Dog Days of War

The rain has returned to Seattle this week, the sky closing in now after an impossibly beautiful summer. It feels like the world is holding its collective breath, waiting for the next act of the drama to begin. I think I understand now what the summer of 1914 felt like, an unusually beautiful summer on the brink of a catastrophe that everyone sensed, but that nobody actually believed could really, truly be as bad as it turned out to be.

Pakistan, like New Orleans, realizes now that it is on its own. It has given up on the United States and pursued a separate peace, creating a safe enclave for a new and far more vicious Taliban to rebuild in Afghanistan. We have seen the face of this kind of force in the world before, in Cambodia. The new Taliban looks a lot like the old Khmer Rouge, extreme violence with an added twist of kamikaze tactics honed to perfection in Iraq.

Meanwhile, back in the other official Central Front, a sock puppet government futilely attempts to build a moat around a modern city of seven million people, abandoning huge tracts of the countryside to the tribal armies and criminal syndicates that always emerge to fill the vacuum when the state has collapsed. Our 140,000 boys and girls on the front lines appear to be doing little more than preventing a slow-motion Rwanda from quickening.

It really is remarkable when you think about it. The United States, with a quarter of the global economy and over half of the weapons on the planet, invades a country the size of Texas with an economy the size of Idaho, and loses. It takes a very special kind of incompetence to make that kind of humiliating defeat possible.

In the failed state of Lebanon, Hezbollah is proving to be more effective at helping citizens recover from disaster than the United States ever was in New Orleans, seizing power in the backwash of the toxic melange of colliding political fantasy that is Palestine and Israel. Palestine itself lurches towards collapse as a viable political or economic entity.

This - all of this - is the legacy of a spoiled trust fund baby, monster party animal, and failed businessman with a great Rolodex, a delusional Dominionist suddenly thrust into the spotlight of history without a clue or a care about how the real world actually works. Yet incredibly, even as the United States globalizes New Orleans with a vigor and energy previously reserved for big ideas that actually helped people, the big debate on tap for this week is exactly how to make it OK for a nation once universally admired for its firm commitment to human rights and the rule of law to secretly torture people at will. The idea that snatching and torturing people at will might never be a good idea is held to be...quaint. Anyone suggesting that snatching and torturing people at will is the sort of thing that we should discourage is clearly an Islamofascist, a lexically meaningless word in a truly creepy debate that recalls the tactics of totalitarian regimes everywhere:

Of course we believe in the rule of law. If you're a citizen. However, we've decided that you aren't a citizen. See, it says right here in this new law we just passed to protect the Homeland.

And underlying all of that is the inconvenient truth that this administration will do anything to stay in power. Anything. As they sense it all slipping away, it is unsettling to contemplate what it will take for the Bushistas to maintain control. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a wild ride.