems capable of nothing but lying and crying about terror while terrorizing others.

Only a few days before the national holiday, with the passing of Bill C-38, Canada became just the third country in the world, after Holland and Belgium, to expand human rights by giving gays the same right to marry as others. Any person aware of history and the gradual expansion of human rights over the last few centuries understands that this is something that will come eventually to all advanced countries (Spain became the fourth the next day), but it is nice to be in the forefront of progress and decency.

Contrary to the harsh uninformed preaching of fundamentalists mainly in the United States, the fully-formed modern idea of marriage only appears in the twentieth century, a time when people choose their companions, often for love and a time when we treat children as being rather precious and needing expensive education. Many marriages are of course childless, but they are still regarded as marriages in every meaning of the word. Control of human fertility for the first time in human history gives us an idea of children new in some respects. Many do not want them. Most have a small number of them and invest a very great deal in them.

The meaning of marriage has changed many times, just since the Middle Ages. Peasants typically during the Middle Ages co-habited. The Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament to enlarge its income and control. Marriage was mainly then an institution for the rich, and it had very little to do with love or companionship. Marriages of the rich and powerful were arranged, always with a careful eye to wealth and property. At the top of the social pyramid, unmarried princesses became literally pawns of their fathers in international affairs.

Elizabeth I, the greatest prince in European history, used Europe's then-traditional views on marriage to advance the affairs of England, avoiding destructive wars by toying with various princes, sometimes for years, over the possibility or even the terms of marriage, something to which she privately was determined never to subject herself, having the harrowing experience of her father's treatment of six wives, including her own mother, burnt into memory.

While details changed, by the eighteenth century, this view of marriage was still alive, even in the New World. George Washington married the richest widow in the British colonies, Martha Custis, and made himself a rich man. I say "made himself" because by the laws and customs then still prevailing, all Martha's property became George's. George liked Martha but no one who knew them ever regarded theirs as a marriage of love. Property and male control of property remained so inextricably linked to marriage, it wasn't until well into the twentieth century in North America that women could hold bank accounts or take loans and mortgages without a husband to co-sign for them.

Children were not treated in the sentimental way we treat them. In upper-class families, children were typically raised by servants and educated by hired scholars in demanding curricula. By the eighteenth century, they were typically sent to boarding schools at a young age. In lower-class families, children were worked like beasts. Through the Industrial Revolution, people very unsentimentally sent children at an early age to work under brutal conditions - as when they were literally chained to machines - or to apprentice in some trade. Charles Dickens' hated apprenticeship to a bootblack was almost gentle compared with what many children in early Victorian England experienced.

So, too, on American farms of the nineteenth century, regarded by so many with sentimental, unrealistic visions of Little House on the Prairie. Children were assets in small under-capitalized enterprises. They did tough work like haying, picking, and water-hauling. Many of the marriages involved little of what we regard today as love or affection, although that was always possible. The women were sometimes mail-order or often not well known to their spouses-to-be. They did unremitting work, aging and dying often quite young. High infant mortality, too, limited the development of purely sentimental bonds with children because nearly half of them died before growing up.

There is simply no reason, other than blind prejudice, for gay people to be denied the rights, satisfactions, and responsibilities of modern marriage. Many may never consider marriage. That too is their right. What is wonderful is that Canada's legal acceptance of their equal status in marriage will gradually work to wear away any remnant of regarding gays as something corrupt or immoral. That is always how it is with social change: change occurs in notable events, almost little revolutions if you will, and gradually all of society alters its attitudes. A number of men, including preachers and newspaper editors, swore up and down, saying many ridiculous and embarrassing things, when women were given the right to vote in the early part of the twentieth century. It's not easy giving up privileges and prejudices.

Not that gays have a difficult time in Canada, the country being far more tolerant than many. Toronto's Gay Pride parade has become a huge event, an entertainment which families attend, with a bigger turnout than the Santa Claus parade. Most people understand that homosexuality is as birth-determined as hair color. The favorite line of preachers of hate that gays are choosing a lifestyle, an abominable lifestyle in the eyes of God, is patent nonsense. However Canada's new law allows churches who believe this stuff to be exempted from performing gay marriages.

Happy Birthday, Canada.

Of course, Bush must actually be re-elected in 2008, but that represents a mere technicality. Bush was appointed in 2000 by a Supreme Court whose capacity for critical thinking already resembled that of senior judges in the early Reich. By 2008, Bush will have loaded the Court with creatures who might have made splendid careers in the Holy Inquisition under Torquemada.

The Republican fallback plan for 2008 is to repeat the election of 2004, in which heavy vote fraud in places like Ohio gave Republicans their revenge for Democrats' vote fraud in 1960. Republicans used to be more straitlaced about things like vote fraud. It was only the old Democratic political machines of the nation's cities that supposedly practiced it with any regularity. But with the rise in political influence of America's fundamentalists and neo-cons, Republicans have embraced vote fraud wholeheartedly. Fundamentalist pitchmen provided the party a splendid example of the advantages of fleecing their flocks. America's neo-cons have decades of experience posing as disinterested academics advocating human slaughter as policy. If you really think about it, the plan seems sound, and the timing seems right. Its prospects look quite good.

It has my full support, simply because I believe America needs a belly full of Bush before the world can expect any relief from the country's lunatic course. I know through long experience that what happens to the rest of the world carries little weight with most Americans. Since 9/11, America has been turning itself into a gated community, bristling with ferocious weapons, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and the truth is we don't hear much outrage about it from America herself.

Americans are stubborn people, convinced of the virtue of whatever they do - even today you'd be hard put to convince many that cremating, poisoning, and blowing apart three million Vietnamese was anything other than heroic self-sacrifice in the name of freedom - so it takes a long time to alter course in America. Steering one of those gigantic super-tankers where you have to anticipate your turn miles ahead is almost child's play by comparison.

Lies have always been used to promote wars, and America's wars, despite the nation's ongoing flirtation with democracy, have been absolutely no different in character to those of despots over the centuries. We could say that it will be the test of democratic maturity when the American people are consulted and told honestly why they are being asked to start a war, but that seems unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

Apart from the ugly lies before wars, remember that America's most weighty contribution to world culture is exceedingly refined techniques of marketing, a smarmy art developed in the course of the nation's historic, headlong rush to get rich. So many things in American life - goods, services, religion, and even elections - have more marketing in them than content. Much of American life has about it the quality of "Have a nice day!" from a computerized phone system.

So I don't understand why any Americans are surprised at Bush's shameless lies. He's almost turned lying into a form of stand-up comedy. As soon as one lie's usefulness is ended, he smirkingly substitutes another, without pausing to consider any need for continuity between the two. It is hilarious to watch the leader of a great nation doing this, at least so long as you are not one of his victims.

The real puzzle is why Americans keep buying tickets to his act. Perhaps, with American media always larded with subtle to blatant lies for commercial marketing and politics, responses to other, greater lies are numbed. Perhaps, America really just doesn't much care.

Orwell was wrong in 1984 putting forward the idea of the Party's gradually eliminating words to control people's ability to think and speak critically. He was of course parodying the Soviet Union which to some extent did follow the practice. But the repressive old Soviet Union is gone while America thrives, constantly inventing new words - marketing gibberish, psycho-babble, political rubbish, science-fiction religion - which strives to puff up nothing into something. In America, you can literally fill a small library with books and magazines on any number of subjects from education to health that contain nothing genuinely furthering human understanding.

Marketing turns out to work better than repression over the long term, although the forces of repression are always there in America to offer assistance in dark corners. Hitler himself could not have asked for a set of laws more devious than the Patriot Act. Its continued existence stands as a monument to American political dull-wittedness. Just as bestial torture cages abroad demonstrate the nation's lack of interest in anything thought not to affect America.

But as the best evidence of America's unhealthy condition, I give you People's Exhibit Number One, the fact that Bush is in office and his polls are still not as low as the nation's ever-hopeful, hopeless liberals would like to believe. After all, vote fraud doesn't work where the vote wasn't already close.

We all know the Newsweek story was not a rumor. The Koran was dunked in a toilet by American soldiers as an act of psychological torture against their poor captives. Captives, we might remind Laura, since rights are supposedly the point of her journey, held in cages with no legal rights and against the Geneva Accords.

"Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression. It's the right to speak and vote and worship freely," Laura told business and political leaders. Women's rights she said had made "extraordinary progress" in the Middle East since the Taliban was suppressed. I doubt Laura was referring to uniformed American women photographed torturing Iraqi prisoners and having group sex with other Americans. They certainly set an interesting example of American women exercising freedom.

When you consider even a small part of the history Laura ignores, you'd have to say the Muslim world's reaction to a nasty story was relatively calm by American standards.

How many hundreds of black Americans were lynched owing to rumor? A lot of them in Laura's Texas, right into the 1930s. There were sensational cases in the 1920s - the most famous being in Laura's neighboring state of Oklahoma, another in her brother-in-law Jeb Bush's state of Florida - where an entire community of innocent black people was massacred and buried in mass graves after the mere rumor of a white woman's rape.

It was as late as the 1950s that thousands of innocent Americans were persecuted, effectively stripped of many rights, and dismissed from their work on the basis of nothing but rumors of being Communists.

A mere rumor near the turn of the last century caused the United States to invade Cuba under the slogan, "Remember the Maine!" The Maine was an American warship which exploded in Havana harbor. Americans immediately assumed, and were encouraged to believe, that the ship had been attacked. Today we know almost to a certainty that the Maine blew up because of a faulty steam boiler system.

What about the invasion of Iraq? Just the rumor of non-existent weapons was enough to launch an invasion that slaughtered a 100,000 civilians and cost tens of billions of dollars. Laura's dear hubby led the political baboons grunting that it must be so.

The Hate Wing of American Fundamentalist Preachers - presumably all welcome guests in Laura's White House - enthusiastically promoted war following 9/11. The act of a few individuals were used to fire hatred against a billion people. Now, I'd call that reasonable and fair, wouldn't you?

Today America shelters a known terrorist by the name of Luis Posada Carriles. This man blew up an airliner full of people in 1976. He worked at one time for the CIA in its ugly campaign of murder against Castro during the 1960s. God knows what other acts of terror he committed. Would he be welcome at Laura's White House?

London's Daily Telegraph, at the start of Laura's mini-crusade, called her the President's secret weapon, but I believe appreciation of her charms is limited to a stretch of odd country known as Middle America, the place where women are generally still expected to wear aprons and bake cookies. While there are no laws against women expressing independent views in America, look what happens when a prominent woman actually does so. Hillary Clinton is vilified, literally spewed with hatred and abuse, for daring to be independent and express her intelligence. The never-ending campaign against her is almost pathological.

Pretty much the same treatment was received by John Kerry's foreign-born, outspoken wife when she was briefly in the spotlight during the last presidential campaign.

For any less famous woman with independent views, the odds are small anyone in the United States will publish or broadcast them and even smaller anyone with influence will listen to them. Anyway, the airwaves of America are such a cataract of subsidized right-wing hate that any little broadcast by a truly independent woman, or man, simply is lost in the ear-splitting roar.

Laura in attacking women's rights in the Third World picks an extremely safe target, but what is she really doing with the timing and subject of her trip? Providing a cheap propaganda counterpoint to abusing prisoners and throwing the holy book of a billion people in the toilet.

Despite the sparkle in Laura's eyes, the sheer abundance of what she doesn't know, and her often foolish words reveal perceptions and attitudes almost as limited as those of her mother-in-law, who said in public not long ago,

Washington is the most dishonest place on earth, and with that fact goes another, that the American people are among the earth's worst governed. These creepy American Gauleiters had wronged Galloway with faked accusations of his profiting from oil trading with Saddam Hussein. My God, it's just one filthy lie after another. They tried smearing Kofi Anan with the same kind of stuff.

Why is it so rarely Americans who take on their own lying, murderous political establishment? It has always been the same. How few Americans stood up to that bellowing angry drunk, political wife-beater, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or that ugly maggot sucking at the nation's liberties, J. Edgar Hoover.

George Galloway's real crime is to have been a sharp thorn in Tony Blair's side, a powerful critic of the stupid Iraq War. Blair dreamt he would rise to Churchillian heights by attending training classes in Crawford, Texas, on how to rig an illegal war. Today he looks more like the sad, depleted Lloyd George expressing his admiration for that rising new star in Europe, Hitler.

American liberals keep writing about their press's failure to do its job. Many of the people writing these things are children of the Woodward and Bernstein years under Nixon, a time when there was the brief illusion of an honest press, the tribune of the public, the fourth estate or unofficial branch of government, and other hero-comic phrases.

But that was a brief time of special circumstances. Nixon by then was disliked by a good deal of the American establishment. The War in Vietnam, blackening America's reputation worldwide, serving no worthwhile purpose, and clearly being lost, threatened to divide the nation as ferociously as had the Civil War.

The more usual situation now prevails. We are back to the same press that never questioned a Gulf of Tonkin Incident, something as phony as Nazi Germany's shooting a batch prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms and claiming Poland had attacked the Reich.

There can be no more acid comment on the American press's role in Bush's sleazy war than the mere observation of the New York Times' regular use of the out-of-date, sentimental term GI when referring to America's professional killers now occupying Iraq.

It is not clear yet that America's establishment dislikes Bush. The profits from money thrown around Washington likes slops at an industrial-scale hog farm are delightful while the broader cost of Bush's brutish stupidity has not yet registered. Events on this scale take time to play out. The invasion of Iraq, just as the War in Vietnam, will prove certainly to have been an unmitigated disaster, mass killing and destruction to no good purpose, but the full cost won't be known for years.

America's own deaths in Iraq are still small in number so far as wars go. Why is that, apart from the nature of the invasion itself which resembled the entire Wehrmacht bravely rolling over tiny Greece? Only days ago, a news item in Europe informed us that British military commanders are shocked by American tactics during the occupation, and they have tried advising them, to no effect yet, on altering their ways.

Essentially, Americans sit in Kevlar armor with weapons of horrific fire power behind barriers and in no-go zones. They have absolutely no relationship with the people. They make no friends, only future enemies, as they shoot anyone - almost exclusively innocent civilians - who doesn't understand the rules. Once in a while, they launch a massive assault against a target assumed to be a center of armed opposition. Fallujah was one of these, and its utter ruin represents today almost the same kind of ferocious symbol that the Nazi-obliterated village of Lidice did for World War II.

Anyone can see, even reading the manipulated American press, that these tactics are failing. The attacks of Iraqi resistance forces just keep increasing. The rebuilding of the country, without which there is no hope for long-term stability, isn't proceeding as it should. The country's pathetic excuse for an elected government doesn't yet function as a government. New revelations of American abuses steadily feed indignation and resentments around the world.

Americans are not people with long-term vision. "I want it all, and I want it now," would be the appropriate current national motto. This quality makes Americans among the least qualified people on earth to undertake some of the tasks their politicians set them. The patience of the Chinese or the stiff upper lip of the Brits is missing in people trained to get pissed-off about late pizzas. That's part of the reason for the brutal, senseless nature of the occupation, and that's why the Internet press is full of liberal and other anti-war demands that American troops leave Iraq.

I wish that were possible, but it would be totally irresponsible. The destruction is done, the horrible mess is made. Americans have a clear responsibility to prevent Iraq's falling into total bloody chaos. American troops will remain in Iraq, and will keep dying there, for years. As from all horrible situations, some good may eventually come. Maybe, just maybe, it will dawn on Americans how destructive and ignorant their politicians' approach to world affairs truly is.

But I doubt it. The essence of hell is that there is no escape.

I can't blame the CBC for once broadcasting what is essentially political smut because, on the whole, the network is fair, enlightened, and far freer of nasty political pressure than public radio in the United States. Everyone who makes an honest effort is entitled to make an honest mistake now and then.

Calling people names because you dislike their views is not logic and is not any form of argument. It is not even decent. I can't see how this lawyer's words differ from American Senator McCarthy using the dangerously-loaded slur, Communist, applied to anyone he didn't want working in the State Department or in Hollywood.

If I indulge this lawyer's name-calling, saying it resembles logic, what comes to mind is another lawyer's argument at the trial many years ago of a man who had slashed a woman's throat and then tried to strangle her with a lamp cord. That lawyer claimed his client had only been applying a tourniquet to a wound he accidentally inflicted.

This lawyer's fantasy argument is that the very selectivity of Israel's critics ipso facto proves their anti-Semitism. Why aren't these same people out criticizing China about Tibet he demanded? Apart from the fact that many of them do criticize other injustices in the world - a fact which makes the lawyer's words into the cheap trick of a straw-man argument - one has to ask just whom he includes in his indictment?

Does he include decent, honorable people like Uri Avnery, former member of the Knesset, a citizen of Israel who writes regularly of the injustices committed by the country he loves? Does he include the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim who grew up partly in Israel and has many times criticized its policies? Does he include the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who expressed his rejection of Sharon's brutality? Does he include Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela who both have described what they see in Israel as the apartheid with which they are intimately familiar?

All people supporting any cause must be selective. You can't focus on the facts if your attention is distributed among fifty causes, and advocacy or criticism without facts is vacuous. Ghandi had a focus as did Martin Luther King as did Tutu as did all the early Zionist leaders as did Arafat. Taking on every injustice in the world plainly makes it impossible to say much to the point about any of them.

So why does anyone focus on Israel? In part, for the simple reason that we are overwhelmed with awareness of Israel in our press. A day almost cannot pass that we do not have a news story about Israel. The slightest statement of Ariel Sharon is reported with about the same weight as the words of major world statesmen. We hear of every change in his cabinet. We hear of every change in his plans. We hear of every meeting he has with other leaders. When was the last time you read or heard a story about Tibet?

As a quick check of the intuitive truth of this claim, do a Google search of leaders' names. At this writing, a search of Sharon turned up 24,700,000 references. A search for Blair turned up 24,400,000. Bush, which includes two presidents of the United States plus governors and cabinet posts, nets us 88,700,000 references. China's leader, Hu Jintao had 770,000 references. All of these searches, of course, include people other than the individual in question, but the world's population of Sharons is not large.

The population of Israel is a fraction of the size of cities like Shanghai or Mexico City. Its population is roughly the size of Guatemala's or Ecuador's or that of Ivory Coast. How many stories do you read or hear about these places? Can you name the Mayor of Shanghai or the President of Ecuador? The mayor of Shanghai, one of the world's largest cities, is a man by the name of Han Zheng. That name rang up 304,000 references, but with China's huge population sharing something on the order of only about a hundred traditional family names, those references include many people who are not even distantly related to the mayor.

Why would it surprise any thoughtful person that Israel is far more on people's minds than Tibet? But the question of focus on Israel involves far more than constant repetition, important as that fact is.

A good deal of the mess that we find ourselves in today, the so-called War on Terror and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, largely pivots on Israel's policy and behavior towards the Palestinians and on America's policy towards Israel. The problem of Israel versus the Palestinians has become a kind of geopolitical black hole which threatens to consume much of the energy and substance of Western society. Surely, we all have a right, and even a moral obligation, to address such a threatening situation without being called names.

Why doesn't Israel just make peace? Israel holds virtually all the cards. The weapons. The intelligence information. The economic advantages. The immensely powerful ally. At least certainly compared to the pathetic group of people, the Palestinians, it calls its enemy.

The pointless destruction of Iraq, with at least a 100,000 civilians killed, a reign of terror unleashed, and the loss of some of civilization's greatest ancient artifacts was never about oil. It was intended to sweep Israel's most formidable, traditional opponent from the map. Never mind that Hussein no longer had any threatening weapons (a fact confirmed by experts several times over), and never mind that Iraqis suffered horribly under American-imposed sanctions for a decade.

Hussein was nasty but no nastier than dozens of thugs with whom the U.S. has comfortably done business since World War II. Power is what always takes precedence over principles in these matters, and Hussein opposed some American policies. Israel's policy has followed the same path. For instance, Israel worked closely with the apartheid government of South Africa, heavily engaging in trade and military assistance. The South African atomic bomb, which quietly and quickly vanished with the changeover in government, unquestionably was the fruit of Israeli cooperation. Israel received its early assistance in creating atomic weapons from France in exchange for important support around France's battles in its (now former) North African colonies.

So what do we hear from Sharon, as American Marines turn the once-thriving city of Fallujah into a rubbish pile, as horrific resistance bombs keep ripping apart Baghdad? Sharon, time after time, tells us the United States also should invade Syria and Iran. To intimidate Syria, he has Israeli Air Force planes buzzing the presidential palace in Damascus, the only reason Syria is buying short-range anti-aircraft missiles from Russia, missiles to which Israel strenuously objects. What would the news stories here be were Syrian planes capable of doing the same thing in Tel Aviv?

Is Israel the only country somehow magically immune to Lord Acton's dictum about power? I think not, but in saying that I risk being classified an anti-Semite.

One hopes Stephen Harper will show statesmanship in not forcing a new election, but the hope is slim. His party, though it has virtually no chance of winning a seat in Quebec, naturally wants to be christened by even a brief assumption of power. Peter MacKay, number-two man in the party, answers questions about his past broken promises with a description of politics as a "blood sport," and judging from the language he uses during Question Period, he very much means it.

The Conservatives have no critical priorities, no desperately wished-for program, but they have the opportunity to exploit an unpleasant situation for a possible minority government. In doing this they would be upsetting a lot of important initiatives now underway. They would be appealing to people's unhappiness over a scandal where all the information has not yet even been collected. They would be trying to remove a government that has done everything anyone could expect from government in setting things right. Judge the meaning of an election called under those circumstances. And judge, too, the fact that Stephen Harper's Quebec lieutenant effectively must be Gilles Duceppe.

Duceppe is an almost asinine figure, a man with such a checkered political history that words about principles sound bizarre coming from his mouth. The Bloc Quebecois, a bizarre separatist party acting in the federal arena where it can never achieve its objectives, basically serves as a place to park votes when people in Quebec are angry or frustrated as they are now. That is, except for the genuine opportunity a Conservative minority government would offer the Bloc to extract serious favours for its support. Now there's a principled arrangement: the Conservatives assisting separatism in order to gain power.

I do love the Conservative claim to moral high ground in the current scandal. This is, after all, the party of Grant Devine, a premier who had ministers sent to prison for fraud and who to this day sounds like a weasel trying to explain away what happened. This is the party of wife-murderer Colin Thatcher. This is the party of Brian Mulroney, whose immense Airbus scandal remains successfully buried. This is the party of Stockwell Day whose unique blend of ignorance and mouth cost a provincial government the best part of a million dollars defending him before he had the grace to apologize. This is the party of Peter MacKay, a man whose word goes about as far as the tiny distance between his eyes.

Danny Williams set a fine example for Canadians by taking down the nation's flag all over the Newfoundland because he didn't get quite the deal on revenue-sharing he thought he deserved. What else could you compare Danny's behaviour to except a child who bawls in the store to embarrass its mother into buying something? Taking down the flag of course has more serious implications than just bawling or holding your breath until you turn blue. It is damaging to people's sense of national identity and purpose.

I am not a defender of America's civic religion around its flag, something closer in spirit to brown-shirt demonstrations than pride in rights and freedoms, but, still, flags do mean something. Perhaps rather I should say Canada means something, something a bit more than getting just the financial deal you want. Canada is a genuinely decent country, a peaceful place, a place that does not make enemies in the world, a place where discrimination and hatred are about as minimal as you will find anywhere. The flag is a symbol for these qualities, not a symbol for a particular federal party or a particular financial arrangement. A political leader who uses it for a stunt deserves contempt and owes the nation an apology. Danny largely escaped the price of his ridiculous and destructive behaviour because people do have a certain expectation and tolerance for quaint ways in Newfoundland.

Ironically, and some would hold with considerable justice, an election would prevent Danny's special concession from being legislated. If that were the only consequence of an election at this time, it might not be bad.

Danny's stupid behaviour quickly drew the attention of Dalton McGuinty sniffing around for money. Dalton then stumbled upon the existence of a mysterious and monstrous gap in Ontario's financial arrangements with Ottawa. Evidently, Dalton was unaware of the fact that Ontario pays out more than it receives over the course of his considerable political career, just as he was unaware that Ontario was running a substantial deficit during the last election campaign.

Dalton's slogans about a "$23 billion gap" and a "$5 billion down payment" are as insidious, and potentially as destructive, as the poorly-defined promises of separatist leaders in Quebec. Not that Dalton is as effective a speaker. He is not, coming off rather like a gangly door-to-door salesman in love with the sound of his adenoidal voice.

No reasonable person would argue with Dalton's raising focused issues with the national government over aspects of equalization financing. There may well be aspects of immigration or transportation or other areas where Ontario is today short-changed because the variables in any established formula become stressed by changing circumstances over time. Discussing such matters would simply be part of his job as premier.

But that is not what Dalton is doing. Instead he keeps repeating cheap slogans that question the basic idea of sharing in the Canadian Confederation. Dalton has said he is not questioning the general principle, but the effect upon the public of his advertising slogans can only reduce public respect for traditional Canadian arrangements. That's precisely how advertising and propaganda work.

I won't dwell on Ralph Klein's being re-elected a while back in Alberta, his lifetime political achievement being holding office when oil prices exploded. For some mysterious reason people in Alberta are comfortable with this argumentative, unpleasant man who all too often behaves as though he'd just emptied a pitcher of martinis at the Petroleum club. I'll only mention that in looking at the Alberta government Internet site recently, I discovered Klein listing himself under the heading, the Executive Branch. I think that pretty much sums up his understanding of parliamentary government and perhaps says a word about his dreams.

Which brings us back to Stephen Harper. Can he rise above Ralph Klein's bar-room vision of Canada? Can he show the statesmanship and decency we knew from Joe Clark? Can he contribute genuinely to Canada's precious integrity? Few of our contemporary politicians seem even slightly capable of passing such a test.

I could dwell on the difficulty of anyone's improving relations with a man of Mr. Bush's remarkably unpleasant character. After all, Canada has produced no more affable or charming politician than former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and Mr. Chretien it seems could not entirely disguise a sense of repulsion. I am sure he did not greatly miss his cancelled invitation to share charred cow, root beer, and sermons from the Book of Revelations down in Crawford, Texas.

Of course, no matter how unpleasant the current President is, Canada must have a decent relationship with America. Geography dictates this, but so does Canada's basic national character. Canada does not make enemies, which is why so many Americans travelling in Europe and other places wear Maple Leaf patches on their backpacks or pins in their lapels.

Criticism of Manley's scheme is possible on many levels, but my chief criticism is that the authors simply do not understand that no country can make a binding deal of this nature with the United States. It is simply impossible. Yes, America's government might well sign an agreement, but the agreement would shortly prove worthless, except in just those portions with visceral appeal to Americans. This conclusion comes neither from prejudice nor mordant humor but from having lived half my life in each country and being a serious student of history.

The point of the scheme is to avoid the massive back-ups in trade and travel that occurred in the aftermath of 9/11 by creating what would be effectively a single border for the countries of North America. Canada and Mexico would give up their independent decision-making regarding circumstances of entry, including for refugees, an area of international affairs where Canada has been far more generous and humane than the United States in past decades. There is even provision for educational efforts to promote a sense of North American identity.

My most enduring memory of crossing the Canadian border is of a gruff, unpleasant American border guard seizing a banana from a man travelling into the United States. Traffic was heavy and slow, allowing us the chance to view this little passion play. The man's car was parked, having been selected for detailed search. With nothing found amiss, the guard seized a banana from the man's lunch on the car's front seat and marched truculently back to his office with it. His reason for doing so? The banana didn't have a sticker. Now, I know not all Americans are like this guard, but enough of them are to heavily color the national character.

Former Governor Weld of Massachusetts, who also sat on the trilateral panel, called the proposal daring and spoke against those who would "hide their heads in the sand." Well, all I could think of is American border guards stationed alongside Canadians in places like Nova Scotia, seizing bananas from lunch bags. Governor Weld is oblivious to the real concerns of his country's northern neighbor which are more about Canadian heads being shoved into the sand than anyone hiding there. But then Weld is a conservative former governor from the same state that gave Canada the most obnoxious American Ambassador ever appointed, another former conservative governor, Mr. Cellucci, a man with no grace who has specialized in travelling around Canada telling Canadians what their policies should be. His recall wasn't requested surely only because the government already felt intense displeasure from Washington over its decision not to contribute troops to the killing fields of Iraq.

The panel's scheme is a vision of Fortress America scowling at the world with its two small neighboring principalities huddled in the shadows of outer works or pens under the massive walls. The scheme is sweetened for Canada and Mexico by offering supposed new certainties in trade access to the world's largest national market. The outer works supposedly have open doors through the looming walls.

No matter what Canada and Mexico do to prepare against it, should there be another major terrorist-style attack on the United States, precisely the same pattern of behavior is to be expected. America has behaved irrationally for three solid years since 9/11, and no treaty, no agreement, or no arrangement will prevent a re-kindling of America's blast-furnace rage at its rich gated community again having been rudely broken into by "some of them." I recall an engraved wooden sign some years ago in the window of a luxurious land-yacht at a trailer park in Arizona, "We don't call 9-1-1," with a drawing of crossed smoking pistols. The sign was funny, but funny only in its succinctly capturing an ugly truth about the lawless, uncivil character of many Americans.

It was Americans themselves who let the 9/11 gang into their country with visas and permitted them to study such arcane matters as learning to be airline pilots. 9/11 was nothing more than "blowback" from unsavory CIA operations in Afghanistan and other places, yet Americans never stopped talking about Canada as a haven for terrorists, and, to this day, American intelligence officials and others have not been held accountable for what they so clearly permitted to happen. But this failure represents a real thread running through the American character: no one is responsible for anything, unless he or she happens to be a foreigner or someone from America's more undesirable classes.

Government in the United States is a kind of loosely organized chaos, which is how Americans have always wanted to be governed. No matter what the source of authority, the American system allows for exceptions, bending of the rules, or scholastic-like quibbling over definitions. This pliability about rules doesn't exclude frequent bouts of brutal excess in enforcing the very same rules. Bush, as Governor of Texas, ferociously enforced the same rules about drugs he flouted for years as a feckless rich drifter.

America presents an odd face in its dealings abroad, odd at least to countries like Canada where respect for order and good government is deeply valued. America's is a Picasso-like image, seeming to be a single face, but with perspectives going off in several directions. The noted American historian, Page Smith, observed the characteristic time and again in America's national history and described it loosely as "schizophrenia."

For Canadians the most obvious recent examples come under the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and the latter North American Free Trade Treaty. As most Canadians are well aware, the U.S., whenever it has suited its interests, simply has ignored the authority of bilateral panels created by these treaties to settle trade disputes. The story of Canadian softwood lumber is only the most extreme in a long series of disagreements. You could write a book on the subject. The U.S. lost its arguments, time after time, in every international dispute-settling institution, and it has been told it is violating the rules of the WTI. Yet the matter remains unresolved.

Think of the comic-opera ending to the recent decision to open borders again to Canadian beef. A single infected cow had caused the best part of two years' hardship for Canadian beef exporters. Any country is entitled to protect the health of its citizens under the rules of trade, but America's action went well beyond that goal. It is after all Americans who always say it is "the science" that should count in matters like global warming, but the science here supports Canada which made big changes in its beef industry, not to mention the honest reporting of the infection in the first place. Can there be any doubt in the course of these events that more than one animal with mad-cow disease has been quietly shot and buried on the dusty plains of Texas or Arizona?

A judge in Billings, Montana, decides for local ranchers who stand on no principle other than protecting themselves from the falling prices of returned competition. How on earth does a district court have the ability to derail a matter relating to international treaties? Yet, this event precisely captures the confused American concept of government and the country's inherent inability to make and scrupulously keep international agreements.

There is nothing unique in the Canadian experience. Everyone who has signed economic treaties with the U.S. has been treated the same way. Mexico, for example, one of whose most important crops is avocados, was barred, under one pretense or another, from exporting avocados into the U.S. for years after implementing the North American Free Trade Treaty. Mexico's crop is less costly than that raised by American farmers and would have serious economic impact, but as anyone who has studied first-year economics knows, that is precisely the kind of competitive effect that free trade is supposed to generate.

You don't need to look only at economic treaties. The Bush administration was perfectly content to turn its back on a sound anti-ballistic missile treaty when it felt like pursuing its new failing-every-test anti-ballistic missile system intended to swell defense contractors' profits and keep the Cold War paranoia pot stirred. No knowledgeable person expects any so-called rogue state to have the ability to launch an ICBM at the United States for fifteen years. Right now, anyone wanting to harm the U.S. with an atomic device need only bring a fishing boat into port on any of its coasts.

The American government defied the U.N. over Iraq, even though its membership in this organization includes many important treaty obligations. The invasion was just about as illegal and without justification as Hitler's invasion of Poland. U.N. inspectors could have indefinitely maintained surveillance to keep Iraq free of weapons Bush falsely claimed were there. The cost would have been a fraction of invasion, and one hundred thousand civilians need not have died. And what can we say of a United States that unilaterally ignores its treaty obligations to pay U.N. dues, demanding instead changes in the organization to its own liking? Or what of the appointment of a new American U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who for years has preached contempt and utter diplomatic ignorance of the institution?

There is no higher authority in the U.S. than the Constitution, a document Americans have been trained to regard almost with religious awe, and yet Americans time and time again violate the principles and clear intentions of this document. Its exalted Bill of Rights was simply ignored for the best part of two centuries where Black Americans were concerned.

You are not supposed to face double jeopardy under the American Constitution, the Founders being well aware of horribly abusive practices in some courts of Europe, yet a form of double jeopardy is practiced every day in America. Accused persons tried under the criminal law are often tried again for precisely the same matter under civil law, often with the opposite verdict. I understand the lawyers' technical explanations of this, but a person found innocent under the tougher standards of criminal law should be presumed innocent of the same charge under the less-demanding standards of the civil law. Not so in America. Any unbiased observer could only call it a form of double jeopardy, scholastically redefined.

What of America's penchant for insane law suits? Does this reflect anything more than willingness to seize a chance at a big jackpot without a sense of responsibility, good citizenship, or decency?

America, most importantly, is a signatory to weighty treaties outlawing torture and mistreatment of prisoners. Yet today the CIA quietly runs regular airline flights delivering prisoners into the hands of torturers. The U.S. military operates a small gulag of hideous prisons in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan whose whole purpose is the deliberate mistreatment of prisoners and where prisoners receive none of the rights recognized in the Constitution, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Accords. Thousands of prisoners simply disappeared in the deserts of Afghanistan with no explanation.

No, a nation which behaves as the United States does is incapable of signing a binding international agreement without afterward picking through its terms for just those parts serving its own changing interests.

Furthermore, I suspect that America's obsession with security is going to fade. There are many reasons for believing this, but the chief one is that the costs are wildly out of proportion to the risks. During the height of the Cold War, America's government gradually, quietly came around to the view that building a huge chain of well-equipped bomb shelters was not worth the cost.