What a Mess

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: June 6, 2007

RAMALLAH, West Bank

The Middle East has gotten itself tied into such an impossible knot that Biblical references or Shakespearian quotations simply don’t suffice anymore to describe how impossibly tangled politics has become here. Shira Wolosky, a Hebrew University English scholar, suggested to me that maybe Dr. Seuss, in “The Cat in the Hat,” offered the best way to sum up the Middle East today.

Then he shut the Things

in the box with the hook.

And the cat went away

With a sad kind of look.

“That is good,” said the fish.

“He has gone away. Yes.

but your mother will come.

She will find this big mess!

And this mess is so big

And so deep and so tall,

we can not pick it up.

There is no way at all!”

Just look around. Gaza is turning into Mogadishu. Hamas is shelling Israel. Israel is retaliating. Iraq is a boiling pot. Iran is about to go nuclear. Lebanon is being pulled apart. Syria is being investigated for murdering Lebanon’s prime minister. I could go on. Yes, this mess is so big and so tall. Who knows where to pick it up at all?

In Israel, officials are mulling all alternatives — from the Saudi peace initiative to negotiating with Hamas to opening talks with Syria to reoccupying Gaza to looking for a “trustee” for the West Bank — because no one is sure anymore what to do.

That is, the Left’s way — land for peace — was discredited by the collapse of Oslo. The Right’s way, permanent Israeli occupation of all “The Land of Israel,” was made impossible by Palestinian demographics and two uprisings. The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza, has been discredited by Hezbollah’s attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.

“Israel is in a place it has never been before,” said Moshe Halbertal, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. “It does not have a picture of where to go and how, so people are looking for a fourth way.”

It is impossible to predict what that fourth way will be. But it is easy to identify the new realities it will have to take into account.

First is the fact that Yasir Arafat’s Fatah group, which has long dominated Palestinian life, is in disarray. Fatah will not disappear, but it will never again totally dominate the Palestinian Authority. Fatah will have to share power with Hamas, which has largely wiped out Fatah in Gaza already. Sooner or later, the U.S. and Israel are going to have to drop the economic sanctions they imposed on Palestinians to pressure Hamas into recognizing Israel. “As repulsive as [Hamas] is to me as an Israeli, I don’t think it’s coming to the Palestinian Authority just to pay a visit — it is here to stay,” said Israeli TV’s top Arab affairs reporter, Ehud Yaari.

Israel’s real choice is between dealing with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority or watching it collapse into little pieces, which Israel would have to pick up. (Think Iraq and Somalia.) West Bank and Gaza unemployment is now around 40 percent. Talking with Palestinians in Ramallah, the phrase I heard most was not “Israeli occupation” but “Palestinian disintegration.”

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki told me that as bad as things are today, his polls show most Palestinians still don’t blame Hamas. They blame Israel and America for withholding funds from the Hamas government that Palestinians elected. The best way to diminish Hamas’s influence, or to moderate it, is by forcing it to assume responsibility. Ask it: “Do you want Palestinians to be able to work in Israel? Then sit down with Israel and work out the details.” We need to “force Hamas through a corridor of difficult decisions,” said Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein. If America can talk to Iran, Israel can talk to Hamas.

Second, Hamas says it will only offer Israel a long-term cease-fire. Fine, take it. Fact No. 1: the real history of Israeli-Arab relations is: war, lull, war, lull, war, lull — from 1948 until today. Fact No. 2: “Since 1948,” said Mr. Yaari, “the Jews have always made better use of the lulls than the Arabs.” Israel doesn’t need Hamas’s recognition. It needs a long lull.

The third new reality is that Hamas’s shelling of Israel from Gaza means Israel can never hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, without an international trustee — because from there Palestinians could close Israel’s airport with one rocket. Only Jordan, or an international force, can be that trustee.

Bottom line: I don’t know if there is a fourth way, but, if there is, it will have to include these new realities. Otherwise, this mess will get even bigger, deeper and taller.

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HOME FIRES: five Iraq War veterans on their return to American life

By Brian Turner
June 5, 2007, 10:09 pm

The War in Present Tense

I’ve been reorganizing the garage all morning. Rearranging journals and notebooks written years ago, weeding through boxes marked “miscellaneous” for any seemingly useful item, throwing out a broken warming plate that never worked to begin with, trash-bagging old clothes for the goodwill bin at the local grocery store — basically sloughing away the material things that seem to accumulate so easily in my life, packrat that I am. But for some reason when I get to my Army duffel bags I don’t leave them closed. I undo their snap-links, grab each green bag with my name and unit numbers still stenciled on them, and flip them upside down to dump everything out onto the concrete floor.

Turner, Brian D.
(Last 4 of S.S. #)
B. Co, 2-3 INF
3rd SQD/ 1st PLT

Heaped on the floor, I find my desert uniform with the distinctive star and Indianhead patch that says I was in the Second Infantry Division, part of the first Stryker Brigade to ever serve in combat. Here’s the folding knife I kept in a pouch on my belt. Here’s an Iraqi bayonet in its scabbard. Plastic Iraqi language cards with pictograms (like cartoon drawings, really) of tiny men and women, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, roadside bombs exploding with three lines of red fire into a small black mushroom cap above.

I don’t know what to do with all this old gear. When I lift up my desert boots and turn them over in my hands, it’s impossible for me not to think of climbing over stone walls in Mosul and landing with a thud on the other side—these were the boots that did it. These were the boots that turned blue after I stupidly and mistakenly thought a cesspool was only a few inches deep (it turned out I could nearly swim in it) as we crossed an open area in squad wedges while patrolling near Balad, just north of Baghdad. These boots kicked in the metal door to a “target house” during a joint raid with the Florida National Guard. They limped and gimped with me through our time in Iraq with the ankle injury that still plagues me to this day.

But I don’t have to dump my old duffel bags to remember these things. Though it’s been two and a half years now since I’ve breathed the dust in Iraq and walked in the dirt there, the war shadows me every day. It forces itself into conversations. It whispers into my ear, as I’m driving under an overpass, that I’m lucky I no longer need to scan the trash there for roadside bombs. When I sat out on the patio at Bullwacker’s Restaurant and Pub in Monterey on a recent weekend, the war whispered for me to sit with my back to the stone wall (so that I could see everything in front of me).

It keeps me up late at night, thinking. Sometimes, I lay in bed for hours remembering a man I didn’t shoot one night in the summer of 2004, and I feel guilty that I didn’t shoot him, odd and terrible as that might sound. I think of the car that nearly ran me over and slammed into the back of our Stryker in the dark backstreets of Mosul, the one I wasn’t able to stop and by rights should have shot, that turned out to be carrying not a bomb, but a husband, wife and infant child. The many women’s faces staring at us when we herded them into rooms and arrested their men after midnight.

I sometimes wonder about the Iraqi translators I worked with, the ones who may or may not have had their heads cut off after we left—do they sit on the edge of the bed as I try to drift off? Do they walk among us here in America and wander amazed through our lives?

I opened my e-mail inbox a few days back and found a message from my rifleman in Iraq, who is now serving his second tour and has just been extended for an additional three months. It was a day like most out here—a sunny California morning—and I’d just ground up some coffee beans and turned on the stereo to listen to David Bowie sing “Five Years” (from “Ziggy Stardust”) when I read the following:

Debated on whether or not to even tell y’all, but I figured you’d be pissed if I didn’t.

Got blown up yesterday. Yes, blown up. We were dismounted and checking some abandoned store fronts near where the Strykers were parked. My team and I found an outside stairwell behind a metal door that led up to a 2nd floor apartment. The door was locked with a deadbolt. The top half was a lattice pattern that you could just barely reach through. Anyway, at the top of the stairs I saw some boxes and a poster with a pic of Muqtada al Sadr on it. Thinking this might be what we call an OMS site (Office of Muqtada al Sadr) I called up what we found and got permission to bust in, which was approved… [W]e got out a prybar we call a Hooligan tool and pried the door open. It took a bit to bend the deadbolt back, but it finally popped. We heard “tink-clink-clink” and thought that was either the deadbolt falling away, or the spoon on a grenade pin falling.

In answer, the door exploded in my face.

How do you drink your coffee after that? How do you pay the bills and go about your daily life knowing that at this very moment—this one—there is a convoy somewhere in Iraq pulling up to the gate inside a military base. A soldier sends up logistical info by radio. Somewhere in that convoy, right now, as you read this, a soldier is pulling out a 30-round magazine, slapping it up against his or her helmet to seat the rounds correctly, sliding that magazine into the magazine well, pulling back on the charging handle, releasing the charging handle to let the bolt chamber a round, and checking to make sure the weapon is on “safe.” That soldier, right now, may well sigh and release a deep breath that will never be written down in the history books or be reported in the evening news. That soldier is about to go outside the wire.

Is this war in the present tense, here in America? Iraq is on the other side of the globe and the events there are mostly reported in the past tense. And yet when I walk through a Home Depot and hear a sheet of plywood dropped on a pallet, I hear an airy breath followed by an explosive crack—the signature echo of an incoming mortar round. And when I listen well enough, late at night, I sometimes hear one of our Iraqi translators, Saier, repeating to me: “The wrong is not in the religion; the wrong is in us.”

And my rifleman, is he O.K.? Will he make it home safe? I can imagine him dumping his own duffle bags to find his dog tags and boots and Iraqi bayonets. I imagine dirt and bullet casings and blood pouring out of those bags. A 10-year-old boy with a thousand-yard-stare is curled up there, waiting to whisper his own stories of Spector gunships and Hellfire missiles. And the grenade that exploded in my rifleman’s face? They tell him the shrapnel now lodged in his hand will be absorbed by his body. But late some night years from now, he may realize it has worked its way up through the surface of his skin—that grenade might reveal itself once more.

***************

Brian Turner is a poet who has served seven years in the Army, most recently in 2004 as an infantry team leader in Mosul with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His book of poems, "Here, Bullet," won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. He lives in Fresno, Calif, where he teaches poetry at Fresno State.

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BASIC INSTINCTS: behavior on two, four, six and eight legs

By Richard Conniff
June 3, 2007, 8:20 pm

The Un-Schadenfreude

A while back, a writer friend of mine produced one of the bestselling books of the year, and on the strength of his royalties, moved to a large Manhattan penthouse with extensive river views. And of course I was thrilled by his success. Truly.

I managed to avoid visiting for several years. But then the penthouse started to turn up in my dreams, and I found myself wandering in dismay from room to room through an apartment with the acreage and impeccable design of, oh, let’s just say a K-Mart. The only good thing about this dream was that it always ended up at the back of the apartment, where bins full of my friend’s remaindered books were being sold at a sharp discount.

I was, to be sure, ashamed, not least because it was a recurring dream. But it also occurred to me that I was mired in a more or less universal feeling, rarely discussed and for which there appears to be no adequate word in English. “Envy,” for instance, doesn’t suffice for that peculiar blend of delight and crestfallen dismay when a friend triumphs. (I was in fact happy, even proud, of my friend’s success. But let’s not dwell on that.) The German language, that mother lode of vocabulary for obscure and debased emotions, gives us schadenfreude, for the thrill we feel when bad things happen to people who deserve it. But what I was feeling was more like the un-schadenfreude. Good things + good friends = pain (squared). Or as Gore Vidal once put it, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

A little something, indeed. The inability to celebrate a friend’s success seems shameful because it reveals just how petty and mean-spirited we can be. The Irish have long had a culture of “begrudgery,” belittling anyone who seems to be getting big: A young businessman purchasing a country house from the fading old gentry is likely, for instance, to elicit this summary judgment: “Castles falling, dunghills rising.” It’s a way of deflating puffed-up egos and also getting a laugh at the pub. On the other hand, the Irish have often blamed begrudgery for killing ambition and keeping everybody small. The Germans of course also have a relevant word, missgunst, meaning unhappiness at someone else’s good fortune, with a corresponding note of bitterness.

But I’d like to argue that the un-schadenfreude is different, better, even beneficial, probably because I didn’t badmouth my successful friend to mutual acquaintances, or suffer in silence. Instead, I decided that the only way to shake off my recurring dream was to admit it to my friend and go visit the damned penthouse. He looked a little sheepish when he opened the door. Since his bestseller had been a Civil War book, he greeted me with, “Thousands died at Antietam to make this possible.” The implied permission to regard his royalties as blood money made me suddenly feel much better about myself, and we got along splendidly after that.

A few years later, a book I had written was getting good reviews and lots of public attention, and I realized that I wasn’t the only one who sometimes struggled with these feelings. I sent a copy of a particularly flattering article to a photographer friend, and he wrote back, “I have received the latest news of your potential importance, and it has caused my spirits to sink, as intended.” It dawned on me that admitting to the un-schadenfreude was one of the most generous forms of backhanded praise a friend could offer. A note from another friend began with the greeting, “Conniff, you swine,” and my heart warmed. It was bonding by open envy and insult.

But there was one thing missing. My friend with the penthouse apartment had gone off to India on a project. He was staying with friends, living like Rajput royalty, safely buffered from any news of my success. Then one day his pained e-mail message arrived: “So I sit down to breakfast. Blue sky. Paraquets calling just outside the window. The bearer pads in with sliced papaya, sweet lime juice, a masala omelet and a neatly folded copy of the Times of India. I snap it open and there ON THE FRONT PAGE is a feature article on your book. Christ, Conniff …”

Well, my heart went out to him. I hesitated a moment before replying, recalling his gracious response to my own tawdry moments of un-schadenfreude. I struggled for a moment to muster that largeness of soul, but ….

As it happened, my book wasn’t nearly as big a success as the Times of India seemed to imply. (You can check it out at the local bookstore, being careful to steer clear of the remainder bins.) But he didn’t need to know that. “Just got off the phone with Hollywood producer seeking film rights,” I replied, “and was saddened to receive your e-mail. Cheer up. Everything hectic here, what with buying new beach house.”

And then I added the words I hoped would fill his nights with dread: “Come visit soon.”

***************

Richard Conniff, a longtime nature writer, is the author of “The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide” and “The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights, and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature.” He also writes for Smithsonian, The Atlantic and National Geographic.

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The Passion of Al Gore

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 5, 2007

Al Gore is earnestly talking about the long-term implications of the energy and climate crises, and how the Arctic ice cap is receding much faster than computer models had predicted, and how difficult and delicate a task it will be to try and set things straight in Iraq.

You look at him and you can’t help thinking how bizarre it is that this particular political figure, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to be president, is sitting in a wing chair in a hotel room in Manhattan rather than in the White House.

He’s pushing his book “The Assault on Reason.” I find myself speculating on what might have been if the man who got the most votes in 2000 had actually become president. It’s like imagining an alternate universe.

The war in Iraq would never have occurred. Support and respect for the U.S. around the globe would not have plummeted to levels that are both embarrassing and dangerous. The surpluses of the Clinton years would not have been squandered like casino chips in the hands of a compulsive gambler on a monumental losing streak.

Mr. Gore takes a blowtorch to the Bush administration in his book. He argues that the free and open democratic processes that have made the United States such a special place have been undermined by the administration’s cynicism and excessive secrecy, and by its shameless and relentless exploitation of the public’s fear of terror.

The Bush crowd, he said, has jettisoned logic, reason and reflective thought in favor of wishful thinking in the service of an extreme political ideology. It has turned its back on reality, with tragic results.

So where does that leave Mr. Gore? If the republic is in such deep trouble and the former vice president knows what to do about it, why doesn’t he have an obligation to run for president? I asked him if he didn’t owe that to his fellow citizens.

If the country needs you, how can you not answer the call?

He seemed taken aback. “Well, I respect the logic behind that question,” he said. “I also am under no illusion that there is any position that even approaches that of president in terms of an inherent ability to affect the course of events.”

But while leaving the door to a possible run carefully ajar, he candidly mentioned a couple of personal reasons why he is disinclined to seek the presidency again.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t really think I’m that good at politics, to tell you the truth.” He smiled. “Some people find out important things about themselves early in life. Others take a long time.”

He burst into a loud laugh as he added, “I think I’m breaking through my denial.”

I noted that he had at least been good enough to attract more votes than George W. Bush.

“Well, there was that,” he said, laughing again. “But what politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply.”

Mr. Gore is passionate about the issues he is focused on — global warming, the decline of rational discourse in American public life, the damage done to the nation over the past several years. And he has contempt for the notion that such important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences or 30-second television ads, which is how presidential campaigns are conducted.

He pressed this point when he talked about Iraq.

“One of the hallmarks of a strategic catastrophe,” he said, “is that it creates a cul-de-sac from which there are no good avenues of easy departure. Taking charge of the war policy and extricating our troops as quickly as possible without making a horrible situation even worse is a little like grabbing a steering wheel in the middle of a skid.”

There is no quick and easy formula, he said. A new leader implementing a new policy on Iraq would have to get a feel for the overall situation. The objective, however, should be clear: “To get our troops out of there as soon as possible while simultaneously observing the moral duty that all of us share — including those of us who opposed this war in the first instance — to remove our troops in a way that doesn’t do further avoidable damage to the people who live there.”

I asked if he meant that all U.S. troops should ultimately be removed from Iraq.

“Yes,” he said.

Then he was off to talk more about his book.

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HOME FIRES: five Iraq War veterans on their return to American life

By Michael Jernigan

June 4, 2007, 9:30 pm

What a Way to Come Home

My name is Mike Jernigan. I am a United States Marine Corps corporal who was medically retired in December of 2005. I served in Iraq for six months out of a seven month deployment. I was blinded by a roadside bomb on August 22, 2004 during a patrol near the town of Mahmudiya. Coming home was wild ride. I was medevac’d to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.

A few hours after I was airlifted my godfather, an Army colonel who was in Iraq, came to my bedside to sit with me for as long as he could. Upon hearing the news of my injury, my mother had immediately called his home in the states. She reached his wife and was told he was out of the country. But he quickly got the message over in Iraq and a few hours later drove over to the hospital. From there he became my mother’s eyes and ears. He held his satellite phone up to my ear while I was lying in a medically induced coma so that my mother could talk to me. I learned later that during these times my blood pressure would rise. The doctor had said that was a good sign; it meant I still had some brain activity.

I was later transferred to Landstuhl, Germany where I was met by my father. At the time he was working in Stuttgart, just a few hours away. I was there for two days receiving more surgeries to stabilize me. It was a very touch-and-go situation. I was told I flatlined a few times on the operating table, which was a very stressful time for my father. He had served in Vietnam but was not prepared to see his son come home like this. The Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps at the time, Sgt. Maj. John Estrada, came up to my father and gave him a big hug and told him that his son was going to be O.K.

I was soon airlifted to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. I was lucky in the fact that my father and stepmother were able to ride on the medevac plane with me. It was very reassuring to know that you get to go to the same hospital as the president of the United States. Here I was taken to the intensive care unit. The rest of my family — my mother, stepfather, brother, wife, and even my mother-in-law were awaiting my arrival. I am a unique case in the fact that I was surrounded by family every step of the way.

I was not only blinded but had also suffered a traumatic brain injury. My entire forehead was crushed and removed. My right hand was completely reconstructed. I am still missing my second metacarpal phalangeal joint and half of my fifth metacarpal phalangeal joint. To this day I still have limited movement in my right hand. I have come to affectionately refer to it as my “Bob Dole” hand. I also received severe trauma and had major surgery on my left knee. I now rock some wicked cool scars that include a 14 inch-long one that runs from temple to temple across the top of my head. I still wear a regulation high and tight haircut and all my friends tell me I should grow my hair out. My chest puffs out and I tell them you don’t need medals when you have scars like mine.

The crazy part is that this was the easiest part for me. Not long after I came home to St. Petersburg, Fla., it became apparent to me that my wife had lost interest. Two years and two months after my injury we were divorced. When we split I found out that she had spent all of the money I had earned plus all of the money given to us in private donations. I was then trying to make it on my own with little financial means, but the strong support of my entire family.

I completed a 16-week blind rehabilitation program at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Augusta, Ga. This was the most instrumental step on my path back to independence. There I learned how to clean a house, do my laundry, iron my own clothes, and even cook my own meals, which is a great thing because I am a very talented cook. I learned how to do basic maintenance around the house to include rewiring a lamp and fixing the plumbing underneath the sink. As part of my manual skills instruction I completed a couple of woodworking projects. I made a gorgeous two-story birdhouse from a kit and also built a bird feeder shaped like an old style covered bridge from bare lumber. This program has taught me that even without sight I can lead a very productive life.

Although suffering from my injuries might seem like an unfortunate incident, it has provided me with many great opportunities to better myself. I have taken advantage of the ones that interest me the most and look forward to any more that may cross my path. In the next few weeks I will be able to share more about life after Iraq with you.

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Giuliani Makes 9/11 His Brand

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: June 5, 2007

The Republican candidates for president will go at it again tonight, debating in New Hampshire. Terrorism and national security are bound to figure as topics, and we all know what that means: Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani will have another chance to assert proprietary rights to Sept. 11 and how we should understand that day.

Not that Mr. Giuliani is alone in believing that his perspectives on this subject are special. Like him, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton claims a unique status by virtue of being a New Yorker.

During the Democratic candidates’ own New Hampshire debate on Sunday night, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina dismissed the “war on terror” as a political slogan — a “bumper sticker,” as he called it. In disagreeing, Mrs. Clinton established her street cred.

“I’m a senator from New York,” she said. “I have lived with the aftermath of 9/11.”

It will be interesting to see what happens should she and Mr. Giuliani go toe to toe as their party’s nominees. One can imagine the former mayor hauling off on her should she use that aftermath line again. Aftermath? I was there, he’d say.

That was Mr. Giuliani’s tactic during a debate last month when he lit into a fellow Republican, Representative Ron Paul of Texas. Mr. Paul had suggested that American policies in the Middle East, going back to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, have contributed to the Muslim anger that has produced atrocities like the 2001 terrorist attacks. Though it wasn’t his turn to speak, Mr. Giuliani piped up as the indignant proprietor of 9/11 memory.

“That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq,” he said. No Clintonesque aftermath for him. He was there.

Mr. Giuliani has made the attack so much his province — the satirical newspaper The Onion says he is running for “president of 9/11” — that you have to wonder why he doesn’t try to trademark “9/11” as his own.

For a trademark claim, “he’d have to say that every time people saw ‘9/11,’ there was an association of that phrase with him, that there was an immediate link to him and his product, whatever that might be,” said Tim Wu, a professor of copyright law at Columbia University.

Indeed, that is essentially what Mr. Giuliani does say. His presidential race rests heavily on his performance on Sept. 11 and his hope that, when Americans contemplate antiterror strategies, the first name to pop into their heads is Rudy. Like every other candidate, he definitely has a product to sell: himself.

Nor is he shy about protecting himself in this regard. He has trademarked “Rudolph Giuliani” and “Giuliani Partners L.L.C.,” the company he formed after his mayoral term expired at the end of 2001. As The Daily News reported a few months ago, the company asserts that anything that “tarnishes, degrades, disparages or reflects adversely” on the Giuliani name could be grounds for terminating a contract.

The former mayor’s sensitivities about his name are well known.

You may recall how he went ballistic a decade ago when New York magazine ran advertisements on city buses that said of itself, “Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” The mayor leaned on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to remove the ads, and that led to lawsuits over free speech. The magazine prevailed in court. To fight a no-win battle in Mr. Giuliani’s behalf, the bus people tossed away $183,766 of riders’ money in legal fees.

GIVEN that background, the notion of trying to trademark “9/11” doesn’t seem so outlandish. But it would be an uphill climb and most likely an unsuccessful one, specialists in copyright law say.

A date on the calendar is “something so generic,” said Edward J. Davis, a Manhattan lawyer. Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, agreed. “It’s in broad use by so many people that it doesn’t uniquely distinguish any good or service,” she said. “It has no trademark heft.”

Professor Wu said much the same — that the date is “sort of a collective property,” beyond any individual claim. Still, he said, he could envision a debate in which “another candidate, let’s say McCain, gets up and says, ‘9/11 is important.’ And Giuliani says, ‘Do you realize that “9/11” happens to be a Giuliani trademark? You’re not allowed to talk about it.’ ”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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A Million Little Pieces

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: June 5, 2007

Over a year ago, Joe Biden, Les Gelb and others proposed a federal solution for Iraq. The basic argument was that Iraq is a ruptured society and there is no way to reconstitute it from the center.

There is no social trust between Sunnis and Shiites, the federalists observed. There is a winner-take-all mentality, which is not conducive to compromise. There is no tradition of impartial rule or impersonal justice, making it hard to establish big national institutions that won’t favor one tribe or sect.

Biden, Gelb and the federalists suggested a devolution of power to the regions, as envisioned by the Iraqi constitution.

Everybody out of power sympathized with their diagnosis, but everybody in power rejected it. Some of their objections were reasonable but not insurmountable. The Sunni and Shiite populations are too intermingled for a federal solution, senior administration officials would say when I would press them. There is no governing capacity in Iraq’s regions, so it’s crazy to talk about devolving power there, others pointed out.

Republicans, Democrats and others went ahead as if a solution could come from the center. The Republicans supported the surge, dependent on the performance of a nonsectarian national military. Democrats imagined that if they came up with the right array of benchmarks, timetables and incentives, they could induce Iraqi leaders to cut deals and make peace. A collection of smart, bipartisan people wrote the Baker-Hamilton report, based on the supposition that regional governments could work with the Iraqi center to create stability from the top down.

Now it’s a year later, and where are we? National reconciliation looks farther away than ever. There’s no petroleum law. There’s no de-Baathification law. There are no regional elections. There’s been no drop in violence.

Iraqi society has continued to fracture and is so incoherent that it can’t even have a proper civil war any more. As Gareth Stansfield wrote in a Chatham House report last month, what’s happening in Iraq is not one civil war or one insurgency. Instead, Iraq is home to many little civil wars and many little insurgencies that are fighting for local power. Even groups like the Mahdi Army are splitting.

After three and a half years of covering the conflict, Edward Wong, a Baghdad correspondent for The New York Times, wrote that the hunger for a final crushing victory overshadows any spirit of sectarian compromise. “Looking back on all I have seen of this war,” Wong wrote in last Sunday’s paper, “it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel, the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.”

Meanwhile, American political capital has been exhausted. White House officials are looking for some modest, sustainable policy to implement after the surge. Gen. David Petraeus, on the other hand, is apparently looking to up the counterinsurgency. But Republican patience is gone. The Democrats are veering leftward and may not accept any residual U.S. force in Iraq.

The most likely outcome is that we’ll see a gradual withdrawal to the bases. Some smaller number of U.S. troops will hang around to fight Al Qaeda and to make sure nobody topples the figurehead national government. But the Iraqi people will increasingly be on their own, to find security where they can.

And the irony is that what they will get is partition. It’s just that it will be done de facto, through the back door, and in the bloodiest way possible.

For while the center remains paralyzed, local armed bands are grasping for power and creating their own facts on the ground. Wong and Damien Cave described on May 22 in The Times how this is happening. In the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, Shiite militias are gradually consolidating control. They are expelling the Sunnis. They have created a system of street justice, complete with underground Islamic courts. They’ve battled rival militias. They fund their activities through extortion and bribery. But amid the mafia behavior and ethnic cleansing, they’ve created relative calm. Two thousand Shiite families have moved in.

This is now a success story: an ethnically cleansed safe place. Instead of a sort of managed soft partition that at least has a shot of transferring power to the best local people, we’re now getting machine-gun partition that transfers power to the most violent people. For Iraqis, the thug who rules your local gas station rules your life.

The continuing U.S. mistake is an unwillingness to see Iraqi reality sociologically, from the ground up.

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"A Million Little Pieces" >>

HOME FIRES: five Iraq War veterans on their return to American life

By Jeffrey D. Barnett
June 1, 2007, 4:49 pm

The New Normal

It’s quickly approaching a full year since I returned from Iraq, but it really doesn’t seem that long ago. However, the calendar doesn’t lie, and the end of August will mark the day in 2006 when I reunited with my wife, Christina, on the steps in front of my unit’s barracks in Camp Pendleton, Calif. Of course, we managed to miss each other as I got off the bus, and then we both proceeded to circle the crowd in a clockwise direction, maintaining equal distance and obliviousness of each other until we finally gravitated towards the center and met. After exchanging the required hugs and kisses I thought, “What do I do now?” I thought for a moment and offered the suggestion, “Let’s go home.” And that’s what we did. At T plus four minutes from setting foot in the continental United States it was already as if I was just coming home from another day of work.

The feeling actually started on the bus on our way from March Air Reserve Base to Camp Pendleton. I looked out at the Southern California countryside and thought, “It’s so familiar. It’s like I never left.” Then a cell-phone laden motorist in an S.U.V. swung around our bus at a high speed and I thought, “Whoa! I see those didn’t die out while I was gone.”

Everything felt the same as it always had. As a matter of fact, I struggled for several days in various capacities trying to figure out why I wasn’t radically changed or why normal things felt just that normal. I thought routine activities like watching TV on my couch would somehow be extraordinary after I returned. Nope, just normal.

After a few half-days of completing some administrative tasks and required post-deployment training I took about 10 days of leave. I really didn’t know what to do with all of the free time. I went from working 12 hours a day with no weekends to having no time commitments whatsoever. Then I understood the ridiculous stories from my friends who would return from deployment and stay up all night reorganizing their closets and sorting laundry. Six months of constantly dedicating every moment of the day to some type of task ­ be it working, eating, sleeping, or exercising can wreak havoc on your psyche when it’s finally time to relax.

Speaking of psychosis, it also crossed my mind several times, “Why don’t I feel crazy?” Then I remembered that truly insane people aren’t aware of it, so that was really a moot issue. As I told one gentleman — who was so suave as to inquire, upon our first meeting, mind you, if I have any “flashbacks” or other ill-effects — “I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of being normal, before or after Iraq.” Nevertheless, it was like society had given me a set of expectations for my return, and reality was turning out a little differently. Wasn’t I supposed to sit shirtless at the dinner table wearing dogtags and sip black coffee with a thousand-yard stare?

Frankly, I do have some memories from my time in Iraq that I think about often — sometimes daily. Some are good. Some are bad. I don’t tend to discuss the bad ones with anyone except my wife. I suppose I don’t think someone that has less than a 100 percent understanding of me could offer much insight.

Reintegration has been a really interesting (and really welcome) endeavor. My friends and fellow officers in my neighborhood on base were an easy bunch to settle back in with. They welcomed me back as we crossed paths, asked me if I enjoyed my time in Iraq, and that was it. After that it was life as usual. We’re all accustomed to people dropping off the social radar and then picking them back up when they return.

While I absolutely don’t mind sharing my general experiences from Iraq, there is something to be said for not being pressed like a clove of garlic for the same trite bits of information over and over. Fellow Marines were understandably the best about that. Not only do they have a similar knowledge base about Iraq, but they have a general understanding of what you are interested in discussing, what bores you, and what you’d rather leave alone.

Conversely, sometimes people do ask thoughtful and intriguing questions that are a joy to answer. It is never a burden to tell someone my opinion of my own experiences. I’m not interested in discussing the strategic level of war and national policy with every stranger I meet, and I’m definitely not interested in listening to everyone’s personal soliloquy on the war, but my thoughts on what I experienced are always fair game.

I don’t want to give the impression that reintegrating with others outside the military was difficult. That’s not the case. But if I have to tell one more person “whether we’re doing good things over there” I’m going to click off-safe. What do they expect me to say? “No. We’re doing horrible, horrible things. That’s why I signed up to go. We’re stealing money from Iraqi schools and using it to buy backhoes to tear up the roads while we play gangster rap from the top of every mosque.”

I understand people are genuinely curious about the truth of what’s happening, and I always deliver a few honest sound bites to appease them. But realistically, if “good things” is as deeply as you’ve thought about the situation in Iraq, do you really want a detailed answer, or do you just want the sound bite?

More of Jeffrey D. Barnett’s writing for TimesSelect can be read in the 2006 column, Frontlines.

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Obama in Second Place

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 4, 2007

One of the lessons journalists should have learned from the 2000 election campaign is that what a candidate says about policy isn’t just a guide to his or her thinking about a specific issue — it’s the best way to get a true sense of the candidate’s character.

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that, and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy proposals.

That’s why I’m not interested in what sports the candidates play or speculation about their marriages. I want to hear about their health care plans — not just for the substance, but to get a sense of what kind of president each would be. Would they hesitate and triangulate, or would they push hard for real change?

Now, back in February John Edwards put his rivals for the Democratic nomination on the spot, by coming out with a full-fledged plan to cover all the uninsured. Suddenly, vague expressions of support for universal health care weren’t enough: candidates were under pressure to present their own specific plans.

And the question was whether those plans would be as bold and comprehensive as the Edwards proposal.

Four months have passed since then. So far, all Hillary Clinton has released are proposals to help reduce health care costs. It’s worthy stuff, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that she’s putting off dealing with the hard part. The real test is how she proposes to cover the uninsured.

But last week Barack Obama, after getting considerable grief for having failed to offer policy specifics, finally delivered a comprehensive health care plan. So how is it?

First, the good news. The Obama plan is smart and serious, put together by people who know what they’re doing.

It also passes one basic test of courage. You can’t be serious about health care without proposing an injection of federal funds to help lower-income families pay for insurance, and that means advocating some kind of tax increase. Well, Mr. Obama is now on record calling for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

Also, in the Obama plan, insurance companies won’t be allowed to deny people coverage or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history. Again, points for toughness.

Best of all, the Obama plan contains the same feature that makes the Edwards plan superior to, say, the Schwarzenegger proposal in California: it lets people choose between private plans and buying into a Medicare-type plan offered by the government.

Since Medicare has much lower overhead costs than private insurers, this competition would force the insurance industry to cut costs — making our health-care system more efficient. And if private insurers couldn’t or wouldn’t cut costs enough, the system would evolve into Medicare for all, which is actually the best solution.

So there’s a lot to commend the Obama plan. In fact, it would have been considered daring if it had been announced last year.

Now for the bad news. Although Mr. Obama says he has a plan for universal health care, he actually doesn’t — a point Mr. Edwards made in last night’s debate. The Obama plan doesn’t mandate insurance for adults. So some people would take their chances — and then end up receiving treatment at other people’s expense when they ended up in emergency rooms. In that regard it’s actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan.

I asked David Cutler, a Harvard economist who helped put together the Obama plan, about this omission. His answer was that Mr. Obama is reluctant to impose a mandate that might not be enforceable, and that he hopes — based, to be fair, on some estimates by Mr. Cutler and others — that a combination of subsidies and outreach can get all but a tiny fraction of the population insured without a mandate. Call it the timidity of hope.

On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn’t quell my worries that Mr. Obama’s dislike of “bitter and partisan” politics makes him too cautious. But at least he’s come out with a plan.

Senator Clinton, we’re waiting to hear from you.

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Escape From North Korea

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 4, 2007

CHINESE-NORTH KOREAN BORDER

In an archipelago of safe houses here, part of a 21st-century Underground Railroad, I met groups of people who live every moment with sickening fear.

These are North Koreans who have escaped to the “free world” — China — and are now at constant risk of being captured by Chinese police. The Chinese government, in a disgraceful breach of its obligations under the 1951 Refugees Convention, hands these escapees back to North Korea, where they face beatings and imprisonment, occasionally even execution.

In one shelter is a 14-year-old North Korean girl: shy, sweet and terrified. Her parents led her across the frozen Tumen River from North Korea in the middle of winter, but then they became separated while trying to flee the police. “I don’t know where my parents are, or if they are even alive,” she said.

Now a joint crackdown by the North Koreans and Chinese is greatly increasing the peril for people like her.

The North Korean authorities used to detain citizens returned by China for a few weeks or months and then release them after a bit of “re-education.” But about a year ago, North Korea greatly increased the penalties.

Now those returned by China are often sentenced to prison for several years, and repeat offenders or Christians can be sent with their entire families to labor camps for life.

Some North Koreans told me that their government now holds regular sentencing rallies, at which the punishments are publicly announced — or in extreme cases, such as those who became Christian evangelists while in China, the accused are executed in front of the crowd by firing squad.

One Christian I spoke to had been beaten so badly after his return by China that he tried to commit suicide by swallowing a handful of pins. The prison, not wanting to have to dispose of a corpse, freed him — and he eventually made his way back to China.

“If he is sent back again,” said his wife, “he’ll be beaten to death.”

China has also increased its punishments for its own citizens who are caught helping North Koreans. The penalty used to be a fine, but now it is jail for a year or two — or for a decade or more if someone smuggles escapees to South Korea.

“Now most Chinese don’t dare help the Koreans,” said one local official who secretly protects a safe house full of North Koreans — and who even stood guard outside as I interviewed them. “But I feel so badly for them. They’re just wretched.”

With the help of incredibly courageous conductors on the modern Underground Railroad, I visited four shelters that together house dozens of North Koreans, and residents of a fifth shelter were brought to my vehicle so that I could talk to them safely. My entire visit was conducted under very tight security to make sure I did not lead police to the safe houses.

The North Koreans I talked to described a society that is increasingly corrupt and disillusioned. One said that even with the latest crackdown, a $400 bribe to guards will win a prisoner’s immediate release. Another estimated that up to 20 percent of North Koreans in her area are disaffected enough that they listen illegally to Chinese broadcasts.

Chinese and South Korean missionaries are also beginning to evangelize secretly in North Korea, a sign of weakening government control. One Chinese Christian I talked to had made four trips into North Korea to evangelize. “If I’d been caught, I don’t think I would have been executed,” she said, “but it wouldn’t have been good.”

All the same, none of these North Koreans thought an uprising was imminent. Indeed, a surprising number of them are so steeped in propaganda that they still insist that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is a good man. “The problem is with lower officials, not with Kim Jong-il himself,” claimed one man who has arranged for smugglers to bring his entire family out to freedom in China. (For more on the North Koreans, go to my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

President Bush should raise China’s breach of its international obligations with Hu Jintao. Mr. Bush might think of that 14-year-old girl, who spends her days minding two 9-year-old boys whose mothers were caught and sent back to North Korea. Those three children are modern reminders of the terrors of Anne Frank. They fear with every footstep outside their door that China will arrest them and send them back to their national torture chamber.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Think Again - a New York Times blog by Stanley Fish

June 3, 2007, 10:05 pm

Another Spin of the Wheel

In the past year I have come to expect that the respondents to these columns will be learned, eloquent and precise in the articulation of their positions. (I have also learned that, no matter how remote the connection, they will be able to use whatever I write as a springboard to a denunciation of the Bush administration.) But my expectations were exceeded by the comments posted to my last piece on the impossibility of avoiding “spin” in a world (our world) where perception and expression necessarily proceed from some angled perspective or point of view. With passion and precision (and often at some length) the authors of these comments alerted me to at least two mistakes.

The first is the more serious: I was using the word “spin” in two different senses and my failure to distinguish between them led to a slippage in the argument of which I remained unaware until it was pointed out by literally dozens of readers. One sense of “spin” – the commonsense sense that is the subject of Brooks Jackson’s and Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s new book, “unSpun” – is the effort to deceive either by omitting relevant facts or by drawing suspiciously large conclusions from small amounts of data or by regarding disputed evidence as authoritative – or by any of the hundreds of other techniques by which someone labors to “put something over” on someone else.

The other sense of spin I employed in the column is more philosophical: it is a response to the argument, made at times by Jackson and Jamieson, that one antidote to deception – either deception imposed by others or the self-deception imposed by one’s own desires and inclinations – is to carefully monitor one’s own thought processes and to be especially alert to the human tendency to “embrace information that supports our beliefs and reject evidence that challenges them.”

Jackson and Jamieson cite as a cautionary example a group that had gathered to await the appearance of a UFO that would rescue its members from a flood of biblical proportions. Neither the flood nor the UFO arrived, but, rather than abandoning the convictions that had led them to the prediction of both, the faithful “became even more committed to their cause after seeing what any reasonable person would conclude was shattering proof that they had been completely wrong.” What they should have done, say Jackson and Jamieson, is reduce “ their dissonance by abandoning their religious beliefs.”

The model here is of a mind stocked with beliefs and an independent world the facts of which could serve either to confirm or disconfirm them. They believed X, but then Y happened (or in this case didn’t happen), and the rational (reasonable) thing would have been no longer to believe X. In the original column I challenged this model and asserted that facts, rather than standing in a relationship of distance to belief – a distance that allowed them to perform the service of check or correction – were a function of belief. That is, the facts of a situation are not just sitting there waiting to be spotted by a perceptive apparatus free of biases and prejudices; the facts of a situation will take the shape they do – will become facts – by virtue of the grounding beliefs of interested observers ( there are no other kind). That is why the leader of the group in Jackson’s and Jamieson’s example declared that the “cataclysm had been called off because of the believers’ devotion.”

In a different, but structurally similar, scenario the failure of a predicted messiah to appear would be taken to mean (and has in history been taken to mean) that the faithful had been judged unworthy. If the belief is strong enough, if it is the cornerstone of one’s world-view, it will be no trick at all to re-characterize facts that others might see as a devastating challenge to it. (Thus in his “On Christian Doctrine,” St. Augustine advises scripture readers who find parts of the Bible pointing a bad moral to work the text over until “an interpretation conducing to the reign of charity is produced.”) We don’t “embrace” information that supports our beliefs; we see the information delivered by our beliefs.

And it doesn’t have to be a religious belief that is productive of facts confidently seen. Many who raised objections to my argument were especially bothered by what they regarded as my letting Karl Rove off the hook when he cited a statistic to support his claim that under President Bush the United States economy had improved. It was their belief that anything Karl Rove said was a lie – “a statement is a lie if it comes out of Rove’s mouth” – and it is within that belief, unshakable by anything offered as counter-evidence, that they will assess an analysis of a Rovian utterance, mine or anyone else’s.

But why not come to a situation with no beliefs, or with the beliefs you have held in abeyance or bracketed, and take a good, hard look at the facts? Aside from the point I have already made (that any facts we look at will be available and perspicuous only from the perspective of some belief or other), what is it exactly that we would be looking with? Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely – and if there were all disputes could be settled by just going to it – we can only look with or within the convictions that anchor our minds and provide the possibility of judgment. It is within a conviction or belief that some assertion or description will seem to us to be right or wrong, adequate or inadequate. Absent a belief that grounds it and gives it a direction, the mind would be rudderless and incapable of going anywhere.

That is what I meant when I said that an open mind was an empty mind. There is of course a perfectly good and uncontroversial sense of having an open mind: being receptive to new ideas in the hope that we might learn something or revise an opinion (see comments #125 and #129); but even that possibility will be shaped by the opinions we already hold, for it is from their vantage point that an idea will be received as new and worthy of consideration. Open-mindedness, insofar as it exists, is itself a constrained condition. There is no such thing as really being open-minded Again this is a distinction – between open-mindedness in a perfectly ordinary but uninteresting sense and open-mindedness as an epistemological state no human being could achieve – that I failed to articulate, just as I failed to articulate the difference between spin as deception and spin as the name of our inescapable condition, and for these failures I should certainly be faulted.

I should not be faulted, however, for maintaining that “there are no facts” or for declaring that “reality is subjective” or for “giving up the search for truth” or for saying that “there is no shared truth let alone an absolute truth.” I did not say and would never say those things. In most if not all cases there is certainly a fact of the matter, but just what it is will be worked out within the vocabularies or “dimensions of assessment” (J. L. Austin’s term in “How To Do Things With Words”) that at once limit and enable what we can see and say. And if two accounts of the fact of the matter are in competition, there is no algorithm or decision procedure independent of any dimension of assessment whatsoever that will tell us which is the correct one.

And as for reality, it is not subjective (a word I never use); it is out there prior to any of our efforts to describe it. But what we know of it (a knowledge constantly changing as our descriptive vocabularies change) will only be known through the medium of our descriptions; and disputes about it will be disputes about the adequacy of different ways of describing, again without the possibility of something that is not a challengeable mode of description settling the dispute once and for all. And the search for truth? It is the business we all should be in, but it is a line of work that can only be pursued within the linguistic and technical resource history affords us. There is an absolute truth, but short of achieving a point of view that is not a point of view–achieving, that is, godhead – it cannot be absolutely known.

The bottom line is that it is no contradiction at all to assert the firm existence of fact, truth and reality and yet maintain that they can only be known within the human, limited vocabularies we have built in the endless effort to get things right. Truth claims are universal, but their justification and elaboration take place in time and within revisable, contingent discursive structures.

This is hardly a new insight. Thomas Hobbes put it this way in his “Leviathan” (1651): “True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.” That is to say, our judgment as to whether an assertion is true or false will be made by seeing how it fits in (or doesn’t fit in) with other assertions the truth of which are, at least for the time being, warranted. We do not compare the assertion with the world but with currently authoritative statements about the world. The world itself – unmediated by any system of statements – is forever removed from us. As Richard Rorty says, in an update of Hobbes, “The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not” (“Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” 1989). The world, Rorty adds, does not have its own language, does not make propositions about itself. We do that, and it is the propositions we hazard, not the world as it exists apart from propositions, that we affirm, reject, argue about and believe in.

If that is so, propositions – assertions that this or that is or is not the case – are the vehicle of thought and Hobbes can be emended to say, “where Speech is not, there is no Thought.” Words come first and make thought – propositions – possible. This is what I was getting at when I said we can’t think without them. I should have added (another failure to clarify) that by thinking I meant making propositions about the world. I was not thinking about the kind of thinking (if that is the word) that goes on in music or dance (see comments #79, #108 and #129). Fortunately, I was rescued from my imprecision by S. Mckenna and Ben Murphy, who make the point I should have made: “‘thought’ here is being used in the Fregean sense of something that can be true or false, something that can serve as a premise or conclusion in a deductive argument.”

And finally there is the matter of George Orwell. Kenny asks that I back up my judgment that “Politics and the English Language” is a silly, terrible essay with analysis and reasons. Well, that would take more than a column, but I could just cite Orwell’s advice “to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures and associations.” I had thought that the last word on this fantasy had been written by Jonathan Swift in “Gullliver’s Travels.” Swift describes a society so distrustful of words that its members carry packs upon their backs, and when they want to communicate they just pull out things and point to them. (Try that with a Hummer or a big-screen TV.) James Johnston predicts that in 50 years people will still be reading Orwell and I will be just a footnote, if that. That sounds right. George Trail wonders what I think of “1984”. I think that “1984” and “Animal Farm” and many other writings by Orwell are accomplishments way beyond my abilities. I also think that “Politics and the English Language” is way below my abilities.

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Failed Presidents Ain’t What They Used to Be

By FRANK RICH

Published: June 3, 2007

A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.

That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).

This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.

The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.

On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war (“I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action,” he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed “again and again” so that Mr. Bush would be forced to realize “he has no choice” but to end the war. It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.

Among Republicans the right’s revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the 19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base’s traditional gripes — knee-jerk wailing about the “tragedy” of Mary Cheney’s baby — can’t be heard above the din.

“White America is in flight” is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration alarm. “All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a credit card” is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill’s punitive measures for illegal immigrants. Bill O’Reilly, while “reluctantly” supporting Mr. Bush’s plan, illustrates how immigration is “drastically” altering the country by pointing out that America is “now one-third minority.” (Do Jews make the cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like “Fight Club.”

What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don’t adhere to their bases’ strict ideological orders. “If Democrats do not stick to their guns on Iraq,” a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be “serious political consequences in 2008.” In an echo of his ideological opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act.”

But there’s a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else. Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63 percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also buy broad provisions of the immigration bill — including the 66 percent of Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a guest-worker program.

What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base hollers, America is not going to round up and deport 12 million illegal immigrants, or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the Mexican border — despite Lou Dobbs’s hoax blaming immigrants for a nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new president unburdened by a disastrous war may well fashion the immigration compromise that is likely to elude Mr. Bush.

Withdrawal from Iraq is also on its way. Contrary to Mr. Edwards, only Republicans in Congress can overcome presidential vetoes and in so doing force Mr. Bush’s hand on the war. As the bottom drops out of Iraq and the polls, those G.O.P. votes are starting to line up. The latest example came last Sunday, when the most hawkish of former Rumsfeld worshipers, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined his party’s Congressional leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, in talking about drawing down troops if something “extraordinary” doesn’t happen in Iraq by the time Gen. David Petraeus gives his September report on the “surge.” No doubt Mr. Sessions, who is up for re-election in 2008, saw a May 12 survey in The Birmingham News showing that even in his reddest of states, nearly half the voters want America out of Iraq within a year and favor candidates who agree.

This relatively unified America can’t be compared with that of the second Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may be a precise political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed presidencies rent by catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying for the mood pendulum to swing.

Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when he described himself as a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was (to a fault, as it turned out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see this equation at work now in Mitt Romney’s unflappable game-show-host persona, in John McCain’s unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan grin and in the unlikely spectacle of Rudy Giuliani trading in his congenital scowl for a sunny disposition. Hillary Clinton’s camp is doing everything it can to deflect new books reminding voters of the vicious Washington warfare during her husband’s presidency. Then again, even Michael Moore is rolling out a kinder, gentler persona in his media blitz for his first film since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In this climate, it’s hardly happenstance that many Republicans are looking in desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly welcomed his candidacy last week because, in his view, Mr. Thompson is “less harsh” in tone than his often ideologically indistinguishable rivals and “a real-life version of the avuncular fictional D.A. he plays on TV.” The Democratic boomlet for Barack Obama is the flip side of the same coin: his views don’t differ radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.

If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly villainous as Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover would do this time.

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A Journey to, and From, the Heart of Radical Islam in Britain

By JANE PERLEZ

Published: June 2, 2007

LONDON

ED HUSAIN (left) remembers the man as a kindly soul, not the sort you would suspect of recruiting for a radical Islamic group. As a teenager already in rebellion against his upstanding middle-class parents, who had raised him as a sort of Muslim choirboy, young Mohamed — his original first name — was an easy target.

They met in the early 1990s at the elaborate Muslim wedding of a distant relative. “He was a medic at Royal London Hospital, and he invited me to lunch,” said Mr. Husain, whose recently published memoir, “The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left,” has caused a ruckus in the newspapers, on television, on talks shows and in blogs.

“He was asking me questions and then saying, ‘White Muslims are being killed in Bosnia,’ ” he recalled in an interview. “What chances do we have as brown people in England?’ He was creating doubts.” He said his new friend had “black and white” answers to the world’s problems, and gave him books by Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge who, dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, set up his own Islamic party, called Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation.

Thus began Mr. Husain’s journey into the world of British Islamic radicalism. He joined a university campus branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir. He said he had been hooked on an ideology that calls for a caliphate in Muslim countries and the end of Israel, though in nonviolent ways. Membership made him feel important, even though he was only a cog in a larger movement. “You feel a few cuts above an ordinary Muslim,” he said.

He left the group in 1995 after two years, dismayed after a fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir member stabbed a Christian student, killing him.

NOW, with his book, Mr. Husain’s personal story has become fodder for the percolating debate in Britain about how to combat terror, and about how to narrow the divide between white non-Muslim Britons and Muslims from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

With the zeal of a true believer, Mr. Husain, 32, has denounced Hizb ut-Tahrir, and called for it to be banned. With almost equal fervor he has upbraided the British government for being too soft on issues of Islamic extremism.

Some Muslims have called Mr. Husain, who is of Indian heritage, a traitor. Some non-Muslims on the left have questioned his get-tough approach. Others, mostly on the right, have hailed him as brave. Mr. Husain has also been challenged by some who argue that his experiences do not deal with the most pressing problem, the very small minority of British Muslims who end up being recruited as terrorists.

For its part, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which runs a sophisticated Web site and is no slouch at joining the fray, has assailed Mr. Husain, calling his attacks unfair and outmoded. A spokesman, Taji Mustafa, said that Mr. Husain was never a formal member who took a pledge, but rather attended the group’s circles like thousands of others.

On the other side, Mr. Husain says he has been approached by British government officials, asking whether he wants to join their antiextremist efforts, a move that would almost certainly cast him in parts of Britain’s diverse Muslim community as a government stooge.

“The Islamist blogs are apologists,” Mr. Husain said of his Muslim critics. Of the critics on the left, he said: “The left shouldn’t be getting into bed with the Islamists. We’ve got a political correctness gone mad in Britain that says, ‘How dare we white British tell them what to do?’ ”

Mr. Husain argues that radical Muslim groups prey on the anger and confusion of young British Muslim men of South Asian heritage, who grow up in segregated neighborhoods and peer from the outside into a society that promises equality but does not deliver.

In his case, he said, feverish internal politicking, religious arguments and leafleting on the streets, in the campus library and around pool halls in East London quickly took the place of what had seemed to be a dead-end life as a Muslim who tried to fit into British society. He had left an all-boys high school of mostly Asians — where he started out in a tie, blazer and polished shoes — feeling an outsider.

In contrast, being part of Hizb ut-Tahrir was an all-consuming business as he aspired to be one of the intellectual leaders of the new dawn of a Muslim caliphate. “I lost my smile,” he said.

But when things got out of hand — he said that one of his colleagues, Saeed, murdered a Christian Nigerian — Mr. Husain called it quits with Hizb ut-Tahrir. “I was spiritually down in the gutter, remote from the Koran and remote from my parents,” he said.

IN his continued quest for religious meaning, Mr. Husain joined several other Islamic groups, left those, and finally settled with the Sufi teachings of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an American convert to Islam, whom he believes teaches an Islam of moderation that is the true Islam.

He married an Indian British Muslim, Faye Begum, and together they traveled to Syria and then to Saudi Arabia to teach English.

It took him six years, he said, to free his head from the doctrine of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Along the way, he deliberately did two things that the group had forbidden. “I had to make non-Muslim friends, because they said don’t do that,” he said. He now counts several Jews among his circle, he said. The second forbidden act, he said, was that “I joined the Labor Party, because they say don’t vote.” He has found religious solace, he says, in the teachings of the California-based Mr. Hanson — a popular preacher in Britain — because his faith allows Islam to face the contemporary world.

“In traditional circles, Muslim women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim men,” Mr. Husain said. “But in a pluralistic world in 2007, where non-Muslim men and Muslim women are marrying, you can’t say, ‘You can’t do that.’ Hanson says Muslim women should be allowed to marry non-Muslim men as long as she can practice her faith.”

Mr. Husain, dressed in jacket, pressed shirt and khakis, took a visitor to the campus of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, where he is studying for a Ph.D. on Sufism. Students sprawled on the grass between exams. One, a longtime friend and onetime colleague in Hizb ut-Tahrir, Majid Nawaz, came over to chat.

Mr. Nawaz, a Briton, spent nearly four years in jail in Egypt on charges of proselytizing for Hizb ut-Tahrir. After his release last year, he returned to Britain, and last month, quietly left the executive committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Soon, says Mr. Husain, his friend will go public with the reasons for his departure, an explanation he hopes that will cause a stir like his own.

As for that very un-Muslim first name, Ed is an abbreviation of Mohamed. “I found most Muslims didn’t address me as Mohamed,” he said. “Like Christians don’t use Jesus too much.” In Syria, some people would call him Mo, but he preferred the last syllable of his name: “In new times, with new problems, I feel like Ed.”

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Men Will Be Boys

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: June 3, 2007

When Alvy Singer and Annie Hall split up, he tells her a relationship is like a shark: “It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

A relationship that turns into a dead shark is common. A live shark that reproduces without a relationship, however, is uncommon. Yet there was a recent report of a virgin birth in an aquarium — a female shark having a baby without mating. A trick of nature called parthenogenesis.

“I love this word parthenogenesis,” David Page, an expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., told me. “It suggests knowledge, but what it stands for in this case is ignorance. Nobody has a clue how parthenogenesis works.”

When a hammerhead shark had a baby at an Omaha zoo, scientists at first thought she had mated with another species or stored sperm from years before. But then they decided there was no “male contribution,” as one put it.

Dr. Page may be biased in favor of male contribution, but he doubts females are ready to dispense with males. “It’s reproducing without sex, and reproducing with sex is something that’s been around on our planet for maybe a billion or a billion and a half years,” he said. “Even yeast cells, the cells that make your bread and beer and wine, reproduce sexually.”

A shark may know how to knock herself up, but in “Knocked Up,” the new Judd Apatow comedy being hailed as “an era-defining classic” and a “zeitgeist-tapping generational marker,” Katherine Heigl still has to fool with the birds and the bees.

She plays a reporter for the E! network who becomes pregnant the old-fashioned way: she gets so drunk with a stranger at a bar that she can’t tell he’s not using a condom.

He’s not the perfect man. Played by Seth Rogen, he’s a pothead with no income, no cellphone and no muscle tone. He lives in a group house plastered with girlie magazines and littered with ninja weapons. When he and his friends aren’t paintballing or trading movie lines or fighting with fiery boxing gloves or obsessing on women’s breasts, they plot to start a cinema nudity Web site called Flesh of the Stars. The morning after their tryst, he advises the appalled Ms. Heigl at breakfast: “Once you’re hung over, you’ve just gotta puke.”

On the other hand, he’s sweet and honest and sticks by her through her pregnancy, despite ups and downs with her affections, her hormones and her high-maintenance sister. Maybe he is perfect.

Ms. Heigl’s single working girl decides to keep the baby, just as Natalie Wood’s single working girl did in the 1963 “Love With the Proper Stranger,” when she becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a raffish stranger played by Steve McQueen.

Even now, after so many decades, it’s hard to imagine a romantic-comedy heroine opting for, as one of the slacker dudes puts it, “a word that rhymes with shmashmortion.”

I’m not sure I’d deem “Knocked Up” “a ‘Tootsie’ or ‘The Graduate’ for the 21st century,” as Slate called it. But Mr. Apatow, who specializes in lovable geeks falling in love, is funny.

The ’30s and ’40s had screwball comedies, with the snappy patter of zany dames and the guys they drove crazy. In the ’70s, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton made magic.

This period will be remembered for classic comedies where the true sparks fly between men — coming-of-age tales about guys who should already be of age — perpetual boys with Maxim mind-sets, hilariously knocking on each other (usually by dismissing each other with crude or anatomical terms for women). In his Bilbongsromans, Mr. Apatow cleverly tempers his adolescent raunch with old-fashioned innocence.

From Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson’s “Zoolander” to Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn’s “Wedding Crashers” to Will Ferrell’s “Old School” and “Anchorman,” to Mr. Apatow’s “40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” the creative energy is with the boys.

Mr. Apatow’s message is that his lost boys must put their toys away and find the deeper fun in adult responsibility. Suddenly, while having lap dances and taking shrooms in Vegas with his new buddy, Paul Rudd, Mr. Rogen decides to go home, shelve his bong and be a daddy.

Mr. Apatow’s women are smart and confident, but you always know you are on a journey with the men. Ultimately, the men seem happiest without any female contribution — when they’re engrossed in the gross-out world of guydom. It’s like a male version of parthenogenesis.

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