Monday, September 20, 2004

Posted here Monday, September 20, 2004 at 4:11:27 PM     A ver full discussion of the options in raq over at http://scoop.agonist.org/story/2004/9/19/211433/693 It starts   First, the United States can effect what I would call a strategic and orderly retreat. This is the option that General Odom has called for in a recent National Interest essay. The benefits of this plan are limited to a pause in the tempo of our war fighting capability, offering us some much needed time to recoup our losses, refit and retrain. We would then have more freedom of action in Afghanistan, as more resources would be freed up for a more focused and judicious application in that sad land. The downside to this option would be the global and regional perception that we had been beaten, driven out by a rag-tag army of "dead-enders" and terrorist thugs. The perception would be akin to the loss of prestige suffered by the Israeli's upon their unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, magnified ten times. This option would also reduce the amount of capital we are currently sinking into Iraq. This is no small sum as our current burn rate is roughly $4 billion a month. The success of this option would largely be in our hands, not that of the enemy. Success therefore, would be highly probable. The second option is that which I believe the United States is currently considering. This option entails a large offensive into regions that are currently labeled by the media as "no-go" zones. These areas include, but are not limited to, Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra. The benefits of the successful conclusion of this option are significant. One would assume that the insurgency would be crippled, perhaps permanently. Furthermore, the United States and her allies would attain virtual freedom of action in the region to effect political accommodation by other, adversarial, regimes. However, this scenario is not without grave risks itself. First, one must take into consideration the plain fact that the enemy has a choice in this option too. Frankly, our performance has not been successful to date. If it were, there would be no insurgency. His vote, therefore, counts. However, I would not count out the bravery and determination of the American fighting force. Our will is formidable when the politicians do not meddle. This option would also grant us a small window of opportunity to effect some necessary political accommodations in Iraq, accommodations necessary to our future success. There are other significant risks that I would call political. One, the fallout from the massive civilian deaths that would arise from such an offensive and the regional and global outcry would be significant and should not be underestimated. Second the amount of capital required to rebuild Iraq after the intense urban fighting this scenario calls for would be immense. A rough guess: double our current burn rate for a short time, perhaps six months, and then a return to the current rate. Finally, the amount of US casualties will also be extremely high. This option would probably not pass the "Dover Test" but in the current media environment would probably be feasible. Success in this option would be possible but not certain. Finally, we come to the last option, which I would term the "More of the Same" option. We can continue down the fruitless path were are currently trudging. We would see the same amount of casualties, the same burn rate and a fighting force stretched to the very limits of effectiveness. This solution offers no political resolution in the region, maintains the strain on our fighting force and expenditures with few visible benefits other than delaying the inevitable choices mentioned above. One can hope that things will get better but hope is not a policy. The possibility of success arising from this option is virtually zero. These are the options as I see them. This risk versus reward discussion is in no way complete. I simply lay it before you to consider. However, I believe these are the only realistic options we have. We can consider them with the full force of our reasoning faculties or we can bury our heads in the sand. But in the end, I believe we will be faced with two choices: one rich in blood and the possibility of victory; the other, simply an admission of our inability to effect our will. Either way, our choices are not good. ********

	Sunday, September 19, 2004

Posted here Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 5:32:06 PM     One way to understand america is by looking at apparently dissimilar countries where it is obvious the dynamics are actually quite similar. We have the opportunity in a very full two part article from the London Review on the state of politics and culture in contemporary france. Here are the listings, and I will have more to say later this week. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/print/ande01_.html and http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n18/print/ande01_.html   ********

	Thursday, September 16, 2004

Posted here Thursday, September 16, 2004 at 11:27:32 AM     Highly recommend this review, from which excerpts. Pasted from http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i04/04a01001.htm  From the issue dated September 17, 2004   Delving Into Democracy's Shadows The sociologist Michael Mann took a detour from his epic study of power in human history. It led him straight to the horrors at the center of modern life.   The work begins with the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, charting the emergence of four distinct forms of power (ideological, military, economic, and political) that Mr. Mann finds operating throughout recorded history. The second volume, appearing in 1993, extended the analysis up to the outbreak of the First World War. A review in The Journal of Economic History began, simply, "Colossal!" Scholars often mention Max Weber's Economy and Society (1914), another work routinely called monumental, when discussing Mr. Mann's work.   But the edifice remains, as yet, unfinished -- because the 20th century turned out to be a nightmare. "As soon as I completed volume two," Mr. Mann says, "I began to write volume three, which continues the story from 1914 up to the present day. I spent a year in Spain, working at an institute with a wonderful library on fascism," he recalls. "So I began to write a chapter on fascism. That turned into a book in its own right."   He refers to Fascists, published by Cambridge in July, a comparative analysis of how fascist movements developed in half a dozen European countries between the World Wars. His research also drove Mr. Mann "to write about the Holocaust, about what the worst fascists did when in power" -- which led him, in turn, to study the more recent killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. His contribution to the field of study now known as "comparative genocide" is forthcoming from Cambridge in November as The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.   At a time when pundits wax at length on the idea that economic globalization has undermined the old ideal of national sovereignty, Mr. Mann offers a very different view of the world. The ideal of the nation-state crystallized over the course of centuries, he says, and has taken root everywhere. It will not soon vanish. Mr. Mann interprets fascism as "merely the most extreme form" of "nation-statism."   His thesis in The Dark Side of Democracy is, if anything, more troubling: the extension of democracy throughout the world carries the seeds (if by no means the certainty) of mass murder.   Order, but No Law   Mr. Mann's sweeping vision of historical sociology does not boil down to formulas about the rise and fall of civilizations. (Any resemblance between his books and Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West or Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History is strictly at the level of ambition and heft.)   "No laws are possible in sociology," he wrote in the first volume of his magnum opus, "… for the number of cases is far smaller than the number of variables effecting the outcome." But Mr. Mann imposes some analytic order on what he calls "the patterned confusion" of human history by distinguishing four general categories of power operating at any given time -- the ideological, economic, military, and political forms.   Economic power derives from, as Mr. Mann puts it, "the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the resources of nature for sustenance." It is distinct from political power ("the control of the state") and ideological power (basically, the myths and rituals that give human beings access to a sense of ultimate meaning). Each form of power is channeled through its own network of institutions. "In particular historical phases or periods," says Mr. Mann, "one source of social power may well be primary. "But over all, I don't think that general relations of primacy can be asserted. In that sense, I'm Weberian, rather than Marxian."   Mr. Mann goes one step beyond Max Weber, however -- questioning the German theorist's classic definition of the state as the institution possessing "a monopoly on legitimate violence." For Mr. Mann distinguishes military power ("the social organization of physical violence") as a distinct force, with its own institutions and norms. "In principle, all well organized militaries could seize state power," he notes, "but only a few actually do."   The ordinary citizen may be justifiably relieved to hear that. Sociologists would do well to ponder it as an intriguing paradox. Mr. Mann complains, however, that they have tended to neglect the military and warfare as important factors in social structure. Until the rise of industrialism, he notes, economic exchange usually occurred over short geographical distances. "Large areas and diverse peoples" became integrated largely through the force of arms. Other scholars commenting on Mr. Mann's work have pointed to his emphasis on military power as one of his most important contributions.   The Grid and the Cage   A four-dimensional model of power sounds abstract, even rather bloodless. In practice, though, Mr. Mann is unrelentingly empirical. He wields "the IEMP grid" (as some have dubbed his four-pronged approach) to integrate a wide range of specialist work by other scholars -- to which he adds his own crunchings of econometric data, for centuries for which it was available. Each of the forms of power he studies corresponds to networks of institutions that interlink with, struggle against, and shape one another. The result is a set of grand narratives of history that Randall Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has called "our contemporary standard of knowledge" on several topics.   The energy really starts to flow through the IEMP grid when Mr. Mann analyzes the rise of the nation-state. It was not simply a matter of local markets integrating, over time, into national economies -- which then (under catchy slogans like "no taxation without representation!") reshaped the state to defend the interests of business. All of that did happen. But at the same time, new forms of military organization required the integration of large numbers of conscripts. People whose sense of identity once came from belonging to a particular village came to understand themselves as citizens of the same nation. As each form of social power in his theoretical grid developed, says Mr. Mann, it generated its own vested interests. The revenues raised through taxation could be used not only to finance the military but to build roads, schools, and other public services -- giving the state "infrastructural power" in addition to its military control over territory. That growing infrastructure then reinforced economic growth. Meanwhile, the sense of national identity itself became a kind of ideological power, embodied in education, media, and the political organizations that sought to control the state.   As a result, all of these interests increasingly intersect to create what he calls the "cage" of the nation-state. It is a term with important overtones in classic social theory, calling to mind Weber's sense that modern life unfolds within an "iron cage of bureacracy."   By the early 20th century, nation-statism was an almost unquestioned fact of life in Europe and the United States. And the emergence of numerous successful anti-colonial movements showed that it had been exported throughout the world as well.   Street Fighting Men   In Fascists, Mr. Mann contends that the rise of right-wing authoritarian movements between the world wars can best be understood as, in effect, nation-statism forging not a cage but a concentration camp. His analysis puts him at odds with the Marxist interpretation of fascism, which treats it as a violent effort to preserve capitalism from the challenge of left-wing mobilizations following World War I. Mr. Mann also rejects efforts to treat fascism as a totalitarian "political religion" emerging in reaction against modernization and democracy.   All of Europe underwent severe economic crisis in the period between the wars, he notes. But fascists made no serious bid for power in countries where the state had both well-established institutions of representative democracy and a solid basis of infrastructural power. In England, for example, the black-shirted members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists were exotic and attention-grabbing, but ineffectual at much besides outbursts of street hooliganism.   Mr. Mann focuses on the countries where fascism did become a mass movement that either took control or strongly influenced the state: Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Spain. In each case, he contends, state power was divided between an established and narrowly based group (for example, landowners) and a new, relatively inexperienced set of parliamentary institutions. Mr. Mann calls this formation a "semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal state." Fascist movements were similarly hybrid. While the cult of national glory and calls for organic community might sound conservative, Mr. Mann observes that fascist movements also recruited on the basis of frustration with the slow pace of political elites in creating the infrastructure to provide basic services to the population.   Proto-fascist ideas began circulating among small groups of intellectuals throughout Europe in the late 19th century, but the movement took off in the 1920s, pulling in young men who had gone through the experience of "total war." Fascist movements always created paramilitary organizations, Mr. Mann says. But most of them also placed great emphasis on electioneering -- and proved very good at it. The fascists were enemies of democracy in the abstract, but devoted to mobilizing mass participation in ways that were often anathema to old-fashioned "conservative authoritarians."   Mr. Mann also says that "the degree of capitalist support for fascist movements … varied considerably between the different countries." What was consistent, however, was that the core fascist constituencies had strong vested interests in the growth and dynamism of the nation-state. "Soldiers and veterans above all, but also civil servants, teachers, and public-sector manual workers were all disproportionately fascist in almost all the countries of mass fascism," he writes. Students, too, were always heavily represented.   Hungary vs. Romania   Mr. Mann contends that, important as economic factors were, they are insufficient to understanding the movement. Consider the contrast between Hungary and Romania. "Hungary had probably the worst middle-class job prospects, Romania the best," writes Mr. Mann, "yet both produced fascism among those most affected, students and public-sector workers." He also notes that in both countries fascists "recruited more from proletarian than bourgeois backgrounds."   In Mr. Mann's analysis, fascism appealed not only to people seeking to preserve the status quo, or retreat to an early form of social order, but also to those who wanted modernization to continue under the firm hand of the nation-state.   The defeat of fascism on the battlefield in 1945 also meant its demise as a political force in Europe, says Mr. Mann. Authoritarian and xenophobic parties have sometimes won parliamentary representation. But no movement has had the combination of paramilitary and electoral support typical of fascism in the 1920s and '30s. "Institutionalized liberal democracy," as he puts it, "is proof against fascism." While currents embodying aggressive strands of nation-statism may yet emerge in Eastern Europe or the Russian federation, the requirement of democracy for entry into the European Union "has remained influential."   But that does not mean that Mr. Mann is quite ready to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating liberal democracy as the end of history. In his forthcoming book, The Dark Side of Democracy, Mr. Mann contends that nation-statism and ethnic cleansing are intertwined in ways that make the spread of democracy problematic.   Ethnic violence existed before the rise of the nation-state. Still, Mr. Mann says it tended to be limited and instrumental. Killing was a means by which one group subjugated another, whether to enslave it (thereby integrating it into the conqueror's economic system) or to convert it (thus extending a religion's ideological power grid).   He sees violence used to drive an ethnic group out of a state, or to destroy it, as a relatively new thing in history -- and one closely associated with the emergence of democratic forms of political organization.   He points to the contrast between European colonies under authoritarian rule and those in which the settlers could control local institutions. In Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the use of violence by authoritarian governments tended to be limited. "Stable authoritarian regimes," says Mr. Mann, "tend to govern by divide and rule, balancing the demands of powerful groups, including ethnic ones." But the transition to democracy tends to unleash ethnic cleansing. "When settlers in North American and Australian states and colonies acquired de facto and de jure self- government," he says, "murder also increased."   Mr. Mann makes a similar point about Rwanda. Between 1973 and 1994, the dictatorship of President Habyarima, a Hutu, was certainly oppressive to the Tutsi minority. But it also "somewhat restrained ethnic violence." In the early 1990s -- amidst an influx of Tutsi from Uganda -- the Rwandan government moved toward a multiparty, constitutional democracy. This shift accelerated the transformation of ethnic tensions into attempted extermination. In April 1994, Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis in an organized campaign of genocide at a rate of almost 300 per hour.   Power to the People   The problem, says Mr. Mann, comes from a fateful ambiguity at the heart of democracy -- "rule by the people," as the Greek source of the term has it. But within a nation-state, "the people" tends not to mean simply "the ordinary citizens," but those sharing a distinct culture -- an "ethnos." In a nation-state that is authoritarian but stable, ethnic violence may be routine, but it tends not to involve struggle for control of political power. With democratization, however, the stakes increase. Ethnic nationalism proves strongest, and most deadly, when one group feels economically exploited or threatened by another. (In Rwanda, for example, Tutsis tended to be more prosperous than the Hutus.) Mr. Mann lists a series of steps through which the tensions may reach a brink -- at which point, in the name of democracy, ordinary people seek to purify the nation-state of any ethnic "contamination."   In calling genocidal violence "the dark side of democracy," Mr. Mann says he is not denouncing the institutions of the democratic nation-state itself. The demos need not be confused with, or limited to, one ethnos. The diversity of citizens is something, he writes, "which liberalism recognizes as central to democracy."   But according to David D. Laitin, a professor of political science at Stanford University, Mr. Mann "uses his erudition and keenness of subtle argument to cloud social reality rather than to clarify it." In a paper to appear in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, forthcoming next year from Cambridge University Press, Mr. Laitin contends that "the culprit" in genocide "is not democracy, but a form of politics that uses words similar to [those employed by] democrats, but in a different semantic sense."   Mr. Laitin also suggests that the argument of The Dark Side of Democracy itself rests on a kind of basic confusion. "Mann implies that because democracy and genocide are both modern, they implicate one another," he writes. "Logically, Mann is incorrectly linking two phenomena that are temporally but not causally linked. This type of reasoning would make democracy culpable for world war, AIDS, and rap music."   Striking Back at the Empire   Mr. Mann is now back to work on The Sources of Social Power. His long march through fascism and ethnic cleansing has transformed his sense of how to approach the 20th century. "I realized, through that, that I could not write volume three in the same detailed, empirical way that I'd written the first two. There's too much material, too much scholarship. Fascism was only one of a half-dozen topics for the 20th century, and I'd ended up writing a whole book about it."   Instead, he says, the third volume will offer "a mixture of historical narrative and conceptual analysis. There's a section on empire. There's one on the development of capitalism, and on the difference that wars and ideologies have made to it. The theme of globalization has always been there, and it comes to fruition in a section on the post-World War II period." In fact, the third volume will be called Globalizations. (Mann is considering a fourth volume in the series, which he describes as a theoretical summation of the project.)   The plural in that title is in keeping with the IEMP framework -- for Mr. Mann is very skeptical of ideas about a monolithic "world system" of capitalist development. "The expansion of the economy," he says, "has been paralleled by the expansion of the nation-state system, of wars, and of ideologies. These are not the same thing. They don't link together to form a global system." The different forms of globalization "sometimes produce major contradiction," he says. "More often, they produce disjunctions, because they're completely different, rather than contradictory."   In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Mr. Mann took another detour from the third volume -- long enough to write Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003), a scathing criticism of the idea that the United States can impose a Pax Americana upon the world. Quoting the White House's oft-repeated estimate that 100,000 international terrorists were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mr. Mann points out that most radical Islamists concentrate on struggles to dominate their own countries, rather than on exporting terrorism.   "The age of empires is over," says Mr. Mann. "We're in the age of nation-states, for better or worse."   One can see the dangers for the United States. One cost of Iraq is the number of americans who have served under total war conditions and have their identity formed by it. If we now have an estmatede 20,000 us wounded, 250,000, who have rotated in and out of Iraq, and 50,000 total Iraq dead, we see that the karmic buildup is fierce. ********

	Saturday, August 21, 2004

Posted here Saturday, August 21, 2004 at 8:37:58 PM       Two tough articles, one from the progressive and on from the neocon side. Both are serious attempts to name the reality. The emotional and value base is nearly orthogonal, missing each other. But the struggle to understand them, and what you think, and why, is really worth the hard work. My own copies are now about one third my notes, and I've just started to fully understand the nature of the beasts.  Agre's is a brilliant analysis of conservative posturing, and Podhoretz's is as solid attempt to lay out the view that the US is the pinnacle of civilization (city on the hill) and we need to defined it with everything. That he treats Bush a the personification of American wit and will is of course in my mind, ludicrous. but Dealing with all the history and logic is not easy.   Pasted from <http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html> What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? Philip E. Agre August 2004   Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple: Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.   These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.   //1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.   One weakness in his argument is that he says things about right authoritarians that also applies to left authoritarians. The article is an powerful analysis of self serving elites at the cost of others. True conservatives, one might think, work for the good of the whole society. but that there are such people might be an illusion. The alternative is a forthright and demanding democratic ethos.   This comp[ares with a very thorough article on why winning in Iraq is important part of a world war 4 (3 was the cold war). I hate the tone and logic of this piece, but it has important history, and force s one to think. It is a hard exercise, very worth while. the two together, rubbed together so to speak, will heat your mind - a hard workout.     Pasted from <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm>           Commentary September 2004 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win Norman Podhoretz     This past spring, when it seemed that everything that could go wrong in Iraq was going wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through the country. Caught up in the particulars with which we were being assaulted 24 hours a day, we seemed to have lost sight of the context in which such details could be measured and understood and related to one another. Small things became large, large things became invisible, and hysteria filled the air.   Since then, of course, and especially after the hand over of authority on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government, matters have become more complicated. But the relentless pressure of events, and the continuing onslaught both of details and of their often tendentious or partisan interpretation, have hardly let up at all. It is for this reason that, in what follows, I have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to piece together the story of what this nation has been fighting to accomplish since September 11, 2001. ..   Telling the story properly has required more than a straight narrative leading from 9/11 to the time of writing. For one thing, I have had to interrupt the narrative repeatedly in order to confront and clear away the many misconceptions, distortions, and outright falsifications that have been perpetrated. In addition, I have had to broaden the perspective so as to make it possible to see why the great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV.   My hope is that telling the story from this perspective and in these ways will demonstrate that the road we have taken since 9/11 is the only safe course for us to follow. As we proceed along this course, questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or that move was necessary or right; and such questions will breed hesitations and even demands that we withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even in World War II, perhaps the most popular war the United States has ever fought, and much more of it in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it is happening again, notably with respect to Iraq.   He fails, in my view, to pay attention to culture, and to the complexity of events within the US and the market world, and fails to give weight to the obvious: that American democracy is not the only meaning of democracy, and that the destruction wrought by too aggressive an economy is devastating - as devastating as terrorism itself. He fails at empathy.   ********

	Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, August 18, 2004 at 4:37:37 PM     Highly recommend this article http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? Philip E. Agre August 2004 Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple: Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world. These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States. I think he fails to analyze left authoritarianism, but the aalysis is so good, and raises such good questions, and is so courageous - read it. ********

	Monday, May 24, 2004

Posted here Monday, May 24, 2004 at 8:13:00 PM     A long worthwhile history of the ME in terms of the brits and france starting beginning of the 20th century. http://logosonline.home.igc.org/watenpaugh_iraq.htm ********

	Thursday, May 13, 2004

Posted here Thursday, May 13, 2004 at 12:51:31 PM     Another must read.. Friedman in the NYT shifts.. http://nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13FRIE.html Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida. And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.") Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.   ********