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The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations - some wise, some impolitic, some impossible - is itself a confession that all the choices are bad.
That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president - the self-proclaimed decider - who started and ran this misbegotten war.
As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby":
"They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ...."
When George W. Bush first ran for office, a lot of people worried that the frat president from Yale had had too many beds made for him and been allowed to walk away cost-free from too many of his screw-ups - in business, in the military, in his personal life. He, too, retreated back to his money and his vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess he made.
This time even the cleanup crew, headed by the old family consiglieri Jim Baker, couldn't handle it, either for the country or for the son who is now leading the race to be the president who has done more damage to his country and the world than any other.
And yet somehow, he was a good match for that nation, which seemed perfectly willing to accept - even embrace - the impossibility of an endless war fought by an undermanned, under-equipped military with no presidential call for sacrifice from anyone else. Instead we - particularly the rich - were handed multibillion-dollar tax cuts. All we had to do was take off our shoes at the airport.
We ratified that course in 2004, when the president's party and his political guru, Karl Rove, wrapped his party in the flag and made Iraq the wedge issue of the campaign. It was "the people" who voted for the Congress - Democrats and Republicans - that handed the president his blank check in 2003 and the media that mostly cheered.
In the years since, the president and that Congress have been on a steady march to shrink civil liberties and constitutional rights, to legitimize torture and to create a whole new vocabulary of Newspeak to justify and euphemize them: rendition, illegal enemy combatants, enhanced interrogation techniques, water-boarding.
At the same time, for lack of money (see tax cuts) and because of corporate lobbying, the most tempting terror targets - container ports, chemical plants, power systems - remain largely unprotected.
The Coast Guard, whose aging fleet is supposed to be replaced by modern ships, boats and aircraft, is the victim of billions in slipshod work, resulting from the administration's penchant for turning the job over to private industry more devoted to the bottom line than the national interest (ditto Iraq reconstruction).
Could anyone be surprised that it was all repeated in New Orleans? Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban resurges and the opium fields bloom.
As the Democrats arrive in Congress, is there any way to turn all this around? In the first Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush created a genuine coalition of nations, and sent 500,000 troops to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein's army.
In this war, we could barely afford 140,000, despite the vastly more ambitious objective. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, who took the blame for everybody - some deserved - before resigning said you fight a war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. But the administration chose the time for the war - rushed into it despite the dubious, if not falsified, intelligence - and it's had three years to cancel the tax cuts to strengthen a military stressed to the breaking point. But ideology, politics and a vast carelessness stood in the way.
There are two sensible courses now, regardless of what we do in Iraq. One is to rebuild the armed forces, which even Bush now (belatedly) wants, and roll back the tax cuts of the last five years and especially the estate tax cuts, to make clear the cost - past, present and future - of our military adventures.
The other is to gradually increase the gasoline tax by, say, 25 cents a year in each of the next 10 years and use part of the revenues to offset the cost to low-income people and in part to develop a major alternative energy program.
In northern Europe, the price at the pump is now roughly $6 a gallon. In Germany, it's $6.50. There's nothing like it to spur the development of more energy-efficient technologies and to send a message to the Middle East that we're tired of subsidizing the madrassas, the terror training camps and the corruption. The alternative is more of the vast carelessness that got us here.
That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president - the self-proclaimed decider - who started and ran this misbegotten war.
As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby":
"They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ...."
When George W. Bush first ran for office, a lot of people worried that the frat president from Yale had had too many beds made for him and been allowed to walk away cost-free from too many of his screw-ups - in business, in the military, in his personal life. He, too, retreated back to his money and his vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess he made.
This time even the cleanup crew, headed by the old family consiglieri Jim Baker, couldn't handle it, either for the country or for the son who is now leading the race to be the president who has done more damage to his country and the world than any other.
And yet somehow, he was a good match for that nation, which seemed perfectly willing to accept - even embrace - the impossibility of an endless war fought by an undermanned, under-equipped military with no presidential call for sacrifice from anyone else. Instead we - particularly the rich - were handed multibillion-dollar tax cuts. All we had to do was take off our shoes at the airport.
We ratified that course in 2004, when the president's party and his political guru, Karl Rove, wrapped his party in the flag and made Iraq the wedge issue of the campaign. It was "the people" who voted for the Congress - Democrats and Republicans - that handed the president his blank check in 2003 and the media that mostly cheered.
In the years since, the president and that Congress have been on a steady march to shrink civil liberties and constitutional rights, to legitimize torture and to create a whole new vocabulary of Newspeak to justify and euphemize them: rendition, illegal enemy combatants, enhanced interrogation techniques, water-boarding.
At the same time, for lack of money (see tax cuts) and because of corporate lobbying, the most tempting terror targets - container ports, chemical plants, power systems - remain largely unprotected.
The Coast Guard, whose aging fleet is supposed to be replaced by modern ships, boats and aircraft, is the victim of billions in slipshod work, resulting from the administration's penchant for turning the job over to private industry more devoted to the bottom line than the national interest (ditto Iraq reconstruction).
Could anyone be surprised that it was all repeated in New Orleans? Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban resurges and the opium fields bloom.
As the Democrats arrive in Congress, is there any way to turn all this around? In the first Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush created a genuine coalition of nations, and sent 500,000 troops to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein's army.
In this war, we could barely afford 140,000, despite the vastly more ambitious objective. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, who took the blame for everybody - some deserved - before resigning said you fight a war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. But the administration chose the time for the war - rushed into it despite the dubious, if not falsified, intelligence - and it's had three years to cancel the tax cuts to strengthen a military stressed to the breaking point. But ideology, politics and a vast carelessness stood in the way.
There are two sensible courses now, regardless of what we do in Iraq. One is to rebuild the armed forces, which even Bush now (belatedly) wants, and roll back the tax cuts of the last five years and especially the estate tax cuts, to make clear the cost - past, present and future - of our military adventures.
The other is to gradually increase the gasoline tax by, say, 25 cents a year in each of the next 10 years and use part of the revenues to offset the cost to low-income people and in part to develop a major alternative energy program.
In northern Europe, the price at the pump is now roughly $6 a gallon. In Germany, it's $6.50. There's nothing like it to spur the development of more energy-efficient technologies and to send a message to the Middle East that we're tired of subsidizing the madrassas, the terror training camps and the corruption. The alternative is more of the vast carelessness that got us here.