“Sharon wants to destroy the peace process and the Palestinian people as a political entity,” Taamallah says. “There is no limit to what Sharon can do because he got the green light from the States.”

In much of Israel and Palestine, Wednesday’s meeting between Bush and Sharon, scheduled to broadcast during prime time here, is seen as a huge, possibly career-saving victory for Sharon and a debilitating blow to liberals on both sides of the Green Line, the border that separated Israel and Palestine before the 1967 war. Despite what Bush said, few here see Sharon’s proposal to pull out of Gaza while solidifying control of much of the West Bank as being consistent with the “road map,” the peace plan supported by the United States and the other three members of the so-called Quartet (Russia, the European Union and the U.N.), which requires that Israel stop settlement building and the Palestinians stop terror attacks as part of a process leading to the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. Instead, it’s seen as the death notice of Bush’s stillborn proposal and the beginning of a new stage in Israeli politics in which Israel, rather than negotiating a settlement with the Palestinians, negotiates one with America.

By overturning the decades-old official U.S. position that the dispute over borders and refugees had to be resolved by direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, Bush in effect conceded huge areas to the Israelis in advance of those negotiations. It’s true that in any peace deal, some large Israeli settlements were likely to be folded into Israel proper — with the Palestinians being given compensatory land — and true as well that no wholesale right of return was likely to be acceptable to the Jewish state. But by prejudging these issues, Bush fundamentally shifted the entire dynamic of the process — and, many here believe, killed it altogether.

Palestinian moderates who had urged concessions have been rendered irrelevant. The last embers of Palestinian faith in a Bush-brokered two-state solution have been snuffed out. And Israeli opponents of the occupation have been cut out of the debate inside their country.

Sharon isn’t the only winner, though. “Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been very much strengthened,” says Daniel Levy, a Middle East analyst at the International Crisis Group and co-drafter of the Geneva Accord, an unofficial peace initiative put forward by liberal Israelis and Palestinians, including several key participants in the Camp David and Taba peace talks and two of Israel’s most famous writers, Amos Oz and David Grossman. “The whole unilateral thing strengthens them. The guys who have spent 10 years sitting with Israelis, negotiating, are humiliated.”

It’s not that anyone to Sharon’s left disagrees with leaving Gaza — it’s what he’s demanding in return that troubles them. “Israel should never have built settlements in the Gaza Strip in the first place, so dismantling the settlements is a positive step,” says Adam Keller, spokesman for Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group that advocates Israel withdrawing to its 1967 borders. The problem is that Sharon “is sacrificing the Gaza Strip in order to better control the West Bank. He’s like a chess player who sacrifices a knight to save the queen.”

Sharon’s huge victory is just the latest in a long career in which he has come back from the political graveyard again and again. (The most dramatic was his rehabilitation from findings by an Israeli commission of inquiry that he was culpable in the notorious massacre, by Israel’s Lebanese Phalange allies, of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon, who was the driving force behind Israel’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Lebanon, was dismissed as defense minister.) This time, Sharon has been facing indictment on corruption charges that could force him to step down. Israeli liberals, meanwhile, had seized the initiative on creating a workable settlement.

Last October Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo Peace Process, and former Palestinian cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo introduced the Geneva Accord, which both sides presented as a workable plan for a final settlement between Israel and Palestine. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, “At the heart of the proposal is a Palestinian concession on the right of return to lands within the State of Israel” — a nearly sacrosanct issue for many Palestinians, who’ve long dreamed of return to the homes they lost when the Jewish state was created — “in exchange for sovereignty over the Temple Mount. The plan also calls for an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip.” The plan does not differ substantially from the last official peace proposal on the table at Taba in 2001, which Ariel Sharon, who was elected prime minister on an anti-Oslo platform, broke off upon taking office.

Considering the dramatically worsened political climate in both Israel and the occupied territories since the end of the Taba talks and the new intifada, the Geneva Accord stood little chance of being implemented in the short term, but for a while it dominated the debate over Israel and Palestine. “When Geneva came along, it made such a big storm that even those who disagreed had to respond,” says Levy, who is an advisor to Beilin.

Many current and former leaders worldwide endorsed Beilin and Rabbos’ proposal, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, former President Bill Clinton and former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev. Blair sent Lord Michael Levy — Daniel Levy’s father — to represent him at the Geneva Accord signing ceremony in Switzerland on Dec. 1, and released a statement saying, “I hope that this initiative will also show that Israelis and Palestinians remain capable of finding partners for peace and working together, and encourage a return to the negotiating table.”

Sharon was apoplectic. The core of his approach to the conflict has always been the conviction — or strategic position — that there is no one on the Palestinian side to negotiate with, and the sudden appearance of credible Palestinian peace partners threatened that position. So he came forward with his own plan — unilateral disengagement. He called for pulling out of Gaza entirely, evacuating the 7,500 Israeli settlers who live in 21 heavily armed settlements among more than a million impoverished Palestinians. He also said he would evacuate four of the 140 settlements in the West Bank while consolidating control over other, larger ones. The majority of Israel’s approximately 400,000 settlers — 230,000 of them — live in the West Bank. (Another 160,000 live in East Jerusalem.) Many of the settlements are being embraced by the security fence — in many places, more properly described as a security wall — that Israel is building on Palestinian land.

“In any future final status arrangement, there will be no Israeli settlement activity in the Gaza Strip,” says a letter about the plan that Sharon faxed to Likud members on Thursday. “On the other hand, it is clear that there will be areas in Judea and Samaria that will be part of the State of Israel, and there will be civilian communities, security zones and other places in which Israel has further interest inside those areas.”

Despite Sharon’s promise to retain parts of “Judea and Samaria,” Jewish biblical names for the West Bank, his plan to withdraw from Gaza faces opposition by some right-wing factions in Israel, who accuse Sharon of caving in to terrorism and sacrificing land that God has deeded to the Jewish people.

Seeking to demonstrate support for his plan, Sharon called a May 2 referendum of 200,000 Likud members, whose vote will decide the future of the pullout. One result of this has been to render everyone to the left of Sharon even more irrelevant than they have been for the last three and a half years, when the collapse of peace talks and the Al-Aqsa intifada pushed them to the margins of Israeli society. “As far as the Israeli media is concerned, all the debate is taking place on the right,” says Levy. “It’s as if America’s Iraq policy was being decided by a referendum within the Republican Party.”

Before the vote, though, Sharon needed to offer his party assurances that if it gave up Gaza, the United States would support Israel’s claim to the West Bank, something no American president has ever done. The plan, then, could only work with Bush’s endorsement, which Sharon hoped to get both during a joint press conference and in the official letters that the two leaders exchanged. The day before Sharon met with Bush, David Sharan, a Likud activist and aide to conservative Knesset member Yuval Shteinitz, said, “I think 30 percent [of the party] are with Sharon, 30 are against and the rest are in the middle. They didn’t make their mind up yet. Everybody is waiting for him to come back from the United States and then they’ll see.”

Some were expecting Sharon to come home disappointed, reasoning that, confronting a dangerous insurgency in Iraq, Bush would scarcely want to further antagonize the Arab world. Others, though, figured that the mess in Iraq would make a weakened Bush desperate to point to some kind of achievement, however temporary, in the Middle East and unwilling to exert any pressure on Sharon. Bush relies on Christian evangelicals, who staunchly support Israel and make up his electoral base, and is unwilling to pay the political price of challenging Sharon (total support for Israel may be the only issue upon which there is virtually complete unanimity in the U.S. Congress). The day before Bush’s meeting with Sharon, an editorial in Israel’s most prestigious (and liberal) newspaper, Haaretz, said, “Sharon wishes to take this opportunity, on the eve of the American presidential elections, when the president is in political distress because of the military entanglement in Iraq, to harness the administration to the political move he is leading.”

By Wednesday night, it was clear that Sharon had gotten everything he could have hoped for from Bush. “Bush went farther than most expected in supporting the plan, saying in clearer terms than any U.S. president has publicly used that the U.S. does not expect Israel to withdraw to the Green Line nor take in Palestinian refugees,” said an analysis in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post.

Bush also promised Sharon that the U.S. “would do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan,” a reference to both the Geneva Accord and to a similar 2002 peace initiative put forward by Saudi Arabia.

But Bush’s biggest gift to Sharon may be a possible way out of the corruption indictment that the Israeli prime minister is facing.

The Sharon scandal — pushed from the news in Israel by stories about his triumphant meeting with Bush — stems from his position as Israel’s foreign minister in the 1990s, when he allegedly intervened to help Israeli businessman David Appel secure land development deals in Greece. In return, Appel is said to have funneled money to the Sharon family by hiring Sharon’s son, Gilad, as a consultant on a tourism development project — a field in which Gilad had no experience. Appel was indicted in January, accused of trying to pay more than $2.6 million in bribes to Sharon and Gilad.

Prosecutor Edna Arbel recommended that Sharon be charged as well. The final decision about whether to indict Sharon is left to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz.

Mazuz is more liberal than Sharon, though, and many observers believe he won’t want to be the one to stand in the way of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. “The chance of pulling out, especially if the plan is endorsed by President Bush, it would put tremendous pressure on this one single person, the attorney general who has to make a decision,” says the liberal Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev. “He would be forcing out of office a man who is just about to change the course of history. A chance to reduce tension, to reduce terrorism. It’s a tremendous responsibility.”

Segev, who supports the Gaza pullout even though he opposes Sharon’s hard line on the West Bank, sees the pullout plan as a last-ditch maneuver by Sharon to avoid Nixonian ignominy. “Interestingly enough, he won’t find himself on trial for any war crimes but for corruption charges. It’s ironic that he might end up as a simple crook, similar to Richard Nixon.”

While Bush strengthened Sharon’s position, the moderate Palestinian leadership was badly wounded. Levy says that there are “Palestinian leaders that are eminently dealable-with,” but that Sharon has “cut them off at the knees.”

He points to Abu Mazen, the moderate Palestinian prime minister who resigned last September after a power struggle with Yasser Arafat. “Abu Mazen came along and said, OK, I’ll play the game, and he got shattered,” says Levy. “Imagine if Sharon had said to him, ‘For the first three months, this is what I expect of you. Then, in month four, I’m going to announce that as a result of our meetings, I’m going to evacuate Gaza.’” The liberal, negotiation approach would have been strengthened enormously among Palestinians, Levy says.

Now, those Palestinians who were willing to make concessions to Israel are under attack. “They’re going to say, ‘You’re the ones who paved the way for this letter!’” Levy says. “Americans and Israelis have taken your concessions, pocketed them and given us nothing.”

Indeed, no sooner had Levy said that than the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Palestine’s Refugees, a group representing refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, released a statement attacking the authors of the Geneva Accord. “Bush would never have taken this step, had he not known that the Palestinian arena is filled with initiatives and ideas to repeal the right of return,” the statement said. According to Haaretz, one of the authors of the statement demanded that Palestinians “boycott persons involved in the peace initiatives, until they retract their remarks.”

Reached in Gaza, Jamal Zakut, co-author of Geneva and deputy to Abed Rabbo, was both furious and despairing. “I think that by disengagement and unilateralism, Sharon is empowering radicalism in Palestine,” said Zakut. “He’s deepening the idea that there is no hope of a real peace process, there is no hope of negotiation. What happened yesterday was very clear. It was the replacing of the road map with the Sharon map. It was an American failure.”

Speaking in Ramallah, Hani Al-Masri, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of information, was more fatalistic. The road map, he said, “was born dead. Yesterday they just put it into the fire.”

Meanwhile, there is no political solution in sight for those Palestinians whose land is being annexed by the security wall. In Masha village, the wall cuts Hani Amer’s house off from both his land and his village, looping around to completely surround the small home where he and his wife live with their six children. On one side are newly erected concrete slabs reaching around 30 feet into the air. On another is the gate to a military road erected to service the wall, on the third is the double row of fencing protecting a neighboring settlement, and on the fourth is a locked gate with a sign reading, “Mortal Danger — Military Zone. Any Person Who Passes or Damages the Fence Endangers His Life.”

The Israeli army gave the family a key to the gate that surrounds them, but they’re not allowed to have visitors. “We are like prisoners,” says Monira Amer, Hani’s wife. “The view of the wall is disgusting.”

From the roof, though, there’s a prettier view, of a settlement that’s only a stone’s throw away (and many stones have been thrown, by both sides). There, there are manicured lawns, lush flowering plants (the lion’s share of water is reserved for Israeli settlements) and large American-style two-story homes. It’s another world. Monira cries when she sees the settlement’s children playing in its orderly streets. One of her teenage sons crouches sullenly on a corner of the roof, not saying anything. To the north, a bulldozer works on the Palestinian side of the fence. According to Fareed Taamallah, construction is beginning there on another settlement. It’s only a matter of time, says Monira, before the Israelis come for her family’s farmland, too.

“They will come again,” she says, while Taamallah translates. “It will not be enough. They will not stop.” She may be right — now that Bush has endorsed Israel’s claim to much of the West Bank, there’s no reason for Sharon not to keep building.

Groups like Hamas aren’t strong in the villages, says Taamallah; they flourish instead in the crowded refugee camps. Still, he thinks the ground is growing fertile. Amer’s angry son might make a receptive recruit, he says.

And for those who still reject violence, but also reject an endless occupation? The only strategy left for the Palestinians, says Taamallah, is to work for a one-state solution, with Palestinians and Israelis living as equal citizens in a democratic country. Already, the two populations are intertwined, with Israeli settlers living just a few dozen meters from the surrounding farming villages. When Palestinians begin demanding a place in the country that’s expanding to envelop them, he says, how can the world not support them? It will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, but that’s hardly Taamallah’s concern.

“Day after day, a one-state solution becomes the best solution,” he says. “We are in Bedia, in the heart of the West Bank, and there is a settlement 10 meters from here.” Separation, he says, is becoming impossible. It’s an idea that Taamallah says is catching on among Palestine’s educated classes.

Levy isn’t surprised by this kind of talk. “A one-state solution has lots of benefits for the Palestinians,” he says. “There’s no concession on refugees or on the bigger land issue, and they’re going to be a majority in a few years.”

The two-state solution, he points out, was only formally adopted by the Palestinian leadership in 1988. Before that, the PLO charter called for a secular democratic state in all of Palestine — meaning Israel and the territories.

“Pragmatism and realpolitik led them to abandon that,” says Levy. But now that such pragmatism has proven useless, the old idea is back in vogue.

“I hope they understand just how much hostility there will be for it in Israel,” says Levy. “What a long, long struggle it will be, with no guarantees at the end of the day for a working model. But if two states means Bantustanization for the Palestinians, of course they don’t want to buy into it.”

Sharon, of course, doesn’t care what the Palestinians do or don’t buy into. Indeed, when asked by Israeli journalists just how successful he really was in Washington, his aides proudly pointed to the Palestinians’ furious reaction.

“They were dealt a lethal blow,” he crowed to one Israeli newspaper.

For once, Sharon and the Palestinians are in complete agreement.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer