Most of the media coverage this week seems to be glossing over the significant detail that the U.S. investment in Iraq, in terms of personnel and dollars, will continue.  Instead of uniformed troops from the military, we’ll have 15,000-16,000 people there in the form of other government employees and private contractors.  We’ll be spending almost $4 billion there in 2012.  These numbers are lower than what we’ve been investing, but they are not small numbers, and they still represent a significant commitment on the part of U.S. taxpayers, let alone on the part of the soldiers still on the ground.  We can’t afford to start thinking or talking as though our involvement in Iraq is through.

It also seems appropriate that when we talk about the human life lost in the course of the U.S. presence in Iraq, we avoid artificial exclusions based on nationality.  The story and cost of war is incomplete if you only recognize the count of killed and wounded on one “side” of any conflict.  As we consider this particular milestone, let us reflect on the totality of what has been sacrificed, taken or destroyed along the way.

Some will talk about the dangers of having weapons of various sorts and sizes available to individuals like Breivik and passionately implore for tighter controls and regulation of firearms or other weapon-making materials.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about when, where and why we create weapons designed to kill other human beings, and how we allow them to be used.

Some will talk about how this is a clear cut example that acts of terrorism are an ongoing threat and need to be safeguarded against using increased governmental or military power to fight terrorists and prevent attacks.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about whether current efforts to prevent acts of terrorism are effective, and what else could be done.

Some will speak of a lone madman who was mentally ill, and how we must find better ways to diagnose and treat mental illness of this sort before an individual’s darkness can turn into violence.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about how those among us who suffer from mental illness are treated and how they are helped.

But we must not forget that behind all of these interrelated paths to such awful acts of violence, there is a singular cause that no amount of weapons control, military might or psychological analysis can predict or prevent:

Somehow, this man was able to construct a worldview for himself in which it was permissible to murder other people because of their political views.

We might like to convince ourselves that creating or adopting such a worldview is not something that can happen to rational people.  But we know that our brains and our mental models of the world are pliable.   They can be shaped and reshaped easily, sometimes with almost trivial effort.  This is why television ads and billboards convince us every day to buy or do things we wouldn’t otherwise buy or do.  And we know that people from all backgrounds, all social classes, all levels of education and intellect can do awful, horrible, unthinkable things…if they just come to think about the state of the world in a way that necessitates those things.

In his long manifesto posted to the Internet, Breivik stated that “The time for dialogue is over.”  A simple and chilling statement, but one not too different from the sentiment expressed in social and political discourse happening every day in the US.

As the news media and 24-hour cable news machine tell urgent stories about seemingly great injustices in the world, thinking for us about how to delineate between what is clearly good and clearly evil without lingering too long on any facts or context, they enforce a worldview that suggests the time for dialogue is over.  (I’m looking at you, MSNBC and Fox News.)

As political parties create contrived and over-simplified arguments for why one candidate or another is essential to the future of the city, state or nation, and brush aside nuance or complexity in what effective governance might look like, they send the signal that the time for dialogue is over.

As religious and cultural institutions imply or suggest directly that because someone is of a certain gender, religious belief, sexual orientation or ethnicity that they are not fully worthy of some right or privilege that others are granted, and in fact may be inherently evil, they reinforce for their members or followers that the time for dialogue is over.

As communities trade away their public squares and opportunities for substantial conversation about the future of their neighborhoods in exchange for more opportunities for convenient shopping and individual instant gratification, we create places to live where the time for dialogue is over.

And when we no longer see any room for real dialogue, for meaningful, introspective, vulnerable, respectful exchanges about the way the world can and should work, we reinforce a worldview of “us vs. them” and begin to create that pretext for violence as the path to victory.  Maybe it’s not physical violence…maybe it’s economic violence or cultural violence.  Maybe it’s not a swift act of destruction, but a long slow whittling away of resources or dignity.   But when the time for dialogue is over, what’s left other than the leveraging of power and the exertion of force?

The acts of violence in Norway are to be condemned, the lives lost to be mourned.  But we must also recognize that this came about not because of a lack of gun control or not enough money spent on policing and anti-terrorism or a failure to stop a lone act of insanity.  They came about because our culture is creating and reinforcing a narrative about the future that allows for and even encourages exactly this kind of violence against each other.

Until we can imagine a new worldview that doesn’t end up at murder and oppression as a logical conclusion, that seeks to build shared understandings through genuine dialogue, and that values life over power and profit, we participate in creating a pretext for even more violence.

Unfortunately, most of the responses (and the ones favored by the Obama administration) are focused on paying insanely large amounts of money to private contractors to create and deploy complex technological solutions in hopes of addressing the threat.

What advocates of this approach fail to appreciate is that (A) most of the actual threat comes from uneducated human operators of the technology in question, and (B) deploying homogeneous, technologically complex solutions often makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Once you get past the flashy headlines and attention-grabbing introductory stories in these articles, meant to scare us into believing how real the threat is (basically, bloodthirsty hacker terrorists are trying to kill us all), each of them seems to come back to one of two recurring themes behind these threats.   Either a human being messed something up, or a piece of technology wasn’t secure enough and is now being exploited.

For the first case, it’s usually things like “so and so unknowingly downloaded a virus onto their USB flash drive and then plugged into a secure government network – things exploded!” or “an e-mail user clicked on a phishing scam link and had their password stolen.”  For the second case, it’s usually “Windows machines are insecure, and so they get taken over and absorbed into botnets, which can then wreak havoc through denial of service attacks” or “a security hole is found in a product made by a brand that everyone was supposed to trust, and so it’s running EVERYWHERE and OMG we’re all going to die.”

But in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at cyberwarfare defense we will most likely see only minimal resources devoted to end-user education and training to defend against social engineering, poor personal security practices, and the related actual vulnerabilities.  The funding will also not include programs to hold hardware and software vendors more accountable for selling more secure products and services to end users.  Instead, it will go toward funding secret surveillance and the further shifting control of the Internet into military hands.

With this approach, in the end we’ll be back to where we are right now.  End-users will continue the insecure personal practices that lead to security breaches, and the continued homogenization of hardware and software will amplify the potential impact of every security hole discovered.   This is not helpful.

It’s certainly too little too late for someone who was often the public face of a government that we now know was actively misleading its own citizens about Iraq, wielding its power to practice malicious (not to mention illegal) personal attacks and then covering them up. If you believe in the power of the press and public opinion to help shape U.S. policies (or to at least hold the government accountable for its actions), and if you know how much the press regurgitated White House statements without critical evaluation or follow up in the last seven years, then you might say that Mr. McClellan is fairly directly responsible for a lot of unnecessary death in the world.

Even with the disgust and distaste in my mouth, I still appreciated reading his account of his years with George W. Bush, and his take on the problematic culture of “permanent campaigning” in Washington, and it reminded me of an important point: the federal government is just made up of individual people who are flawed, stubborn, vulnerable, scared, and fragile in the same kinds of ways all the rest of us are. (Unfortunately, as McClellan makes all too real in his account, when those personal flaws translate into the flawed foreign policy of a world superpower, or into the poor representation of a citizenry’s actual needs and desires, the impact is at a whole new level of tragedy.)

McClellan writes more in the style of a college expository essay than a personal narrative, using “As I have shown in this book…” or “As I explained in Chapter such and such…” throughout. I was worried when I saw a few of the glossy pages in the center of the book with photos containing images from his childhood that he would (as some other tell-all writers have done) spend the first third of the 323 pages taking us on a tour of his upbringing, trying to connect statements he made as Press Secretary to the time when his uncle wouldn’t let him have a candy bar he wanted, etc. But mercifully, he minimizes that kind of narrative and gets straight to the point of the book as it’s been pitched: an insider’s take on how the Bush White House does business.

There are few moments of stunning insight or reflection, but the book still manages to be shocking and noteworthy in the sense that it confirms what Bush administration critics have felt for many years: this is a Presidential administration that sets its own goals based on ideological self-confidence, and then make the facts and intelligence and talking points and various departments of the Executive Branch all fall in line behind those goals. It ignores public outcry, mass demonstrations, and personal appeals, and punishes those who are anything but 100% loyal and on message. It “stays the course” even when all other conventional wisdom and practical advice says otherwise. And it does all of this through the manipulative and agenda-driven personalities of a few individuals at the heart of the administration.

I suppose that the one area where I was surprised was in McClellan’s own seemingly authentic contrition about his actions. He clearly knows the tradecraft of spin well enough that he could have manipulated the story into a narrative where he had no blame to share, or even where every actor involved was trying to do the right thing but the pressures and constraints of governing just didn’t go as well as it could. But instead McClellan doesn’t hesitate to say that he should have been paying better attention, he should have been more assertive, he shouldn’t have believed some assurances he was given, he shouldn’t have said the things he did. He also isn’t afraid to point his finger at individuals within the administration and say “this person clearly didn’t live up to the standards of their office” He stops short of personal attacks, but only because he seems conflicted about his relationships. For example, he vacillates back and forth between admiration of George W. Bush’s personality and ideals, and sharing a candid disapproval of Bush’s approach to being President and the significant personal flaws that this represents.

McClellan makes a few suggestions for how the Presidency could be repaired, and how George W. Bush should make amends with the American people. He even writes out a statement that the President could make about what happened in Iraq in the name of healing the country’s deep divides:

An honest statement of the facts would have served Bush better — something like, “We now know that Saddam was a less serious threat than we believed…What is important now is that we continue to work together on a consensus way forward to a successful outcome – one we can all agree on. That is how we, here at home, will best serve our troops fighting abroad and honor the sacrifices that so many of them have made and are making.”

Of course this is a tad idealistic, since if the President and his advisers really valued a consensus process, political unity and solutions that serve all of us, many other things would be different too.

McClellan goes on to say that in order to move away from the permanent campaign mentality – where tactics used in trying to get elected are wrongly employed as a part of governance – new staff positions need to be created that separate politics from policy. In the context of the administrative structure we already have these ideas might be worth a try, but in the context of creating a governmental structure that serves the American people as best as possible, it’s hard to imagine that a “Deputy Chief of Staff for Governing” and a few new support staff are going to fix the severely broken system in place now.

In the end, McClellan is clearly just another player in a bureaucratic and political nightmare that still continues to this day, and unless his book helps us to wake up from it, I’m not sure it has much to offer now beyond satisfying some morbid curiosity about the internal workings of the Bush Administration. But as someone who was tasked with the unique role of translating the White House’s untenable positions into statements that the press could try to take back to the American people, to have McClellan admit several times that he was passing along lies and disinformation is still a big deal. In that sense, What Happened is at least one small act of penance in a Presidency that has so much to be sorry for.

Huh?

Oh yeah, universal health care was one of the things I bought on my $3 Trillion Shopping Spree. I did it at the website 3trillion.org, which asks the question: “The occupation of Iraq will cost $3 trillion…can YOU spend that money better?” It’s an interesting exercise, and a great way to put the costs of the U.S. presence in Iraq into perspective.

Here is the full list of purchases I put in my cart:

• Universal healthcare for all Americans
  Price: $920,100,000,000.00
• Apple, Inc.
  Price: $24,000,000,000.00
• Microsoft Corp.
  Price: $262,260,000,000.00
• Google
  Price: $2,499,750,000.00
• Become President of the U.S.
  Price: $1,000,000,000.00
• No Kill Animal Shelters World Wide
  Price: $7,000,000,000.00
• Sustainable Agriculture Education, Worldwide
  Price: $200,000,000.00
• End our Dependence on Foreign Oil
  Price: $500,000,000,000.00
• 1000 Teachers’ Salaries
  Price: $39,274,000.00
• Build a National High-Speed Rail System
  Price: $300,000,000,000.00
• The Office: Season 1
  Price: $11.00

Gosh, and I still have a $1 Trillion left over, but I got a little depressed and had to stop. Spending $3 Trillion is hard! Unless you’re a certain global superpower.

What would you buy?

1. The price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in the U.S. will hit $6 a gallon sometime this Summer, and perhaps $10/gallon or more by the end of the year. Measures will be taken by the federal and state governments to temporarily alleviate the financial burden on some people, but nothing sustainable. Some people will not be able to get to work at all, while others will have to carpool more, take the bus, ride their bikes, and walk.
2. The U.S. will initiate military action against Iran, probably in the form of heavy air-strikes. There will be no clear notion of victory or desired outcome other than to significantly destroy the country’s own infrastructure, especially targets related to nuclear facilities. This action might be justified to the American people by…
3. An apparent attack on one or more U.S. locations, resulting in significant loss of life or infrastructure.
4. The U.S. airline industry will significantly cut back or even cease flight schedules as we’ve known them, and air travel will (once again) become a privilege reserved for the rich and famous who can afford private flights. Any frequent flier miles you’ve accumulated will become worth near nothing.
5. Most grocery stores will significantly scale back their inventories and restocking schedules, and significantly raise prices on what remains. Obtaining food from non-local sources, even basic staples, will be difficult at best, and most communities will begin to take emergency steps to feed their residents.

Hey, look, I don’t like the thought of these things happening any more than the next person, but perhaps there’s some value in naming what might be, even if it seems a bit outlandish or gruesome. Maybe if we believe these things are possible, we might feel more prepared to prevent or deal with them if they do happen.

What do you think? Too cynical? Worse? What are some other scenarios?

No End In Sight is pitched as an insider’s tale of the reckless decision-making and subsequent incompetence that has propelled the invasion and occupation of Iraq forward from the planning stages to the present day, and it satisfies that characterization quite well. I was impressed with the broad scope (in rank, affiliation and political persuasion alike) of the subjects that writer/director Charles Ferguson was able to secure for the film – everyone from former State Department leader Richard Armitage to soldiers and diplomats who had been on the ground in Iraq carrying out the haphazard instructions from afar. What’s more, they seemed unusually candid and authentic, almost humbled by the chance to reflect – saying out loud how badly things were done, clearly second guessing themselves and their decision-making process they engaged in, barely containing their frustration at the conflicts and politicking within the Bush administration that prevented any real meaningful collaboration or planning to take place. It was amazing to hear from some of the people who were ostensibly planning for life in Iraq after the invasion, and all the roadblocks and impossible tasks they encountered. It reminded me somewhat of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, with the same kinds of long, uncomfortable pauses as people who were directly responsible for life and death decisions came to grips with their place in history.

Beyond the interviews, the film is a great chronology of the invasion and occupation as a whole. With the inattentive and lopsided media coverage the many-hundred-billion dollar adventure gets, it’s all too easy to forget that it’s been going on for more than 4 years and that so many different milestones of presidential, congressional, and national identity (many of them unfortunate) have been reached along the way. But despite the moving stories of discontent from U.S. soldiers and the wrangling of egos and power agendas in the U.S., this is about huge losses of life, total destruction of communities, cities, cultures, livelihoods, and a profound sense of injustice, all sustained by the Iraqi people at the hands of our country’s military/industrial complex. The collection of footage often never shown in mainstream media for its heartbreaking implications is in itself a story of unacceptable disconnection from this tragedy.

One of the soldiers interviewed for the film, Field Artillery Gunner Hugo Gonzales, talked about how his life now was preoccupied by trying to find some meaning in the occupation there, especially given his debilitating injuries and near-constant pain. I felt such sadness for him and his fellow soldiers, knowing they have in most cases done what they believe is right and necessary, and that some of them are now feeling pangs of doubt (if not plain outrage) about the nature and origins of their mission. As I walked out of No End in Sight, it was clear to me that any universally useful meaning will probably only come years from now, when the machinations of national and cultural self-consciousness will finally lead to some wider-spread sense that the whole ordeal was a catastrophic mistake. But until then, the movie gives us as much perspective as might be possible while the battles continue and more lives are needlessly lost.

While President George W. Bush would not be interviewed for the movie, other interviewers have asked him and his advisers about the logic and decision-making process that governed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and most often the response is to brush off the mistakes of the past, saying that dwelling on them doesn’t really serve a useful purpose, and to talk about what needs to happen to move forward (hey, that sounds familiar!). While I understand this perspective, I think it is horribly flawed.

And so I really appreciate that in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore took the time to look deeply at the thought processes, public and private conversations, and general approach to decision making that has dominated the Bush administration’s tenure, not the least outcome of which was the mess in Iraq. Gore starts with the psychology of fear and takes us on a whirlwind tour of how it is used to subvert our appreciation of reason, even to the point where the decisions we make are not in our own self-interest. He looks at the language and framing used by modern politicians (certainly with a critical focus pointed right at conservatives) and how every pressing issue of the day — from climate change to foreign policy to immigration to Katrina to the economy — are being poorly addressed or not addressed at all because of the paralysis of the nation due to these tactics. The sad part of his thesis is that, for those who are assaulting reason, it’s all about power:

Throughout history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all too frequently with some malignant dogma, masquerading as a message from God, to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression in the repertoire of hell. Moreover, this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power. –p. 48

Like some interviewees in No End In Sight, Gore effectively lambastes the Bush administration for its approach to Iraq, but does so in the context of the notion that the Iraq invasion was a distraction from the search for Osama bin Laden and those who attacked the U.S. on 9-11. He returns to the amazing phenomenon where some high percentage of U.S. citizens surveyed incorrectly believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with those attacks, and the rhetoric and carefully planned talking points of the neocon planners that facilitated that trend. In other words, because of the way reason has been assaulted and the truth twisted, lots of people died.

Gore is optimistic about possibilities for improvement and solutions to the phenomenon he lays out, but I’m not sure I can agree with the specific paths he sees to resolution. His primary conclusion is that if Americans can reclaim the practice of meaningful public debate about the issues that face us, we can once again be a nation governed by reason and true democracy. Specifically, Gore sees the promise of the Internet as the key vehicle to that reclaiming, and goes on to promote some of his own efforts with Current TV to that effect.

…the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. –p. 260

It sounds really good, but as George Lakoff and others have identified, pinning our hopes for the resurrection of a nation driven by progressive values on the notion that everyone just needs to be more reasonable is NOT a strategy for success. The reality is that people will let their understanding of the world and their short-term preferences override any deep comprehension of what might be reasonable or right; even, as I mentioned above, when they are making decisions that conflict with their own self-interest. I’ve experienced that often here in my home town, where some of my attempts to engage those with opposing viewpoints using the tools of logic and reason results only in further misunderstanding, animosity, and even outright resentment at the attempt. I’ve come to understand this as something I can’t really completely blame on the people I’m engaging – if I can’t interact with them in a way that is meaningful and useful to both of us, then that’s partly my fault, too.

Still, Gore’s clarity of vision is worth hearing out, even if it isn’t a comprehensive one. As with soldier Gonzales` attempt to find meaning in the events of the past four years, Gore does manage to make a lot of sense of how we got where we are in a fear-based national identity, and I consider The Assault on Reason to be an essential contribution to the discussion about what we want for ourselves from here on out.

1. There must be a really good reason: “force may be used only to correct a grave public evil…a massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations”
2. The injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other
3. Only the proper authorities may wage war
4. Force must only be used in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose – correcting a suffered wrong is okay, but doing it for money or material possessions is not.
5. You have to have a good chance of succeeding – you can’t go to war if it’s futile
6. The force used must be proportional to the good trying to be achieved. (I remember my pastors metaphor here made it into my own speech: you shouldn’t kill a fly with a sledgehammer!)
7. War must only be waged as a last resort

Who wouldn’t be convinced by these? If all of those criteria are met, how can war not be justified, inevitable if abhorrent?

Perhaps as we leave the eighth grade and move on to more nuanced views of the world, we know that it may not be that simple. I have certainly come to learn that just war theory is presented within a particular moral framework that isn’t really my moral framework. But I certainly appreciated at the time that it was consistent within the framework it lived in, true to itself, and it was something you could hold onto when the horrors of what it means to be at war did have such a fogging effect on any thinking about the matter. I appreciated that if you’re going to go kill someone, or ask someone else to kill someone, you damn better well have thought it through at that level and gotten yourself crystal clear on what your reasoning and values say about why you would be a part of that act.

This is partly why it is so scary to me that U.S. troops in the Middle East are now receiving values training three years into this particular war. When requests like “don’t desecrate the dead” and “don’t cause unnecessary suffering” need to be put up in a Powerpoint presentation and read aloud to make sure everyone’s “got it,” I feel ill.

Of course, on one hand, it makes perfect sense, given that the war in Iraq, and perhaps any war waged, requires contemplation of what are probably unresolvable conflicts in moral and emotional principles. Of course there will be stories of troops killing innocent civilians. Of course there will be torture in prisons. Of course there will be horrible acts brought on by asking men and women to figure those questions out in the heat of the moment. How can we ask someone to reconcile the inherent mission of our troops – apply the use of deadly force to coerce people into behaving a certain way – with the conflicting values that are ostensibly behind that mission – respect for life, pursuit of freedom and democracy, instilling peace and justice, creating a better world for all?

I don’t think the U.S. military wants its soldiers pondering those questions in the field. I don’t think it can afford to have each person contemplating those moral judgments along the way. I don’t think it can afford to have real values training, because this is where war – from my perspective, anyway – ceases to have any integrity or consistency within its own moral framework. The justifications for war at a high level may work just fine, but when you drill down to what’s happening out in the field – human beings hurting and killing each other because they’re told to – there is no integrity, there is no moral code that one can follow to justify it. As Albert Einstein said, “A country cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

For what it’s worth, I don’t make a judgment on those who are compelled to exhibit that lack of integrity in a war setting. I believe they are responsible to themselves for their own actions, and maybe they can be acting with integrity and morality within their understanding of their own worldview, even if they aren’t in mine. But if they’ve gotten that far down the path of war, they’re already working within a moral and cultural framework that doesn’t offer them any good options, at least in the context of creating peace, justice and a sustainable human existence.

Or, as I wish I could go back and say to my eighth grade class, there are plenty of ways to justify modern warfare, and a lot of them sound pretty good, but I don’t think any of them work for humanity.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” –Ernest Hemingway

Note: This is a topic that I’m fairly certain the few folks who do read this blog may have some opinions about, and I’d really like to hear them. Please post your thoughts, even if anonymously; I’m done with the eighth grade, but I’m sure I still have more to learn and other points of view to consider.

What he does cover is an astonishing amount of detail from seemingly every major conversation amongst the key players in taking the U.S. to war against Iraq. From President Bush to his top advisors to his cabinet to their subordinates, and from the top levels of the CIA down to the special ops agents working covertly in Iraq well before the war started. Frankly, the book reads like a Tom Clancy novel, and it’s sort of simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating that real life has come to imitate that particular genre so closely. The account isn’t just about the action and it tends not to glorify war or violence, though it does end up giving a fairly dramatic glimpse into issues of war machinery, troop deployment, military strategy, etc. and does so without pausing too long to reflect on the death that comes with them. But Woodward also lingers significantly on the words that were used by the key players, the thoughts on their minds, the happenings in their lives that affect their decisions. He wants us to be a “fly on the wall” to witness the simple utterances that trigger billions of dollars being spent, hundreds of thousands of lives being affected, and major events that will shape politics and international relations for years to come.

Though I sneered above that many of these kinds of books are just consolidations of newspaper articles, interviews, and personal recollections, this is a case where the consolidation is the heart of the story. To see all of the statements that were made, internally and publicly, about Iraq, Saddam, war, and U.S. and international foreign policy, and to weigh them not only chronologically, but in the context of the impact they had years down the road, is amazing. There were plenty of jaw-dropping moments where I couldn’t really believe it was admitted that someone said said what they did, but more interesting (and often disturbing) was the smooth and steady manipulation by these folks of the press, the public, and each other to achieve their agendas. Perhaps it has just become accepted as the norm and I am naive, but I was consistently surprised by the amount of deception by the administration about how early it had been committed to a plan for war in Iraq, despite its public statements about commitment to diplomacy. This is probably one of the most important themes that the book documents: Bush & Co. advertised two possible paths in its interactions with Iraq, but they only ever walked seriously down one of them. And so many could read Woodward’s account as a definitive illustration that we went to war for war’s sake, a horrifying thought in itself.

I was going to say that I found the book lacked attention to the role that public protest played in the lead up to the war, but then I realized that the book perfectly reflects the impact of the protests on the plans for attack: almost none at all. Despite the massive and unprecedented international mobilization of those who opposed invading Iraq, the heads of state with the decision making power essentially ignored and avoided their pleas. When the protests came to their doorsteps, they gave vague or nonsensical responses, left town, and scheduled summits on remote islands. This point stuck with me throughout: the people making and enforcing the policies of our countries can take us to war without pausing for one moment to consider the opposing viewpoints of some major chunk of the population. Unless someone is “in the room” with the key players advocating those opposing viewpoints, they are essentially background noise. As Woodward recounted Bush saying to Blair, “We lead our publics. We cannot follow our publics” (p. 296).

Ever rising since his Watergate-exposing fame of the Nixon era, Bob Woodward is one of those self-propagating phenomena in a world where the message coming out of DC institutions is controlled so tightly and only a chosen few are trusted to have a few moments alone with the “people who matter.” Woodward’s popularity has led to credibility, and credibility gets him in the door, and he cashes that back out into more popularity. In this case it got him hours of interviews with President Bush, and the trust of more than 70 sources, some apparently deep in the administration with access to (and a willingness to share details of) very classified information.

One has to wonder what that kind of deep penetration does to any sense of inner turmoil about how he portrays those he writes about. In Plan of Attack, there was certainly little overt favoritism (other than a recurring expansion on Colin Powell’s personal struggles in particular) and I credit Woodward for weaving together the thoughts and recollections of so many players into something that wasn’t completely lacking a consistent voice. But in finding this balance, he may have glossed over some of the abstract qualities and values of those players that often had as much to do with U.S. military action in Iraq as their words or stated policies. He mostly leaves it up to the reader to decide, which is probably preferable given the contentious nature of the topics he covers.

But if I got to sit down with Woodward himself, I wouldn’t be able to resist asking him for his own conclusions: did these people really believe they were doing the right thing for the U.S., Iraq, and the world, or were they blinded by politics, ambition, and bureaucracy, and propelled by a decision-making process that had no room for peaceful resolution? Plan of Attack is a great read, but leaves one shaking ones head at the complexity of our world, the people ostensibly running it, and how we don’t find ourselves in even worse shape when the Plans are formulated as they are.

2) Ah yes, let’s look at “Global.” When it was the War on Terror, it was being headed up by the countries that had declared that War, namely the U.S. and the U.K. This meant that other participating bodies could largely avoid declaring War and the average citizen in any given country, being unable to declare War, had to leave the heavy lifting to political entities that can. Now that it’s a Global Struggle, all of us have a responsibility, a duty even, to participate. It no longer observes any political boundaries, and its success or failure is no longer solely under the control of any one nation. The U.S. is doing its part in the Global Struggle, yes, but how can the U.S. alone be expected to carry the burden that all of us should now share? Who isn’t doing *their* part in the Global Struggle!?

3) Fighting terror was a pretty hard conceptual sell from the beginning. How do you show evidence of terror until it happens? Isn’t terror the thing that is created in the victims of a terrorist’s crime? This means that you couldn’t really identify a target as a primary one in the “War on Terror” until that person/entity had created terror. As in, after the deed has been done. Now that we’re Struggling against Extremism, the administration can start to focus more effort on the deeds of suspected targets well before any harm is done. The downside, of course, is that the notion of extremism is much more open to interpretation the standard of proof for extremism is much more in the eye of the beholder than terrorism. Extreme about what? Religious beliefs? Economic models? Home decor and personal hygiene? Certainly, there are some acts that a reasonable majority of the world’s population can agree are “extreme,” but it’s the gray areas that might get us in trouble. And whereas before many Americans might have a hard time believing that a terrorist is anyone other than a middle-Eastern-looking man who has come from far away to create havoc and death, many more of us will be able to think as some of their fellow citizens as extremists, suspects in our own back yards.

I give the administration credit for recognizing, through its phrasing, at least, that current and future efforts against the problem of terrorism must go beyond traditional concepts of war or even the use of physical force at all. But I’m also concerned that they’re trying make us all look the other way when it comes to the culpability of administration officials, policy, and decision-making in getting us to where we are now.

These kinds of changes aren’t done lightly by this White House; it starts with an internal political or policy goal, then slight tweaks in the public language being used, then it becomes partisan talking points, then it becomes a legislative agenda, then it becomes a part of our everyday lives.