“What used to be voices on the far fringe, whether it’s the fringe left or fringe right, they are steadily creeping in towards the center,” says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who served as director for defense policy and arms control on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. Calls to leave Iraq, he says, “are marching towards the middle of the establishment.”

As the taboo against discussing withdrawal fades, critics are increasingly less deferential to the idea that America must finish what it began in Iraq, however foolish its invasion.

“Even among harsh critics of the administration’s Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You’ve heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can’t cut and run. We have to stay the course,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on April 30. Krugman doesn’t argue that America should pull out of Iraq, but he does argue that staying is a hopeless proposition. “I don’t have a plan for Iraq,” he says. “I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant.”

On April 7, Robert Byrd became the first senator to call for pulling out. “The harsh reality is this: One year after the fall of Baghdad, the United States should not be casting about for a formula to bring additional U.S. troops to Iraq. We should instead be working toward an exit strategy,” he said.

Byrd’s stance didn’t surprise anyone, but it was still significant. “Senator Byrd, he’s always the first to recommend cutting and running,” says Feaver. “He has a long career of recommending a hasty retreat, but he’s now said it, and he’s a sitting senator, which is very different from a sitting House member. It’s a step up in terms of credibility.”

A week later, Peter Galbraith, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer and humanitarian crusader, published an article in the New York Review of Books called “How to Get Out of Iraq.” In it, he wrote, “Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq.”

On the right, William E. Odom, a three-star lieutenant general, former director of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration and director of national security studies at the conservative Hudson Institute, has also been arguing that the situation in Iraq is hopeless. Last week, he told the Wall Street Journal, “We have failed. The issue is how high a price we’re going to pay … Less, by getting out sooner? Or more, by getting out later?”

On Wednesday, he elaborated on Nightline, saying, “[T]o say you can’t fail at that now, is to fail to realize that you’ve already failed. Now, when I say get out, I don’t mean just pull out and walk out today. I would go through the procedures of going to the United Nations and encouraging a United Nations resolution to approve some U.N. force there. And I would be quite prepared to participate in that for a while, if we could get allies and others to come in. But then I would make it clear that I am slowly moving that responsibility to this force and withdrawing the U.S. over six months or so.”

Patrick Buchanan’s antiwar American Conservative magazine takes an even harder line. In the current cover story, author Christopher Layne argues that neither internationalization nor increasing troop strength will work, and that simply withdrawing is the least bad of several bad options. In a piece that is virtually indistinguishable from a left-wing antiwar screed, Layne says, “the time has come for a statesman to step forward and ask the American people the question that must be asked: if the United States remains in Iraq, how do we tell the U.S. troops there that one of them will be the last one to die for a mistake?”

Meanwhile, Greg Mitchell, editor of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, recently wrote a column titled, “When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?” “Are you ready, now, to think the unthinkable?” he asked his readers, many of whom work in the media industry. “Who will be the first in line to call for a phased withdrawal, not more troops? As with Vietnam, one brave voice (remember Walter Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968) may inspire others.”

Of course, different people mean different things when they call for withdrawal from Iraq. Some, like Layne, would pull out immediately and let Iraqis work (or fight) out the future of their country among themselves. Several on the right, including Daniel Pipes, once a proponent of the notion that a reformed Iraq would spread democratic values throughout the benighted Middle East, are now calling for the administration to appoint a pliable strongman to hold Iraq in check.

Liberals like Galbraith are more concerned with what the Iraqis themselves want — to that end, he proposes a three-state solution, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds running independent republics united in a loose federation. “In my view, Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state,” he writes.

On May 6, the Nation published a forum called “How to Get Out of Iraq,” with contributions from people including lefty luminaries Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, Ray Close, the former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University.

Most call for some kind of international body to manage the transfer to Iraqi sovereignty and to provide security in the country. John Kerry has also promised to involve other nations in Iraq’s reconstruction, and in some ways their plans resemble his, with one crucial difference — while calling for U.N. involvement, Kerry has also suggested that more U.S. troops be sent to stabilize the country. The Nation writers, though, largely argue that American troops need to leave Iraq to others untainted by the botched occupation.

The most intriguing plan in the Nation comes from John Brady Kiesling, the diplomat who resigned last February to protest Bush’s foreign policy. He suggests that America essentially stage its own defeat, allowing a designated Iraqi to reap the glory of driving the occupation from the country.

“A victorious Secretary Rumsfeld could not impose Ahmad Chalabi. However, a retreating US military can designate Iraq’s liberator,” writes Kiesling. “We must select the competent Iraqi patriot to whom we yield ground while bleeding his competitors. There will be casualties and disorder, no matter how brilliantly we orchestrate our withdrawal. But the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will rally around any man who claims to drive us out, and elections would validate his relatively bloodless victory.”

If the plans of liberals and conservatives differ on details, they share the conviction that the presence of American troops in Iraq is causing more problems than it solves. “Washington’s real choice is akin to that posed in an old oil-filter commercial that used to run on television,” writes Layne. “America can pay now, or it can pay later when the costs will be even higher.”

Critics argue that advocates of withdrawal fail to adequately appreciate what’s at stake if America is defeated in Iraq. “There are only a handful of folks who are advocating that who have dealt honestly with the costs associated with it,” says Feaver. “There’s a lot of loose talk — ‘we cut and ran from Vietnam and we still won the Cold War.’ That kind of analysis is very shallow and ahistorical.”

Feaver invokes the “paper tiger” argument to justify staying in Iraq. “The costs of cutting and running is reinforcing the idea that you don’t have to defeat American military power, you just have to make life unpleasant and kill enough Americans and you will break American will,” he says. “That’s the premise behind bin Laden’s grand strategy against the U.S. It’s quite serious.”

Feaver also argues that a U.S. pullout could turn Iraq into even more of a terrorist haven than it’s become since the war. “Afghanistan proves we have a vital interest in not letting a state become a failed state hijacked by terrorist organizations, and some vision of the future of Iraq might be that,” says Feaver. “Just taking our troops and going home, that would produce as many costs to us as staying.”

And if Iraq descends into a civil war, U.S. troops would be forced to return, he says. “It’s worth remembering the civil war in Yugoslavia,” Feaver says. “We couldn’t stay out of it. The people who advocate cutting and running, I’m not sure how they think we can avoid getting involved in civil war in Iraq. If Yugoslavia disappears from the international economy, that’s one thing. If the Persian Gulf disappears from the international economy, that’s quite another.”

Proponents of pulling out, though, say that it’s foolish to ask Americans to die in the attempt to stop a bad situation from getting worse if there’s also no prospect of it improving. “There’s no credible evidence that things will get better the longer we stay,” says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for foreign policy and defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute and an advocate of rapid withdrawal.

Advocates of withdrawal scoff at both the paper tiger and the terrorist-haven argument, saying that we are creating more terrorists by remaining in Iraq than we would if we left.

Pulling out, he says, “will damage our credibility, but the damage is likely to be less than if we stumble out of Iraq years from now having lost thousands of troops with a mission in obvious failure. In many ways Lyndon Johnson faced the same choice in late 1964-early 1965 — either escalate the commitment in Vietnam or terminate the mission realizing it is at least a partial failure. He escalated. What he did was turn a foreign policy setback into an absolute debacle. I’m really afraid if we try and stay in Iraq, we’re going to end up the same way.”

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that the war in Iraq cannot be won, says Carpenter. “The sentiment is shifting. There is now at the very least a pervasive uneasiness about the way this mission is going,” he says. “When you see people like retired General Odom calling for an immediate withdrawal — this is an arch conservative, a hawk on policy for many, many years — when people like that begin to have doubts about the mission, there is a shift in sentiment.”

The shift will further erode public support for the war, says Feaver, because it makes the possibility of defeat in Iraq seem suddenly fathomable. “People who are arguing [for withdrawal] are doing so on the grounds that this is hopeless, we’re losing, we have to cut our losses,” he says. “That attitude is toxic for public support, and especially for casualties. Casualties don’t have such a big effect when the public thinks we’re winning or going to win, but when the public thinks we’re going to lose, then causalities are toxic.”

Already, public support for the war is fading fast. In a Gallup poll taken from May 2-4, 47 percent of respondents answered no to the question, “All in all, do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq, or not?” A CBS News/New York Times poll from April 23 to April 27 phrases the question differently, asking, “Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not worth it?” Fifty-eight percent say it wasn’t.

The growing public disillusionment with the war presents unique challenges for both John Kerry and George Bush. So far, they’re resisting calls for withdrawal. Bush, who has gambled the success of his presidency on his Iraq adventure and who has little political capital beyond his image as an unswerving war leader, repeats the phrase “stay the course” like some kind of magic incantation. Kerry, worried he’ll be accused of being soft on national security, has called for more U.S. troops and has suggested delaying the June 30 hand-over of nominal sovereignty to Iraqis.

But if the demand to pull out snowballs, analysts say, both men may alter their positions, even if they refuse to admit any inconsistency. No one is likely to announce the abandonment of dreams for a stable and decent Iraq. Instead, the bar for what constitutes an acceptable outcome will creep steadily down as public faith in the Iraq mission dissolves.

Clearly, doubts about the war are affecting Bush’s popularity. In the latest Gallup poll, 55 percent of respondents disapprove of how he’s handling Iraq. In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 49 percent say that Bush doesn’t deserve to be reelected, compared to 45 percent who say he does. “This election is John Kerry’s to lose,” says John Zogby, president and CEO of the polling firm Zogby International. “An incumbent president with the kind of numbers Bush has is not good.”

Still, he says, “Kerry is not off to a great start.” Indeed, some Democrats are worried that the president’s numbers aren’t worse, given the debacles of the last few months.

That could change, says Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who studies voter behavior. He argues that the real impact of Iraq’s deterioration may not be seen for a few months. “These things take time,” he says. “Normally you don’t see a dramatic decline in a president’s approval ratings as a result of some sort of foreign policy setbacks unless it’s something really, really dramatic. Even with Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, it took a long time for that to adversely affect him. Initially it increased his approval rating. It took months before it really began to be a problem for him. If in three or four months we see continuing negative news stories coming out of Iraq, if there’s more violence and this situation with the prison remains a big story, it probably will start to have an effect on Bush’s approval rating.”

Ironically, though, the rapid deterioration in Iraq also poses hazards for Kerry.

On April 30, Kerry gave a speech about his plans for Iraq at Westminster College. In it, he raised the possibility of sending more American troops in the short term while calling on NATO members and other allies to contribute additional forces and to provide troops. “The immediate goal is to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share the risk and reduce the burden on our own forces,” he said. “That is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation.”

Kerry’s problem, though, is that while calling for more American troops may be high-minded, it runs counter to the increasing national uneasiness about Iraq. As for internationalization, it isn’t really a viable option, given other nations’ reluctance to send their troops into Iraq’s chaos. Feaver points out that Kerry can’t really offer a significant departure from Bush’s current policy in the country, since circumstances have forced the president to reluctantly do many things — like calling on the U.N. — that Democrats have called for all along.

“When he sits down with his Democratic advisors, they’re very, very smart people, and even they recognize that there doesn’t seem to be good alternatives,” says Feaver. “I don’t think they believe that what the Bush folks are doing is dreadfully wrong and if only we were in control we could make the situation better.”

But if the election hinges on voter dissatisfaction with Bush’s war, and if Kerry’s poll numbers remain flat, pressure on Kerry to abandon his play-it-safe strategy and offer a dramatic alternative could grow. “At some point Kerry’s going to have to focus,” says Zogby. “He’s going to win this as a blue state president, saying, ‘The war is wrong, I’m against the war.’”

He has to do that even if it means abandoning his current position, says Zogby. “He’s going to have to change, because that’s where his voters are at.”

And if the trend toward red-state disenchantment with the war continues, Kerry could even pick up votes from Bush backers. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that a remarkable 40 percent of Republicans said they would consider voting for Kerry if the war situation worsened.

Zogby criticizes Kerry’s current position as outdated. In his April 30 speech, says Zogby, “he called for a solution from 15 months ago, saying, ‘We’ve got to get our allies involved, we’ve got to bring the United Nations in. Well, you’re not going to persuade Germany and France to come in now. You’re not going to persuade the United Nations to get involved now.”

But Kerry can’t make a really radical move and call for withdrawal, Zogby says. “He can’t declare, ‘Let’s cut and run right now,’ because that’s tantamount to George McGovern,” Zogby says. The White House attack machine has already portrayed Kerry as a spineless flip-flopper: If Kerry were to change his position on Iraq, Republicans would crucify him.

So what should his message be? That Bush is a “miserable failure,” says Zogby, and we need to “extricate ourselves from this tragic mistake. We need an Arab summit, we need to build bridges back with all of our allies. There’s no easy solution.”

Essentially, Zogby is arguing that Kerry should start talking about exit strategy — that he should offer voters the prospect of ending the war, even if that prospect remains vague.

The fact that Kerry can’t offer a quick way out of the war might seem to open up a space for Nader, who could bail out a severely damaged Bush presidency by drawing crucial votes from Kerry. But many liberal Democrats think that Nader will have much less success than he did in the last election. “Ralph will try and take advantage of it, but I don’t think he’s going to have great success because I think everyone understands the threat of Mr. Bush and the architects of preemption,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive organizing group. “At the end of the day I think Nader will do much worse than he did four years ago.”

Borosage’s recommendation for Kerry is much like Zogby’s. “I think it would be wise to move towards an Eisenhower-type posture of vowing to end the conflict and get American forces out of there,” he says. “Americans understand you can’t cut and run, but as the situation gets worse, they’re going to be looking for someone who says we have to find a way to bring this occupation to the end and recognize reality, that this occupation is a deteriorating situation, that it can’t be sustained without generating destruction.”

The plan can come later, Borosage says. “The Eisenhower pledge was only that he would go to Korea. It wasn’t that he had a detailed plan or terms of agreement,” he says.

In the end, it could turn out that none of the presidential candidates wants to stay in Iraq. Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst at Janes Consultancy Group based in Britain, believes that both the U.S. and England are quietly trying to engineer a quick pullout.

“I’m not saying there’s going to be a withdrawal tomorrow morning,” Heyman says. “But the situation is deteriorating steadily. There is some evidence that the U.S. government and the British government are talking behind the scenes to both the U.N. and to some of the insurgent groups, both Sunni and Shiite, and it is likely that they will come up with some sort of political agreement between the lot of them which would allow for a much earlier withdrawal.”

“The truth is nobody wants it like this,” he says. “If we can talk our way out of it, that’s a damn sight better than fighting our way out.”

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