American nightmare

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry chapter has been the collapse of national memory and accountability. One outrage follows the next with dreamlike regularity, lies about aluminum tubes to 9/11 revelations to Ahmed Chalabi to Joseph Wilson to cooked intel to Abu Ghraib to illegal detentions to lost explosives, and nothing ever happens, no one is ever punished, everything is for the best in the best of all possible six-gun-brandishing worlds. In an age of reality-TV war, where nothing is asked of Americans except that they rage and fear on color-coded command, the death of responsibility offers a happy ending to all -- except for those killed in Iraq.

Launched against a regime that posed no more threat than a host of others around the world, the Iraq war represented a radically lower standard for what constitutes a just war. As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist." It was a gratuitous war, a strategic aggression whose grandiose goals -- democratizing the Middle East, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defeating "terrorism" -- were bizarrely disconnected from reality.

It is still possible to rectify Bush's mistakes. It is not too late to restore America's standing in the world in general, and the Arab world in particular. But time is running out. And first of all, he must be removed from an office he has proven manifestly incompetent to hold. It is hard to believe, at this point, that even those who subscribe to Bush's ideology could possibly vote for him.

A pious, foolish and poorly educated man, surrounded by zealots and knaves, dreamed of smiting the evildoers, but instead put a sword into their hands. He imagined that by invading a state in the heart of the Arab world, he would cut through the Gordian knot, but he entangled his army in writhing coils. He fantasized that an all-powerful America would stand atop a grateful world, but he made his nation despised everywhere, and particularly in the one region of the world where it is most important that we not be despised. This is the world Bush left us. We must make a new one.