The Legislators and Their Love for EarmarkingIt is no secret; elected representatives (of both parties) love the nefarious practice of earmarking for their pet projects. As expected, proposed reform of earmarking ended up as a joke, the opposition was too strong. Ruth Marcus in the Post described it as a "charade". Rightly so. "And so Stark, as I said, would have found the congressional debate a hoot. Because this charade of earmark reform involved lawmakers forcing themselves to take credit for their earmarks -- in essence, engaging in the legislative equivalent of naming the hospital after themselves.Under the new rule, some -- but not all -- earmarks will require that the sponsoring lawmaker be identified. Big whoop. The problem with the most egregious earmarks isn't that the public doesn't know who's behind them. It's that the patrons are completely unabashed about the pork they are pushing."Excerpts:"All The King's Earmarks"Exhibit A: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens's tirade on the Senate floor against efforts to take away funding for his "bridge to nowhere."Exhibit B: the entire state of West Virginia, crammed with the earmarked products of the Senate Appropriations Committee's senior Democrat. To wit, the Robert C. Byrd Federal Building and Courthouse in Charleston (not to be confused with the Robert C. Byrd Federal Building and Courthouse in Beckley); the Robert C. Byrd Expressway (not to be confused with the Robert C. Byrd Freeway or the Robert C. Byrd Bridge); the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center at Wheeling Jesuit University (not to be confused with the Robert C. Byrd Science and Technology Center at Shepherd University or the Robert C. Byrd Technology Center at Alderson-Broaddus College). "I don't care if you list the members who sponsor earmarks. I put out press releases on every one of them," Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in explaining how ineffective this change would be.That didn't stop the House leadership from congratulating itself. "Today is an important day for the House as an institution," pronounced Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). Perhaps, in the sense that it showed how resistant the chamber is to any deviation from business as usual.So resistant, in fact, that the writers of large checks, also known as the House Appropriations Committee, greeted this minor incursion on their power with howls of outrage. They were being unfairly singled out for abuse, the appropriators bleated behind closed doors; the new rule would still let the tax writers and the authorizers get away with their special-interest shenanigans.

President Bush spoke before the UN. Iraq and Iran both figured prominently in his speech but there are doubts as to how his assurance to Muslims would play in the Islamic world. The facts about his position on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran are known. The mess resulting from his war in Iraq cannot be downplayed or glossed over. UNITED NATIONS -- President Bush on Tuesday appealed directly to Muslims to assure them that the United States is not waging war with Islam as he laid out a vision for peace in the Middle East before skeptical world leaders at the United Nations. On the sidelines, Bush pressed Iran to return at once to international talks on its nuclear program and threatened consequences if they do not."President Bush might not get all he wants. The structure of the UN Security Council no longer allows the super powers to bully and push resolutions through but the United States still has clout and uses it.On another front -- the issue of torture of prisoners -- despite unexpectedly hard opposition from members of his own party and worldwide condemnation the president has not given up trying to get a legislation passed to permit his administration to continue practices that contravene Article 26 of the Geneva Convention relative to The Treatment of Prisoners of War. There are two items in today's Washington Post about this issue, both critical of the president's position.In Torture Is Torture Eugene Robinson writes:I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue -- the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program." Of course, he won't fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons -- and who knows where else? -- but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous "waterboarding," which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.Tom Malinowski draws comparison with methods used when Joseph Stalin ruled the former USSR. Call Cruelty What It IsPresident Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.Bush insists that these techniques are not torture -- after all, they don't involve pulling out fingernails or applying electric shocks. He even says that he "would hope" the standards he's proposing are adopted by other countries. But before he again invites America's enemies to use such "alternative" methods on captured Americans, he might benefit from knowing a bit of their historical origins and from hearing accounts of those who have experienced them. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for the president's reading list.He might begin with Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror." Conquest wrote: "When there was time, the basic [Soviet Secret police] method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."

Victims of WarA news item among many others. But to those of us who love books it strikes a chord. The daily chronicles of deaths, injuries, and atrocities have made us somewhat jaded. We read that x-number of people died in a bomb attack in Baghdad and go on to something else. Sudarshan Raghavan's excellent report in the Post about Naim al-Shatri and the booksellers of Mutanabi Street brought home another side of George Bush's war against Iraq. "BAGHDAD -- A silence has fallen upon Mutanabi Street.In the buttery sunlight, faded billboards hang from old buildings. Iron gates seal entrances to bookstores and stationery shops. On this Friday, like the past 13 Fridays, the violence has taken its toll. There is not a customer around, only ghosts. ...

Pathetic is what comes to mind. Pope Benedict is doing everything but genuflecting and offering an outright apology to the Muslims for his unwise remarks. There can be little doubt that he meant what he said about the Muslims. Of course, the Islamic world jumped at the opportunity to attack him. Then there was President Bush and his talk about a Third Awakening. There is a lot of similarity between them -- the Pope, the Mullahs, and President Bush.VATICAN CITY, Sept. 16 -- Pope Benedict XVI "sincerely regrets" offending Muslims with his reference to an obscure medieval text that characterizes some of the teachings of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman," a senior Vatican official said in a statement Saturday. ...

The President and his aides continue to spread fear and lies. They are asking the American public to believe them....that they know best and they are doing everything to protect the security of the nation. The facts present a completely different picture. Whether the war in Iraq or failure to rebuild damage from Katrina, the Bush Administration's records speak for themselves.In his book The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind wrote about the domestic surveillance program being carried out under USA Patriot Act: "Whether reasonable people agree or not with this particular course of action--and the expansion of presidential authority it entails--will be debated for years; maybe,even, for as long as the so-called 'war on terror' lasts. What is known and indisputable? As this machine searched the landscape, it swept up the suspicious, or simply the unfortunate, by the stadiumful and caught almost no one who was actually a danger to America."Suskind described The Cheney Doctrine thus: "Even if there 's just one a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response' This doctrine--the one percent solution--divided what had largely been indivisible in the conduct of American foreign poilicy: analysis and action. Justified or not, fact based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."Frank Rich's column in the New York Times exposes the continuing lies and deceptions.The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies By FRANK RICH Published: September 17, 2006The Bush administration is carpet-bombing America with still more fictions about Iraq. ...

Surgical Strike * Attempt to redefine Geneva Convention First, the good news. Despite a visit by President Bush to sell his proposed legislation to permit methods of interrogation and trial that contravene Geneva Convention, the Senate Armed Services Committee went against him. The Post reported : " A Senate committee rebuffed the personal entreaties of President Bush yesterday, rejecting his proposed strategies for interrogating and trying enemy combatants and approving alternative legislation that he has strenuously opposed." General Powell no longer commands the respect that he once had. Perhaps in an attempt to redeem himself, he spoke out against the president's proposal.The bipartisan vote sets up a legislative showdown on an issue that GOP strategists had hoped would unite their party and serve as a cudgel against Democrats in the Nov. 7 elections. Instead, Bush and congressional Republican leaders are at loggerheads with a dissident group led by Sen. John McCain (R), who says the president's approach would jeopardize the safety of U.S. troops and intelligence operatives.Despite heavy lobbying by Bush, who visited the Capitol yesterday, and Vice President Cheney, who was there Tuesday, McCain and his allies held fast. Even former secretary of state Colin L. Powell weighed in on McCain's side.Iran's Nuclear Program and the IAEASuper hawk Charles Krauthammer's column "The Tehran Calculus" calmly ponders surgical air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities while U.N. Inspectors question findings in a report issued by the House Intelligence Committee. "U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims." Same tactics were used by the Bush administration to prepare the nation for the war against Iraq. Charles KrauthammerIn his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: "It's very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."U.N. Inspectors Dispute Iran ReportOfficials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

The General BlinkedPakistan's President Pervez Musharraf (General Musharraf) meant well but proved to be no match for the Muslim clerics who opposed reform of the country's rape law under Hudood Ordinance promulgated in 1979. Based on Sharia (Islamic Law), Hudood requires women filing complaints for being raped to produce four (4) male witnesses. The Post: "The government gave in last week to a hardline Islamist alliance, the largest opposition bloc in the chamber, after it threatened to quit parliament if the laws, commonly known as the Hudood Ordinances, were changed." Not being conversant with Islamic scriptures I am unaware of what excactly is the justification for such a strange, archaic, and unjust law. What I find surprising is that the majority of the men and women in Pakistan seem to accept the situation without protest. Are they afraid or are they in agreement ? Almost beyond belief that a country that has the technical expertise to produce nuclear weapons can be so backward when it comes to women's rights. In Pakistan, the Mullahs rule. Christian Science MonitorPakistan to broaden rape laws, but women's groups see setbackA bill originally intended to repeal Pakistan's controversial rape laws is likely to suffer a severe setback this week, analysts say, when Parliament votes on a watered-down version designed to placate conservatives.Under the country's long-standing Hudood Ordinances, a woman who claims to have been raped must produce four Muslim male eyewitnesses to the crime - a virtual impossibility in most cases. If the witnesses cannot be produced, the rape victim herself can be charged with fornication, or adultery if she is already married, a crime punishable in the most stringent circumstances by death.This, and other provisions regarding public morality, have prompted calls from human rights activists and progressives for repeal of the Hudood Ordinances since their inception in 1979. The push for changing the laws gathered steam this summer after a private television channel initiated a series of debates on whether the laws are indeed rooted in the Koran and the Sunna (the sayings of Muhammad), as some religious conservatives contend.The government channeled the repeal momentum into a narrower effort focused on repealing the rape provisions. The Protection of Women bill was supposed to come to a vote on Monday. But the government has now postponed it until Wednesday because, it says, it wanted to consult with religious scholars who could ensure the bill honors the spirit of religious law.Progressives, rights activists, some members of the government had hoped that a vote on the Hudood Ordinances would place secular law over religious edicts. But after conservatives flexed their political muscle, the government has announced it will not touch the religious laws.Instead it has struck a compromise, one which many say reflects the tightrope it must tread: Rape will remain under the purview of Islamic law, but judges can also choose to use secular evidentiary procedures provided by Pakistan's penal code if the circumstances of evidence and witnesses call for it.Ruling party members say the amendment will constitute a step forward. "We are going to make it easier for [rapists] to be convicted," says Tarique Azim Khan, spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League, the ruling party.But many analysts and activists say the bill highlights the power of hard-line Islamists to strong-arm the government."It might be a step forward, but it's a step backward in the broader context of Pakistan," says Kamila Hyat, joint director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "Once again, it shows that the government caved into the pressure of extremists."This week's decision, which comes after months of political wrangling and protests, is one of the central skirmishes in a larger battle between secular and religious forces, a kind of barometer of Pakistan's commitment to progressive values, analysts say.Women's rights activists and progressives argue that rape should be placed under Pakistan's penal code, where standard criminal and evidentiary procedures apply. The Hudood requirements, they say, place the onus of proof on women, and are therefore inherently discriminatory.The new bill likely to be passed this week claims to put an end to this controversy: In the event that four witnesses cannot be found, a judge is empowered to use evidentiary standards of the penal code, such as DNA tests or other medical means, to establish rape.Mr. Khan, of the ruling party, calls it a major step forward. "A judge can decide that a woman's own testimony is good enough, without the need for four witnesses."Almost all analysts agree that, since finding four eyewitnesses to rape is practically impossible, most cases going forward will likely be tried under secular law.Nonetheless, hard-line Islamists insist that the witness rule must remain on the books so as to honor Islamic principles. "It is important because [the four-witness rule] is a God-given law, and no court can amend God-given laws," says Dr. Fareed Ahmed Paracha, a member of the National Assembly from Jamaat-Islami, one of the conservative parties working to uphold the Hudood laws.As part of the compromise reached this week, the government has ensured it will keep the witness rule on the books, as well as the strict punishments for adultery and fornication between unmarried persons codified in Hudood - currently 100 lashes or even death by stoning. Dr. Paracha says such punishments are rarely if ever administered, but must remain on the books as a deterrent.Such small victories symbolize the power conservative religious parties have to sidetrack political reform, analysts say. More than 60 hard-line politicians, who view the repeal of Hudood as blasphemy, have threatened for weeks to resign from the National Assembly, organizing street protests and rallies. Their mass exodus would have forced fresh elections for those seats, with no guarantee that conservative elements or the ruling party - the pillars of President Musharraf's constituency - would be voted back in."It clearly shows the lack of commitment," says Bushra Gohar, a women's rights activist in Islamabad. "The government is going to try to appease the extremists rather than looking to the rights of women."

Or "Gott Mit Uns""Gott Mit Uns (meaning God With Us) was a motto of the Prussian emperor; it was later used by German armies in World War I. During Hitler's reign, the traditional crest was replaced by the Nazi swastika and eagle, however the religious inscription remained unaltered. It is thought that part of the reason the Nazi government retained this motto was an attempt on the part of Hitler to retain the support of Christians, who comprised the overwhelming majority of German citizens." Source: WikipediaWhatever happened to the Second Coming ? I was under the impression that the president and his evangelical Christian followers were waiting for Armageddon and a quick trip to heaven, leaving the rest of us to face horrible deaths. Now he is into "Third Awakening". If speeches about threat of terrorism are no longer persuasive then trust him to throw in the standby 'good and evil' scenario. Peter Baker in the Post: "President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms."A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

Major Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, the first soldier on Iraq Coalition Casualties' list died on March 21, 2003. 21 year old Marine Corporal Jonathan Benson died on September 9, 2006 -- his name was 2669 on the list. The voodoo men spoke and resurrected ghosts of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. But even as they were speaking about successes in the war against terror, details of Col. Pete Devlin's report about Anbar Provice appeared in print in the Washington Post: "The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents." "Even dating is Perilous in Polarized Baghdad" Romance is not dead in Iraq but the sectarian violence has cast its shadow on mixed relationships.Situation Called Dire in West IraqOne Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."The "very pessimistic" statement, as one Marine officer called it, was dated Aug. 16 and sent to Washington shortly after that, and has been discussed across the Pentagon and elsewhere in national security circles. "I don't know if it is a shock wave, but it's made people uncomfortable," said a Defense Department official who has read the report. Like others interviewed about the report, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name because of the document's sensitivity.'Matters of the Heart'BAGHDAD -- He was a dashing young computer engineer. She was a shy student at his alma mater. They fell in love over lunch last year in the university cafeteria and promptly became engaged.As they prepared for a future together, the couple barely discussed a subject that, under Saddam Hussein's rule, amounted to a footnote in matters of the heart: He was a Shiite Muslim; she was a Sunni Kurd.But now those labels are tearing the couple apart. Barred by their families from marrying anyone of the opposite sect, the couple has erased one another's cellphone numbers and stopped speaking."There is no hope in this country anymore for Sunnis and Shiites to fall in love," said Husham al-Gizzy, a 25-year-old engineer, as he buried his face in his hands and recounted the story.

It is not just another day. 9/11 left permanent scars on us and our society. After the speeches and memorial services are over we will, at times, pause to think about where we were and what we were doing on that fateful morning five years ago. We will think of what took place and we will think of where we are today in terms of global terrorism. 2669 of our soldiers have died (25 of them during the first 10 days of this September) in the war in Iraq. What did they die for -- what has their deaths achieved ? See Mark Fiore's animated strip.Knowing what we do now, are we safe -- safer than we were in 2001? Has power been abused by our government in the name of war against terror? There are no simple answers. When it comes to abuse of power in the domestic front the worst example is the attack on Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights that has been carried out under the USA Patriot Act.The Fourth Amendment"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."Here are excerpts from articles that deserve atttention:Vanished Towers, Vanished LeadershipThe Washington PostFive years later, you look at the rancid state of our politics, the decline in America's standing in the world and the behavior of our national leadership, and you want to shed tears for your nation. This year, so much of what's being said about the events of Sept. 11 is about the political survival of the Bush administration."Washington PostBody Count in Baghdad Nearly TriplesMorgue's Revised Toll for August Undermines Claims by Leaders of Steep Drop in ViolenceBAGHDAD, Sept. 7 -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.BBCThe Changing Faces of TerrrorismThe oft-repeated statement 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' reflects genuine doubts about what constitutes 'terrorism'. Sir Adam Roberts surveys the ever-changing definition of terrorist activity, including mass murder of civilians exemplified by the events of September 11.Washington PostConfirmation of CIA Prisons leaves Europeans mistrustfulPARIS, President Bush's transfer of terrorism suspects out of secret CIA prisons to the Guantanamo detention facility would do little to repair transatlantic distrust that has grown in recent years, political analysts in France and other European countries said Thursday."How willing a really liberal Democrat is to listen to George Bush -- that's about how willing the French are," said Nicole Bacharan, an expert on French-American relations at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris.LOST LOVEby Hendrik Hertzberg, The New YorkerIssue of 2006-09-11After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001—five short years ago, five long years ago—a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust of the Twin Towers. The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the nation’s polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody shield.The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism. Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed sympathy. “Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional balancing act, have gone out of the window now,” a Swedish political scientist told Reuters. “There has not been the faintest shadow of doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in Sweden.” Le Monde’s front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera echoed, “We are all Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds.” In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO invoked, for the first time in the alliance’s fifty-two-year history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and pledging action, “including the use of armed force.”No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal divisions of American politics and society were bound to make themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough its consultations. But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize, as an assault on civilization itself.What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government, culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation of Iraq. This shouldn’t have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” one who recognized that government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his intention to “change the tone in Washington,” and advocated a foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush’s job ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point in their tenures. September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European left and some on the American), it is now almost universally supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden. But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.In “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked,” based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while “the first hints that the world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election of George W. Bush,” and that “whatever global goodwill the United States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have quickly dissipated,” after the Iraq invasion “favorable opinions had more than slipped. They had plummeted.” It’s grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most recent Pew findings show that “favorable opinions of the U.S.” have gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in 2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-two to thirty-nine in France. The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq war has made them less safe from terrorism.Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation.