Why We Lost

“The War Tapes” was culled from footage shot by a New Hampshire National Guard detachment sent to Iraq in 2004. 2004. Remember 2004? The war was so much better then, but it was already lost, as is made clear by this documentary, in which the soldiers’ voices are the only ones that are heard; no sanctimonious Michael Moore commentary to be found here. This is simply a video journal of a tour in Iraq.

These men, however amiable they may seem, however innocent they are of the forces that put this abattoir into motion, are completely incapable of winning, or even defining, the war they were sent to “fight”. None of them are trained in the culture or language of Iraq. They are trained to kill, yes, but if you don’t know who to kill, you end up increasing the number of people willing to kill you.

Since Baghdad “fell” this has been a war of peace, a political war. The problem is that our government never seemed to realize that. Instead of treating the Iraqis as a liberated people, we treated them as a conquered people.

The most introspective member of the detachment featured in “The War Tapes” made an attempt to justify his “mission” by saying that, “it really is unfortunate, but when it comes down to it, if there is any room for doubt, our lives take precedence over those of Iraqi civilians”.

This may seem a sober and common-sense assessment by some, or maybe most, but to me it perfectly explains why we have lost.

If the primary mission of the American military is to protect itself, I have a war plan that would surely and swiftly accomplish this goal: stay in the United States. Why would you invade a hostile country halfway around the world in order to protect your soldiers?

The soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard were tasked with providing security for convoys. Here’s how this works: Halliburton delivers Pepsi to American bases in Iraq at a 500% mark-up. American soldiers are killed, are allowed to die with their intestines in their hands, screaming for their mothers, because Pepsi is somehow integral to “freedom”.

These soldiers risk their lives to protect trucks belonging to private corporations. When a shot rings out, they swing their chain guns and unleash. These are guns that fire bullets so lethal that they can kill you without directly striking your body. I can’t blame people from New Hampshire for using overbearing, inaccurate, and counterproductive force in Nineveh. Let’s be honest; their first goal is to get home to see their families again.

And therein lies the key to our defeat. This is not a military war; it is a political war. If it were a military war, we would have won it four years ago. Actually, come to think of it, it was a military war….four years ago. Remember that? Remember how we kicked the shit out of Iraq because they were militarily inferior?

And, remember every day since that day four years ago? More than a thousand days, in which we have lost more every day, because we never even bothered to train our soldiers how to fight a political war?

We are supposed to being winning something. Heats and Minds, as the saying goes. If we define our own safety as the most important mission to be achieved, what are the chances that we will win hearts? Minds? Zero.

There are two ways to convince Iraq to become a peaceful ally of the United States. One way is to kill almost everybody in Iraq. The other way is to convince most of the people in Iraq that Americans are genuinely invested in the welfare of average Iraqis. The former is, thankfully, not an option. The latter is impossible.

Bush and the Book

"It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist"

Despite the mangled syntax or, rather, because of it, the above quote by our President at his most recent news conference affords us an illuminating look into the hamster-on-a-wheel that is his mind.

I need to distinguish myself from the Bush-hating types who reject all allusions to faith as the naive and inane delusion harbored by flat-earth racists and Bible-thumping simpletons. In fact, if I was forced to choose between those who acknowledge the existence of a higher power and those who castigate faith as a mental disorder, I would choose the former without hesitation.

The president's "theology", however, has nothing to do with the transcedant mysteries of the universe that any open-minded person struggles with throughout his or her life. Bush does not use faith to attempt to illuminate the unknown or to frame his relationship with the universe or to attain a sense of peace amidst the overwhelming scale of existence.

Instead, the president's theology is not about mystery, but about certainty. It is not a vehicle for inquisition and exploration, but rather an excuse to castigate such thirst for knowledge as the lot of the weak and the faith-less. Bush's theology has nothing to do with time, space, creation, or any other universal mystery; Bush's theology instead has everything to do with rationalizing his own actions.

Bush's theology is about himself. If this is to be the standard of faith, I would be forced to join the faithless. My faith leads me to believe that a higher power created and ordered the infinitely complicated web that we call "everything". Bush's faith leads him to believe that God created the world primarlity as a stage for certain men, of which he is clearly one. Further, his faith leads him to belive that he, the alcoholic and petulant twerp who found Jesus as the bottom of a Tequilla bottle (or was that the worm?), knows the secret behind the creator's design.

The secret, as revealed to Bush, is that all people deserve freedom. So, God wants all men to have freedom, but God is too weak or preoccupied to do this himself. Luckily, however, God was not too weak or preoccupied to share his designs with George W. Bush. George W. Bush, therefore, takes it upon himself to do the work that God has been too weak or preoccupied to do. George W. Bush will provide freedom to all people. (And, luckily for all people, God and George W. Bush share identical definitions of "freedom".) Bush's means? The very means that God's son, who saved Bush from booze, explicitly rejected. War.

Bush also informs us in the above quote "that is a principle noone can convince me that doesn't exist". How clumsily worded. And how true it is. We all know by now, even those of us who are more kindly disposed towards the president than I am, that this is a man who does not change his mind. Indeed, in Bush's world view, a change of mind would be an affront to God himself.

The incapability of changing his mind is something that Bush explicitly embraces as a positive attribute. We must ask ourselves, however, when did this characteristic take root? On what day, at what hour, did it become okay to never change his mind again? We know that Bush was willing to change his mind at least until he was 40, when he changed his mind about booze and Jesus.

But, apparently, there was a moment between then and now that the president realized he had it. That "it" was nothing short of the key to the universe. The plan had been revealed to him. He knew what the world needed, and he knew how to give it. He had taken full hold of his central principle, which is that God wants something very specific for Earth and that Bush will actualize it if God continues to refuse to do so himself. And since that day, whenever that was, there has been, by his own admission cited above, noone in the world that could convince him otherwise.

This is all difficult for me to internalize because, quite honestly, it scares the living shit out of me. The only thing worse than elitist snobs who see faith as the property of the provincial and the backward are those who see faith as the animation of their own preconceived notions, however gin-soaked or historically illiterate they may prove. Needless to say, George W. Bush and I do not share the same God. Thank God.

The Hands-Off Approach

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 6 years trying to keep American military actions in perspective, especially when conversing with my friends and family, most of whom are far quicker to blame America for the world’s ills than I am. In fact, I still firmly believe that the American model, if not the American practice, is a benefit to mankind in the temporal and secular sense.

When we fight wars, however, the standards tighten. I have been totally opposed to the Iraq War since it began. In the proper historical sense, this war began in 1990, but that’s another blog. The 2003 invasion was illegal in every sense of the word, and the manner in which it was executed totally disregarded the needs of the Iraqi people.

The fatal flaw of the American enterprise in Iraq, since day one, is that the military’s primary mission has been to protect itself at all costs. This priority manifests itself in high-altitude bombing, assumption of hostility from all civilians, and indiscriminate arrest.

Despite this incompetence and disregard, I tell myself that we are qualitatively better than our enemy in terms of our rules. This conviction is still held, but rapidly eroding.

The host horrific attacks in Iraq are those that target large crowds of civilians. I can say with total confidence that Americans would absolutely not, as a matter of policy, aim to kill scores of women and children at a market. And that, I tell myself, is evidence of our admittedly tenuous moral superiority.

But it’s been getting cloudy recently.

We have many enemies in Iraq, and al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is only a minor member of the club. The media highlights their attacks because they are barbaric and because they justify the government’s rationale for the war.

“We’re fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here.” “We’re in Iraq because al-Qaeda is in Iraq.” We’ve heard it all. Skipping past the fact that the American invasion created al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, there are two focal points here.

Firstly, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a sliver of the anti-American insurgency. Secondly, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has absolutely nothing to do with the al-Qaeda infrastructure that attacked us on 9/11.

Despite all that, I can still say that we are morally better than al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. But can I really? Or is it just a function of the American hands-off approach?

Fear Up Harsh is a seminal book by an Iraq vet who tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Mosul. It reads as a microcosm of the process by which America assures itself of its moral superiority.

This soldier made prisoners squat in a baseball catcher’s position in freezing temperatures in the open air desert night. For 8 hours. Everyone who went through this process, and there were hundreds, and ninety percent of them were found totally innocent, never walked without pain for the rest of their lives. That’s torture.

But, see, it’s American torture. The soldier never touched the prisoner. He tortured him without touching him. Is that not what we do on a large scale when we go to war?


American has invaded Iraq twice since 1990. The deadliest period, however, was between invasions, when 500,000 children died of dysentery due to the American-led embargo on water purification technology. The rationale was that the pieces could be used to manufacture chemical weapons.

So, the United States sponsored, directed, and enforced an embargo that Secretary of State Albright acknowledged led to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children. “We think the price is worth it”, she said.

So when I see a terrorist blow up a nursery school, I am revolted. But maybe my ultimate revulsion comes from the fact that, deep down, I know damn well that my country has done the exact same thing. But we took the hands-off approach.

IX / XI

IX / XI, Part II: Rudy and George (or, How to Polish a Turd)

Imagine this happening in any other country: the country suffers the worst foreign attack in its history, a surprise attack that kills thousands of civilians. The leadership, at every level, fails to a) forsee, preempt, guard against, or even warn of the attack which, for the citizenry, literally comes out of the blue, and b)mitigate the attack while in progress in any meaningful way.

In any other country, especially if said country claims to be a "democratic" country in which the leadership is "held to account" by the citizenry, this would seem a scandal of epic proportion. What is more unimaginable, though, and unforgivable, is not just that the leadership failed to forsee the attack or to lessen its impact after it began, but that the very same leadership has used the attack as evidence of its competence.

Think about this: President Bush was in charge on the bloodiest day in American history since Gettysburg, and since none of the dead of 9/11 were armed or knowing combatants, we can safely call in the bloodiest day in American history. Now, we all know how Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress were more concerned with sex than Salafists during the 1990's, but let's focus on the salient fact: Bush, and noone else, was president on 9/11.

Bush failed utterly to forsee, guard against, or warn of the impending attacks, despite varied and relatively specific warnings in the prior months. Once the attack began, as noted in a previous posting of mine, he a) failed to realize that it was an attack, and b)failed to act as if he had either the authority or the responsibility to do anything to counter the attack until well after it was over. Until, that is, he was back in the White House, where he asserted his strength by ordering the bombardment of the poorest corner of the Earth as righteous retribution and as evidence of his stoic and unshakable composure under pressure.

The government at every level, from Bush to the fighter pilots, failed to do anything to lessen the impact of the attack once it began. This vast edifice, erected over decades at the cost of trillions to protect the United States from the godless and the communistic, was utterly and totally ineffective. Totally. The one time since 1812 that we needed a Department of "Defense", and we were defenseless.

There was, however, one group that lessened the impact of the attack. Strategic Air Command? Central Intelligence Agency? Joint Task Force on Terrorism? No. A hastily assembled citizens' militia on Flight 93, who understood the situation, adopted a plan of action, and carried it out.

If that plane has crashed into the Capitol, while Congress was in session, a full branch of government would have been wiped out. The ensuing constitutional crisis would have trumped Watergate and the Incredibly Treasonous Blowjob by an order of great magnitude.

After this record of abject failure, President Bush proceeded to use 9/11 as his strength. What kind of morally inverted universe, what kind of Pez-dispenser seance, what kind of common-sense clusterfuck was this? The president failed utterly to forsee or to react, and he proceeded to inform his nation that, since the worst attack to ever happen to America happened on his watch, he was clearly more qualified than the rest to keep us safe. Any logical person would have drawn precisely the opposite conclusion.

Think about this. Say Bush was applying for a job in keeping us safe. Relevant experience? Mr. Bush, can you give us an example of a situation in which you kept America safe? "Well, the worst attack ever happened on my watch." I'm sold. You're hired! President Bush won re-election not in spite of 9/11, but because of it. As the French would say, what the fuck?!

Now Mr. Giuliani is playing the same card. Since he was in charge of the assaulted city, he is an "expert" on national security. He "understands" terrorism. Mr. Giuliani is rightly applauded for showing great physical courage on that day; indeed, he came very close to death because he insisted on leading from up close. This is to be applauded.

But look at the big picture. Giuliani only looks so good because, when compared with Bush's conduct on that day, who wouldn't? It's like the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, whose torture was cast as "relatively benign", because, for God's sake, look at what Saddam had done.

Giuliani was broke on 9/11. Now he is a multi-millionaire. Why? He is payed more in an hour that what you and I make in a year speaking about 9/11. Why is he an expert? Because he was in charge when his city was attacked. If I am in a restaurant and a suicide bomber comes in and blows himself up, killing several patrons, would I, as a survivor, be accorded the status of "security expert"?

This "expert", Mr. Giuliani, took office shortly after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Along with many others, Giuliani failed utterly to understand the magnitude of, and the implication of, that attack. During the next seven and a half years, America's mayor did nothing to promote counterterrorism as a priority for New York City. He castigates Clinton's actions in the 1990's while blithely ignoring his own inaction. And let us not forget, his first impulse after 9/11 was to, by decree, postpone elections and prolong his term as mayor. Talk about giving the terrorists what they want.

Now Mr. Giuliani informs us that we will die if we vote Democrat. 9/11 happened during the watch of a Republican president, directed at a city with a Republican mayor. The Republican president proceeded to disastrously mismanage a war which more closely resembled a criminal enterprise, while being cheered along every step of the way by the Republican mayor, who nominated his blackmail magnet of a friend of his to head the Homeland Security Department. Republican negligence from Manhattan to Mosul has cost the United States 7,000 lives and hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars since September 10, 2001. The lesson of all this, according to Mr. Giuliani, is to vote Republican.

We need to think long and hard about this. Why are we elevating the men who were in charge that day to the status of protectors? Common sense tells us that every single element of government failed to protect us that day. Is it because we are gluttons for punishment, or is it because, in retrospect, the worst thing of all about that day was what it said about the total, the total incompetence of our government? This seems to be the hardest thing of all for us to accept. But, as the shareholders in this corporation called America, we need to look after our investments. Fire the CEOs.

Know the Enemy (1.3 billion Allah fans can't be wrong)

Nothing gets my blood up in the morning like right-wing talk radio. I actually think, unlike most educated east coast denizens, that talk radio is the most responsive and democratic media in this country; in general it is a good thing, and there is nothing so unappealing as those who castigate democratic media when they disagree with the content.

For example, whatever one thought of the recent immigration bill, talk radio mobilized millions to demand that their elected representatives vote against the bill. Without this absolutely unprecedented outcry from their constituents, Congress would have passed that bill in 10 minutes. Instead, it failed.

Again, regardless of how you feel about immigration, this was democracy in action, an example of an informed citizenry directly swaying their representatives towards their will. This was true republicanism and proactive citizenship of the likes that this country has not witnessed in decades.

The flip-side of talk radio, which self-styled liberals and progressives ceaselessly harp upon, is its demagogic populism. This force, when harnessed by intolerant and provincial men, is the dark side of democracy. I got a taste of that dark side this morning on my way to work, and it pertained to the nature of our enemy in the global and permanent battle to eradicate evil from the universe, or GAPBEEFTU.

The host sternly informed his multitude of listeners that it is suicidal to assume that any given Muslim is not a terrorist, that in World War II any German would have been presumed to be a Nazi unless he met the burden of proving otherwise, and that our wish not to offend people will be our ultimate undoing. He ended this historically illiterate and strategically retarded soliloquy with the coup de grace: "If all the Muslims on Earth disappeared tomorrow, 90% of the violence on Earth would cease".

Fair enough. This is actually a sentiment that a good number of Americans, perhaps the majority, would not disagree with. Partly this is a function of their ignorance and jingoism, and partly it is a function of the liberal and progressive elite's exaltation of "tolerance" above all else.

Most Muslims, like most people in general, have no interest in killing anybody. While they take their religion seriously, they do not seek to impose or castigate; they simply want to live in peace with their families, to be human.

However, let's be honest: when someone walks onto a bus and blows themselves up along with twenty other people, including infants in their mothers' arms, do you ever pause and think, "gee, I wonder what religion that terrorist was"?

How about a controlled experiment, complete with dependent and independent variables: Palestinians have been brutalized, humiliated, and abandoned by Israelis and their Arab "brothers" for sixty years. One out of every five Palestinians is Christian. How many Palestinian suicide bombers are Christian? To ask the question is to answer it.

There is a stateless group of men who would do anything in their power to kill Americans. All of these men are Muslims. There are Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, and others who harbor legitimate greivances and simmering ill-will towards the United States, but they are not flying planes into buildings. To acknowledge that all of the terrorists we currently face are Muslims is not to be "intolerant" of anything other than being intolerant of having our heads up our collective ass.

Furthermore, to insist that this unfortunate truth is somehow coincidental rather than causal is absurd. The Prime Minister of Great Britain recently informed the media that terrorists should not be described as Muslim or Islamic. Being a Muslim is not a secondary attribute, like being tall or having green eyes, or having a last name that starts with R or S. If it were, it would indeed be unfair to stress it. But it's not.

To say that Islam is irrelevant to the terrorism that we face is a total abdication of logic. Islam is not the same as Christianity or Judaism, and the Koran does contain very unambiguous language about what should be done with infidels (The wideness of that net is matched only by the brutality of the recommened prescription).

Let me put it this way: if Islamic terrorists carry out their acts in the name of Islam, couch all of ther greivances and goals in religious terms, and cry out "God is Great" in the commission of their murderous acts, who the hell are we to then say, "oh, they're not really driven by their religon, their acts have nothing to do with Islam"?

What could be more presumptuous and, in fact, racist? Many in the West, up to and including national leaders, insist that these killers did not act for the reasons they explicitly claimed to. So Muslims are not capable of accurately assessing and articulating their feelings? So if they tell us they kill in the name of their God, we politely inform them that they don't know what they're talking about? That they've got Islam all wrong, and that we in the West will inform them of Islam's true and tolerant nature? What presumption. What racism.

Islamic terrorists act because they are very, very religious. They believe, with a faith that few in the West can understand, that their religion is under attack and that their divine mission is to slaughter those they perceive as infidel interlopers. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.

The reasons that Islam is suffering this curse, this civil war between radicals and the always-elusive "moderates", are many. Colonialism was one curse. Oil is another. The lack of an Islamic Reformation is, in my opinion, the biggest problem. Only one out of six Muslims is Arab, yet the Koran is forbidden to be related in any language other than classical Arabic.

What if the Bible could only be transmitted, even in the United States, in ancient Latin? I'm not talking about just reading Catholic mass in Latin; I'm talking about a situation in which every Christian is a Catholic and owning a Bible written in English would be punishable by death. And what if most Christian nations were poor, largely illiterate and recently colonized? It would not be very hard to manipulate Christians under such conditions into doing some pretty psychotic things.

So, Islamic terrorism is Islamic. This is not because Islam is destined to be the most violent monotheism. The Old Testament is by far the most violent of the monotheistic religious books (I hesitate to call them "holy"). The reason that Jews don't go around killing each other and everyone else is that they are largely secular, educated, wealthy, and physically secure. No Muslim nation can say this for itself. Poverty, ignorance, abuse, and despair breed violence. Throw religion into the mix and you've got a time bomb. Or a suicide bomb.

As for the claim that erasing Muslims from Earth would erase violence from the same, there can be no splitting hairs. It's bullshit. If we had erased all the Christians from Europe at any time between 1400 and 1945, we could have similarly cut down on global violence. If we removed all capitalists, or all males, similar paradise could be achieved. From what I undestand of human history between 10,000 B.C. and 730 A.D., men found ways to kill before Islam.

While hyperbole such as the "if the Muslims disappeared" garbage must be rejected out of hand, we must not replace it with insipid relativism and the solipsistic insistence that we know why they kill and that it has nothing to do with their religon. Listen to what the terrorists say. Respect them, for if you do not, you do so at your own peril. These people are not confused; they are not stupid. You have to be smart to be so profficient and creative at killing.

IX / XI

photo courtesy of www.natashamaria.blogspot.com

IX / XI, Part I: Bush's Conduct

Michael Moore has never been accused of being objective (not by any remotely objective person, at least). Anyone who would tell you that Moore is not just as ideological as the president has a severe deficiency in the faculty that differentiates documentary from propaganda. Mr. Moore did us a service, however, in stressing the president's conduct on that horrible day in that Florida school in the otherwise boorish and insipid Fahrenheit 9/11.

It matters that Bush sat and continued reading to those children. It matters alot. It matters not strictly in the public relations sense, but in regards to the much more substantive issues of competence and leadership. There was more than the unnerving skunk-in-the-headlights look on the president's face; there was what it implied.

The people who take pains to defend the president's immediate non-response use a very effective (if allowed to pass unnoticed) sleight of hand to do so; they lump the president in with the rest of us. We were all in shock that day, they say. We all thought the first plane was an accident.

Well, yes, but we weren't all receiving explicit warnings from a number of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies about impending terrorist attacks involving airplanes. We weren't all warned by the outgoing Clinton administration that al-Qaeda was the primary immediate threat to the physical security of the United States. So while, to the rest of us, the shock and disorientation of that morning was to be expected, it was unforgivable in Bush.

He should have known. When someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center, of which he was notified before he entered that school, he should have known it was not an accident. Why? Because he had been specifically warned about attacks using airplanes. If you were specifically warned about attacks using airplanes and then a month later an airplane flew into the tallest building in New York City on a cloudless morning, would you instantly assume, with everyone else, that it must have been a freak accident?

Not only should he have known, he should have acted. Even if it were an accident, the crash would have caused, no, did cause, hundreds of deaths. Perhaps he could have gotten on the horn? Hey, Giuliani, need any help with that crash? Need any resources? Got any info on what might have happened? Hey, FAA, anything odd you may have noticed about that flight? Any need to shut down the airspace around New York? Hey U.S. military, you folks want to send over some helicopters to New York and start plucking folks off the roof of that building? Nothing.

While he was in the classroom, his chief of staff broke ranks to inform him that a second plane had crashed into the second tower and that "America is under attack". Okay. If you're George W. Bush, you've been getting warnings about such attacks. The first attack seems like an accident to you, for some bizarre reason. The second attack makes it clear: this is a multi-pronged, highly coordinated terrorist attack the likes of which the world has never seen. Hundreds of people are dead already, tens of thousands are at risk, and there is no way of knowing whether the attack is over or whether ten more planes will fall from the sky.

Indeed, there is no way of knowing if airplanes are the only weapons in the terrorists' arsenal; "America is under attack" is a rather open-ended prognosis, after all. Maybe the crashes were simply intended to lure a mass of people to the site, where a dozen truck bombs were waiting. Maybe men with machine guns waited outside the Capitol for the second branch of government to be evacuated from their offices. Maybe the president should have gotten off his fucking ass.

Nothing. The man did nothing. He acted as if: a)the attack was over and b) he wasn't the president. "He didn't want to scare the children", his doppelgangers intone, drawing on the president's legendary empathy for the small and weak. I love children. I was a child once. I still am in many ways. I hope to have children of my own one day. But in this case, forget the children and their lil' feelings. There were other people that were scared that morning. Some of them were so scared that they jumped from 110-story buildings. In fact, the president was endangering those children by remaining amongst them, but more about that later.

This was, at this early point that horrible morning, the worst terrorist attack in history. Hundreds of people were dead and dying on live television. It was clear that airplanes were being used as weapons, which raised the obvious possibility that, if there were more, they would have to be shot down. Where was the president? This commander-in-chief who perfected his swagger once the danger was over? Who became far more brave when ordering bombings than he was when called upon to react to them? Sitting. Reading a book.

In a soon-to-be-familiar theme, Dick Cheney made the calls that day, giving the too-late authorization to shoot down civilian airliners that had been hijacked. When Bush did leave the school, he got on Air Force One and flew aimlessly around the country, to bunkers designed to survive thermo-nuclear war, while the people he was sworn to protect were incinerated in the thousands and his self-decapitated government huddled in bunkers of their own.

Why did the president stay on the run? The government told us of a specific threat to Air Force One. Really? Huh. There was a "specific threat" to Air Force One, so you put the president on....Air Force One. Bullshit. This is where we must get angry, because this is clearly, without a doubt, an explicit and intentional lie of commission by the government in a pathetically transparent attempt to gloss over the presdient's cowardice and lack of leadership and decision-making. Indeed, by all accounts, the president gave exactly zero orders that day. Perhaps there was a "specific threat" to his telephones and computers and larynx.

Beyond this staggering, staggering lack of leadership is another thought that I can't quite slip. The president not only acted as if he had no warnings of the attacks and no responsibility or authority to attempt to mitigate them; he also, in a sense, acted guilty. Normally I would chalk this up to his Promethean adeptness at ignoring the obvious and forgetting the already-known. But there is something else here...

Why wasn't the President scared? Two planes have intentionally been flown into two buildings. This is already the largest terrorist attack in history, and there is no way of knowing when it will end. It is clearly targeted at symbols of American power. You are the president. Your whereabouts (Emma T. Booker elementary school) are public knowledge. And you're not scared? And what of the Secret Service? They're not assuming that, at that very moment, a commandeered aircraft is steering towards the school? No urge by the President or his bodyguards to get the hell out of there? Is this not guilty behavior? Does it not imply, in some sense, that the Secret Service knew that the President, and the children surrounding him, were in no danger?

The tragedy of all this is that it leaves us with just two possibilities. The president's actions were a perfect microcosm of the actions of the government as a whole that day; after we assess them, with the cool analytical detachment that 6 years can bring, we are left with only two possible explanations for the conduct of our leadership. The first possibility is an Olympian scale of negligence, which it would not be hyperbolic to call criminal. The second possibility is an indifference and deceit which borders on collusion. Which possibility makes you feel safer?

The Abyss

Evil must be recognized as that which makes us think we are innocent of it.

As I age, I am inevitably drawn to envisioning the world my unborn children will live in. I come to understand how my parents must have felt, bringing me into a world where men regarded as displaying "leadership" could talk of nuclear war as others might talk of baseball or television shows. To talk of nuclear war is impossible, because nuclear war would destroy all that is, including words and the men foolish enough to utter them so nonchalantly regarding the end of existence.

Nuclear war is not war. It is extinction. It is the very definition of evil, and all that can be said for it is that, along with everything else, perhaps it would destroy evil as well. As hard as it has been for me to realize this, I have grown, like my parents before me, in a culture that has lost its mind, as it casually weilds the capability to destroy all that exists and even more casually calls this "security".

Such unfathomable things are hard to write about. We have given to a select few men, who are every bit as prone to rage, irrationality, or mistake as anyone else, the power to destroy everything that exists. Every word, every thought, every work of art and industry that has ever been created. And, of course, every person, born or unborn, from Osama bin Laden to you to 2 billion Chinese to my infant neice. Everything. Gone.

We give ourselves this power with the implicit assumption that we can control it, that we can be responsible with it. But how many mistakes would it take to prove us wrong? To make civilization itself, the very medium for how everything is defined and understood, vanish from existence? The end of the last episode of the Sopranos writ large, with no credits following the sudden blacking of the screne, just billions of incinerated, melted, and charred human beings, with millions of the unlucky, the survivors, who range the moonscape waiting for death from poisoning, a death that can't come too soon.

We would take the Earth with us, for good measure. As the dust, the infinite particles of concrete and human flesh flooded the atmosphere, the sun would be blocked our for years, killing every living thing on Earth and, as far as we know for sure at this point, in the universe. In our act of collective suicide, we would destroy the very universe that gave us birth, ensuring that nothing could or would come after.

This is not hyperbole; this is prophecy. This is inevitable unless and until these weapons are destroyed. Unless and until, in other words, the United States destroys them. I don't want Iran to have 1 nuclear weapon; that would, indeed, be destabilizing. I also don't want us to have 30,000 of them because, given a madman or a computer glitch, that could end everything. Everything.

We built one because we feared Hitler might. When we learned that he wasn't, some urged us to stop. We didn't. We completed the project. When we had them, we used them. Some urged us not to, insisting that Japan would surrender regardless. We went ahead with the use, and killed 200,000 civilians in 2 days.

We could have banned these weapons then, destroying the few we had and removing the motive for poorer nations to attempt to build them. We didn't. We stockpiled hundreds of these weapons, forcing others to do the same. We could have stopped with the atomic bomb, understanding that hydrogen bombs would have thousands of times the destuctive capacity as atomic bombs. We didn't. We built tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs.

We got to the point, in the 1950's, where we had enough hydrogen bombs to kill every living thing on earth. We could have stopped there. We didn't. Even if you are inclined to look at every prior step as a necessary evil to contain the Communists, this final step, this step of ensuring that we could destroy all of existence more than once must be seen as the very definition of insanity.

For all of the talk of Christianity, democracy, freedom, and liberty, what have we become when we presume to "protect" these virtues by maintaining that we will destroy all that exists if we feel a need? After the Communist threat, vastly exagerated and partially self-inflicted, faded away in 1991, we could have begun destroying these weapons, as the Russians did. We could have, perhaps, reduced our stockpile to the point where we could destroy every city on earth, but no more than that. We didn't.

We wonder why people fear the United States. If we share a house with a multitude of other peoples, and we insist on maintaining the ability to destroy the house and all within it if we unilaterally decide we must, or mistakenly do so, in what universe would we not be feared?

This is the abyss that we inherit. Where men who claim to be guardians of the greatest repository of freedom, justice, and Christian ethics that the world has ever known tell us with a straight face that such gifts are only secured by the willingness to destroy all that exists on a moment's notice. What have we become? To my unborn children, I apologize.