I was wrong. She, and all of you, are indeed part of history. I realized that when I picked up this morning’s New York Times. Story after story sang out with examples of the way you’ve made American history.

Like this one: “Lopsided Vote by Senators Against Type of Abortion.” The Senate went and voted against what they call “partial-birth” abortions again. You all know they did it twice before while Bill Clinton was president and he vetoed it. History might not have changed if you didn’t help George W. Bush get into the White House. But now, with an anti-choice president, we can count on the bill being signed into law after the House passes it next month. The procedure won’t even be allowed when the health of the mother is in danger. If Al Gore had been in the White House, he probably would have upheld Clinton’s veto. Thanks to you, history will change.

And that’s not all you’ve done. With a Republican president who you all did so much to elect, we can now look forward to a judiciary packed with conservative zealots. Like Priscilla Owen, the Texas Supreme Court justice who is now going to get a second chance at federal appeals court thanks to the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. Justice Owen is another example of how much you’ve managed to change history for women’s reproductive rights. In Texas, she dissented from the state’s law that a teenager can obtain an abortion without notifying her parents because the teenage girl in front of her had not shown she understood the religious objections to abortion. Not only will you have a chance to change reproductive rights, but you may have made it easier to get around that pesky old church-state separation.

There are still other things to thank you for, like the likely passage of a bill that would cap all pain and suffering awards in medical malpractice cases at $250,000, a bill Bush wants to sign. I sure hope the family of that girl who died after having the wrong organs transplanted into her gets to thank each and every one of you for that. I know the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies sure must be grateful — and who’da ever thunk they’d have reason to feel grateful to old Ralph?

But let’s face it: The place where you’ve made the most difference is Iraq. I know, I know, you don’t want to claim credit because there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats on this issue. In fact, only two of the declared Democratic presidential candidates oppose the war. But now isn’t the time for false modesty. We all know that if Gore had become president and continued the Clinton policy of containment, that Saddam would just be a peripheral pest and your biggest claim to changing history would never have happened. (We in New York especially acknowledge your actions as we await the home-front consequences of an invasion of Iraq.)

Now I know we’ve had our differences, but I know that you acted out of a genuine desire to be progressive, out of a genuine concern for the direction of America, and out of a belief in the importance of not compromising your ideals. You’re all so idealistic that you believe a new progressive movement can be built without significant support from African-Americans, women, gays, or organized labor. If that isn’t idealism, I’d like to know what is.

And I know you’ve been chastised by those old-style Democrats like me for being blind to the consequences of your actions. But a unique chance exists right now for you to show your true colors, to prove that you are entirely aware of the consequences of your actions and are willing to face them: Volunteer for the invasion of Iraq.

The news in the past few weeks has been showing us tearful separations of reservists and their families. Many of the men and women going over to the Gulf are ambivalent about the necessity of war, but they feel obligated by a sense of duty. They’ve even been honest enough to admit they are frightened of possibly facing biological or chemical weapons.

Wouldn’t it be great if just one of them didn’t have to go, didn’t have to separated from their sweethearts or families because all you Nader voters put Bush in office and helped pave the way for the invasion of Iraq? Wouldn’t it be great to show America your guts by taking one of these brave soldiers’ place, by declaring that you’re not willing to let anybody else die for your actions?

I sneered in 2000 when one of you guys said on CNN that you were willing to risk a Bush victory because you believed “things have to get worse before they get better.” But I’m not sneering now. Now’s the chance for you overwhelmingly white, middle-class, college-educated Nader voters to show that you really do care and aren’t just willing to let someone else do the dying for you. You put Bush in the White House, so why not sign up for his invasion — what better way to “make things get worse”? In this time of uncertainty and fear, your country salutes you.

Key lyrics: “I hear people saying we don’t need this war/ I say there’s some things worth fighting for/ Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight/ After 9/11, man, I’d have to say that’s right/ Have you forgotten all the people killed?/ Some went down like heroes in that Pennsylvania field/ Have you forgotten about our Pentagon?/ All the loved ones that we lost and those left to carry on/ Don’t you tell me not to worry about bin Laden.”

Think of it as pop music for the red states. Or better yet, considering the song’s nifty piece of wartime disinformation, maybe “The Ballad of the Gulf of Tonkin.”

That’s not a slap at patriotic pop songs, or to suggest that topical tunes need to lean left, although the two best post-9/11 songs did, at least arguably. Both Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” and country superstar Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” opted for introspection, healing and faith, rather than a jingoistic call for vengeance.

That role, until now, fell to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which may have been the first chart-topper in praise of carpet-bombing: “And it’ll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you/ Ahhh, brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue.”

Another lunch-bucket country singer, Aaron Tippin, weighed in with more of a feel-good patriotic anthem in the wake of 9/11, “Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagles Fly.” Simplistic? Sure. Welcomed during the dark days of October and November 2001? Absolutely.

Worley goes much further than that. He tries to suggest a rationale for the war that even the White House, which has been wrestling with the topic for more than a year, has not been able to successfully articulate.

In interviews, Worley has tried to be cute about the song’s real meaning, implying the “war” in “Have You Forgotten?” is the war on terrorism, which the U.S. launched against Afghanistan with almost unanimous support following terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

But Worley co-wrote “Forgotten” with Wynn Varble in December 2002, after visiting U.S. troops overseas. Did he really think, with weapons inspectors prowling Iraq and MSNBC’s “Countdown Iraq” already a TV staple, that the stridently pro-military song’s reference to “this war” wouldn’t be interpreted to mean Iraq?

As one country disc jockey told USA Today, “The audience is so wrapped up in the emotion of what it’s about, I don’t think they’re nitpicking at this point” about the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

It turns out Worley’s fine with that interpretation. “I do support our president,” he said on NBC’s “Today.” “I think he’s on the right track, and personally, I agree with what he’s doing and I’m OK with that.”

In other words, rather than try to clear up any confusion, he’s signed off on the song’s erroneous premise that if America wants to avenge 9/11 it should rain bombs down on Iraq. As Bill Maher recently noted on his late-night HBO show, that would have been like Franklin D. Roosevelt responding to Pearl Harbor by saying, “OK, Japan attacked us. So let’s go after Spain!”

The question of whether Hussein and bin Laden are in fact linked has been a hotly debated one for the past year. War hawks first tried to prove that 9/11 suicide bomber Mohammed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, but that story kept unraveling.

More recently, Secretary of State Colin Powell has tried to forge the same links, but with few new specifics. His analysis was greeted with widespread international skepticism.

Still, the White House won’t give up. During last week’s prime-time press conference, President Bush argued eight separate times that in order to prevent another 9/11, American must attack Iraq. “Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. Sept. 11 changed the strategic thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country. My job is to protect the American people,” said Bush.

That kind of drumbeat of dubious rhetoric has had an effect. According to a January poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 46 percent of Americans thought most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqis. (Only 17 percent knew the correct answer: none were from Iraq.) That conspiracy theory seems to be thriving inside the U.S. military as well. A recent news account in the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger about U.S. troops deployed in the Gulf region was accompanied by a photograph of a bomb presumably destined for an Iraqi target. On it someone had scribbled: “It’s Payback Time.”

Payback time for what? Tune into WKSJ in Mobile, Ala., KILT in Houston or WIVK in Knoxville, Tenn., and hear Darryl Worley sing the answer: It’s payback time for 9/11, whether Iraq had anything to do with it or not.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream [ ... ]

A few stanzas later, he was drawn back to the image, denouncing “the lie of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky.”

Neither the strength of Collective Man nor of Authority was enough, on September 1st or Sept. 11, to prevent the worst from happening.

Perhaps the poem’s most arresting — and disturbing — synchronicity with Sept. 11, however, is found in the second stanza, when Auden writes of Hitler’s Germany:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

“What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god”: the question echoed like an explosion, as the sight of the twin towers collapsing shocked the world. In America, however, it was not permitted to explore the final lines: to suggest that the evil unleashed by Osama bin Laden might actually be something that happened in history, and be susceptible to historical analysis, was immediately pronounced traitorous — as if the desire to understand somehow was the same as justifying this horror.

Some things, it was argued then and now, cannot and should not be understood. Some evils are cosmic obscenities, anomic, existing outside all reason and causation. President Bush’s declaration that the terrorists struck not for any reason but because “they hate our freedom” was a crude statement of this point. The impulse to declare that catastrophes are beyond the human order is as old as Job. And there is truth in it — but not the entire truth. If all evil is unfathomable, chaos would have engulfed civilization long ago, for catastrophes befall us all.

Auden himself grappled with this issue. As Alan Jacobs pointed out in a penetrating essay published last year, Auden later repudiated his poem — and he did so because he came to believe he had been too quick to explain away evil. The poem asserts that the harsh sanctions imposed by the Allies on Germany after World War I were one of the causes of Nazism. And he drew a moral comparison, perhaps even an equation, between those sanctions and Nazism: “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”

Jacobs explains that as Auden came to understand the true nature of the Nazi regime, he realized that his lofty rhetoric, which implicitly posits that all have sinned equally and all are equally culpable, failed to distinguish between the sins of the Allies and the infinitely greater sin of Nazism.

In short, Auden came to believe that he had arrived too quickly at that moral-aesthetic height from which the varieties of human folly become indistinguishable.

Was Auden right to repudiate his poem? There is no single answer. But the fact that it still speaks to people indicates that he may not have been. In fact, the verses about Germany were never as crudely exculpatory of Nazism as he came to believe. In any case, as time passes, even the most dreadful horrors come to be seen sub specie aeternitatis: indeed, poetry that attempts to engage too specifically and polemically with politics is not usually the poetry that lasts. As an engaged work, a rallying cry of defiance to Hitler, “Sept. 1, 1939″ falls short; but as a meditation on the darkness that infects the human condition, and a haunting description of what it felt like to watch the world collapse from the “neutral air” of New York, it remains strange and alive.

The strange life that courses through Auden’s poem has made it, remarkably, relevant not once but three times: in 1939, after Sept. 11 and again today. Indeed, it may speak even more pointedly to us now, as we once again observe horror unfold in slow-motion — this time a horror of our own making.

By a terrible irony, the poem that so many Americans read after Sept. 11 to comfort themselves and their wounded and victimized nation now reads as an indictment of our folly — and an elegy for our lost reason. The “offense” is the terrorist attacks. And the culture that has been driven mad is our own.

This, at least, is the view of most of the people in the world — one forcefully expressed by the British novelist John le Carré, who wrote a piece in the Times of London called “The USA has gone mad.” It isn’t just the Security Council, or the U.N., although America’s isolation there is disturbing enough. That the overwhelming majority of people on earth — regardless of their paid-off or strategically-aligned governments’ official positions — believe that America is going down a terribly wrong path is something that should inspire far deeper reflection, and doubt, among American policymakers, and the general public, than it has. When millions of people — many of whom had wept and marched in solidarity with the great city of New York, capital of the modern world, just a year and a half earlier — took to the streets in dozens of cities around the globe, Bush dismissed them as a “focus group.” So much for the largest worldwide demonstrations in human history, a first stunning street plebiscite in a nascent global democracy.

America is about to launch the first unprovoked war in its history (or the second, if you count what Neal Gabler called its true precedent, the Spanish-American War), and it will do it essentially alone. After Bush’s strangely robotic press conference last Thursday (the Washington Post’s Tom Shales and the Times’ Maureen Dowd spoke for many when they observed that the president appeared to be drugged), in which he was completely incapable of answering why a beefed-up inspections regime, backed by force, could not keep Saddam under control, there seems no hope that an invasion can be averted by diplomacy. Perhaps Britain will succeed in pushing back the date of the war resolution by a few days or weeks. But the hot weather is coming, the troops will soon lose their edge, and so very soon Bush will either press for a resolution authorizing force — which the Security Council will reject — or simply issue the invasion order. And soon thereafter thousands of tons of bombs will begin falling on Iraq, home of a vile and murderous tyrant and 23 million Iraqis, many of whom will die before their fellow citizens are released from Saddam’s bondage and into an unknown future.

That future will be determined by three things: the fortunes of war, American commitment, and fate. Of those three, it is impossible to say which is the most fickle.

It is equally impossible to say with certainty whether invading a large sovereign Arab state will make America safer or not. Unless the war and its aftermath unfold as smoothly as a game of Risk played against a 6-year-old, however, the odds are it will not.

As the United States stands in rigid and increasingly pathological isolation, prepared to take an incredible gamble for no good reason, Auden’s poem, with all its incredulity, bitterness, dread and humanity-lacerating guilt, resonates with uncanny power. It is music for the coming shadows.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

We have become all too familiar with “the lie of Authority,” which promulgates patriotic myths to ensure compliance with demands that the individual might reject: It is on Fox News and its imitator MSNBC nightly. But Auden’s audacity in this stanza is to link this familiar lie with the “lie in the brain” — a lie of which all humans, Americans and Iraqis and French alike, are guilty. This is the lie that we exist alone, the lie of egotism, the lie that we do not need to love our fellow man. In a brilliant stroke, Auden reveals that these two apparently separate untruths work in the same way, making us susceptible to demagoguery and fear-mongering, leaving us short of our full humanity. Indeed, they are identical. The resonance with Christianity is unmistakable: “Though I speak with the tongues of man and angels, if I have not love, I am but sounding brass and a clanging cymbal …”

What does any of this high-flown talk of love have to do with the looming war with a dangerous dictator? It would be absurd to interpret Auden’s famous injunction “We must love one another or die” (which he later denounced as a “lie” and amended to the darker “We must love one another and die,” before repudiating the entire poem) literally in this context — as did the human shield in Baghdad who told Salon that he wanted to bring “inner peace” to the Iraqis and his fellow activists. The Saddam Husseins of the world do not need a hug. But there is a link between the poet’s call for a revolution in every heart and the question of whether war is really needed to protect America.

That link is found in the high moral and intellectual seriousness needed to arrive at the decision to go to war. And the fact is that the administration’s deliberations and arguments have not even come close to the necessary threshold. Here the uncertainty of the American people, as well as the rest of the world, is a vital indicator. They are not afraid of Saddam Hussein: If they were, they would be clamoring for war. They recognize that he poses a threat, but it is a distant one. Their wisdom derives from the oldest human instinct: to believe that history is a guide, that events are predictable, that someone will not do something he has not done before. They recognize that they could be wrong: when dealing with hypotheticals, no arguments can be definitive. But they are also painfully aware of risk.

The Bush administration, and its faithful valet across the pond, insists that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is so great and so imminent that we must kill thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of people to get rid of him. But they have not given compelling reasons for war. And although their crystal ball works perfectly when assessing the evil that Saddam will do, it suddenly goes dark when it comes to predicting the evil that removing him could do, or even how much money it will cost.

One cannot reach the place of honesty required to answer the question whether war is required if one does not first accept what war means, and look long and hard down that hellish road. Nor can one do so without examining one’s previous beliefs about the threat posed by Saddam. Those who simply transfer rage at the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 onto Saddam are not acting in good faith.

And here Auden’s words are useful. What the poet is calling for is not quietism, not turning the other cheek, but making the painful attempt to see beyond oneself, to recognize the Other as fully human. This vision, to borrow Stendhal’s description of the temperament needed by the novelist, is clear, dry, without illusion. But if Auden rejects bleeding-heart sentimentality, the habitual pitfall of the left, he also rejects the variant favored by the right, brutal sentimentality. And it is precisely a species of brutal sentimentality that lies behind the bizarre, almost unnoticed sleight-of-hand trick successfully pulled off by Bush: transferring Americans’ rage at al-Qaida into rage at Saddam Hussein.

Behind the vulgar flag-waving bombast of the mass media, behind the pro-war chest-beating or too-little, too-late reservations of the nation’s leading newspapers, behind the embarrassing attempts to blame the Bush administration’s worldwide isolation on the French, there is a great hollowness — the sinking, empty feeling that follows the dissemination and absorption of a Big National Lie.

The lie is the claim that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is so urgent that only immediate war can stop it. What is noteworthy about this lie is not just that there are no convincing arguments for it, not just that it depends on gross appeals to emotions stirred by a completely unrelated event, but that most of those who have accepted it have no intellectual justification in doing so.

I propose the following axiom: Those who did not believe and publicly state before Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein represented an unacceptable threat to the United States have no credibility when they now argue that he does.

The reasoning behind this axiom is simple: The events of Sept. 11 have no relevance to the threat posed by Iraq, nor has any new information been unearthed since then about Iraqi threats. Therefore, all those who are only now calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq are basing their change of heart purely on an emotional reaction to Sept. 11, not a reasoned analysis of risk factors. This is an argument made in bad faith. For 10 years they were not afraid of Saddam Hussein. What changed their mind? The fiery spectacle of Sept. 11, they claim. Bush has invoked the date repeatedly as he has tried to scare Americans into supporting his war. But try as they might, none of these hawks in or out of the Bush government has been able to prove a connection between Osama bin Laden’s spectacular assaults and the Baghdad regime.

That this obvious point has scarcely been raised indicates the extent to which emotion, not argument, has come to dominate public discussion of this issue. The patriotic intimidation, the groupthink, the shunning and shaming of those who dared to raise unpopular perspectives — these reflexes still govern the national dialogue on Iraq.

This helps explain why it is not acceptable to question whether even al-Qaida, whose all-powerful, demonic nature must constantly be invoked to prop up war with Iraq, is as powerful, resourceful and threatening as is believed. Obviously, it represents a very serious threat, and all necessary resources must be devoted to hunting it down and destroying it. But it is not necessarily correct to assume that the true strength and significance of a terrorist movement is equal to the success it enjoys in a given operation.

Of course, emotional reactions can be valuable. U.S. intelligence agencies knew for years that bin Laden and his associates were responsible for terrorist attacks against U.S. targets; they failed to act effectively. Sept. 11 served as a wake-up call, and no one would argue that it should not have.

But Iraq, according to CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, whose well-researched pro-war book “The Threatening Storm” has probably been cited by more born-again liberal hawks than any other, had nothing to do with Sept. 11, or indeed with al-Qaida, and very little to do with international terrorism in general. As Pollack and most other analysts have noted, handing weapons of mass destruction out to people he can’t control is not Saddam’s style. The position of the CIA itself, until director George Tenet was taken away and retrofitted with a new pro-war sound system, embarrassingly contradicted Bush’s agenda: The agency said it was unlikely that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction unless an invasion forced him into a corner.

Let us be impolitic enough to recall the universal assessment of Saddam Hussein before 9/11 — an assessment borne out by studies of Iraq from Kanan Makiya’s “Republic of Fear” to Khidhir Hamza and Jeff Stein’s “Saddam’s Bombmaker.” The picture that emerges is of an appallingly vicious Stalinist thug, a murderous despot who has some pan-Arab leadership pretensions, and a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel, but whose overriding instincts are to expand and consolidate his own power and save his own skin. There is nothing in his sordid résumé to indicate that he would support an al-Qaida-like group in terror actions against the U.S.: He is too much of a survivor, too pragmatic and too secular to trade the messianic, apocalyptic joys of killing Americans for the likelihood that the connection would be discovered and his head consequently impaled by the 101st Airborne on the gates of Baghdad. (For that matter, in the current climate, even if no such connection was discovered, Saddam might well still answer for it. Which is why there is reason to believe that if he had anything to say about it, all terror actions against the U.S. would cease immediately.)

Saddam is delusional, not mad: He strikes when he thinks he can get away with it. He believed he could defeat Iran, not least because the U.S. was backing him. (In 1983 the United States knew Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran: The Reagan administration not only raised no objection, it sought closer ties and soon restored diplomatic relations. Reagan’s Middle East envoy at the time: Donald Rumsfeld. They can be seen amiably shaking hands in an old news photo in wide circulation on the Web. These kinds of facts make it difficult to have complete faith in the high humanitarian pronouncements of the Bush administration — which is not to say that the liberation of the Iraqi people would not be a great good.) Saddam thought he could get away with invading Kuwait (which he regarded, with some reason, as a part of historic Iraq that was artificially broken off by the British when they carved up the Ottoman Empire) in part because of the infamous “yellow light” given him by the senior Bush’s ambassador, April Glaspie, and in part because of his own megalomaniacal fantasies and shaky grasp of external political realities.

The most dangerous things about this rather classic paranoid, sociopathic despot are his delusions and his lack of good information about the outside world. But there is no reason to believe either of these things makes him an imminent threat to the U.S. His delusions are those of a cunning man, too cunning to assure his own doom by handing weapons to terrorists; his lack of information leads him to do stupid things like drag his feet on inspections, but not self-destructive ones like attacking the U.S. For me, the most scary scenario in Pollack’s book is that on his deathbed, Saddam might launch missiles at Tel Aviv. But a nation cannot base its foreign policy on trying to stave off theoretically possible future threats. Nor is it America’s duty to make war on Iraq, and risk its own national self-interest, to protect Israel: Israel has shown itself quite capable of dealing with him in the past.

The administration has made crude, increasingly desperate attempts to tout connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, including wildly overdrawn claims that his sketchy relationship with the anti-Kurdish Islamist group Ansar Al-Islam proves his connection to al-Qaida. (The campaign may have reached its humiliating nadir when Colin Powell tried to use Osama bin Laden’s latest tape, in which he called for Muslims to rally around Iraq against America while denouncing Saddam as godless, to connect the two — a line of argument worthy of the Michael Savage show, but one that may be effective with that large percentage of Americans who believe that Osama is Saddam.)

So why, absent any connection between Osama and Saddam, would Sept. 11 have served as a wake-up call about Iraq? It apparently had that effect on many influential voices in the media, including the New York Times’ editorial page, their influential foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the editorial page of the Washington Post. (The Times, which was calling for war just a few weeks ago, has since reversed course. Alarmed by the world’s rejection of the plan, and perhaps having second thoughts about the national security arguments it had earlier accepted, in the last few weeks the editors went first into an awkward semi-retreat, then reversed course and explicitly came out against it Sunday. Friedman, too, has been changing his tune, although his case is slightly different because his enthusiasm for the war has been based less on national security arguments than on the idealistic hope that a democratic Iraq could help rebuild the region. Why it took Friedman so long to realize that the Bush administration was not a trustworthy instrument to execute this noble goal is a mystery.) In any case, the fact remains that these extraordinarily important commentators all accepted Bush’s plan to invade Iraq — a position none of them had held before Sept. 11. The only logical explanation for their change of heart is that only after Sept. 11 did they realize the gravity of Saddam’s threat. Sept. 11, by this line of reasoning, was just a catalyst: somehow the arsonist who tossed a firebomb through the front window made them remember that they had left a convicted murderer in the unlocked basement.

If this is actually what happened to the reborn hawks, it’s at least a defensible position. And perhaps it is — although none of them, as far as I know, have issued any mea culpas for ignoring, for 10 years, a threat to America’s security so great that only launching an incredibly risky war right now, without any delay, can remove it.

It seems more likely that what really happened, not just to the media but to the spineless Democratic Party and to the country as a whole, was a little less respectable. The fact is that the rush to invade Iraq simply exemplifies, on a huge, international scale, that old slogan “A neoconservative is a liberal who got mugged.” We got mugged on Sept. 11, so we have to lock up all those criminal bastards, whether they were the ones who stole our wallet or not. War on Iraq is like California’s barbaric, yet so gratifying, “three strikes” law, just upheld by the five justices on the Supreme Court who brought us the Bush presidency. You shoplifted three golf clubs — 25 years. Al-Qaida is scaring us — invade Baghdad.

This is the triumph of brutal sentimentality: the boozy appeal of raw anger, unreflective rage — a populist version of what Nietzsche called ressentiment. It has long been the favorite rally-the-troops appeal of the right wing of the Republican Party. And, dressed up as “moral clarity,” it worked: America is pursuing a war policy that could have been drawn up by those yahoos who chant and sing “Burn ‘em!” while executions take place. It is a commonplace that the reason we have laws is so that the injured parties, whose passions understandably cloud their judgment, do not decide the fate of the accused. But we now have a policy that enacts the psychological fantasies of, and draws much of its support from, the angry-victim wing of the Republican right — red-faced white men filled with rage, slavering and clamoring to hang ‘em high.

Revenge, of course, is not the principal motive driving Bush. There are several. With his domestic agenda a disaster, his popularity plummeting (the latest poll has him losing to an “unnamed Democrat” by four points), and his administration slowly bleeding to death in the Security Council, he has no political choice except to roll the dice on war. He seems to have convinced himself that Saddam really does pose a threat. And he has big geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East — some concerning oil, some about defending Israel and placing it in a stronger position to dictate terms to the Palestinians, and perhaps some genuinely well-meaning ones about freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny and setting the region on a better course. Nonetheless, revenge disguised as self-defense (or, in down-market Republican circles, self-defense dressed up as revenge) is what he’s using to sell the war. It helps that Bush is from Texas, home of all-American ressentiment.

By definition, victim rage is abandoned, luxurious, orgiastic: It wallows in its emotions in a kind of sexual frenzy. Not surprisingly, it rubs up against racism and tribalism: once all repressive constraints are thrown off, it is irresistible to indulge in forbidden thoughts, whose “truth” is only confirmed by the taboo that has been shattered. The usual litany: Black people are oversexed criminals; Latinos are lazy and stupid; Americans are corrupt, godless infidels; Jews are greedy and deceitful; Arabs are dirty, unscrupulous liars.

A tincture of genteel racism, usually though not always masquerading under the respectable cloak of a “clash of civilizations,” is part of the crusade against Iraq. To describe this impulse as “Kill all the ragheads and let God sort them out” would be too simplistic, but a crude leveling impulse related to that kind of bigotry surely explains, at least in part, the inability of so many Americans to grasp the profound differences between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden — or to mention the group upon whose fate the outcome of Bush’s whole gigantic gamble may rest, the Palestinians.

The Bush administration’s reactionary policies with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis have given this unacknowledged racism an official imprimatur. By framing the entire crisis in terms of Palestinian terrorism, rather than Israeli occupation and Palestinian terrorism, Bush has subtly equated the Palestinians with al-Qaida. In Bush’s view, as in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s, the Palestinians have no history, no grievances, no claims of any kind on the world’s conscience: Their acts of violence are completely evil, exactly like those of al-Qaida. All Arabs, it seems, must pay the price of 9/11.

Bush has done something no American president has ever done: He has pushed U.S. policy so far to the right on the Middle East that it is now virtually indistinguishable from that of Sharon, the father of the settlements, whose Cabinet includes Israeli politicians who openly advocate ethnic cleansing, aka “transfer.”

That extraordinary fact, and its possible consequences, are only just now dawning on people in Israel and America alike. His empty recent speech about a Palestinian state notwithstanding, it is becoming more and more clear that Bush not only shares Sharon’s vision of how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis — slaughter and starve the Palestinians until they are prepared to accept whatever wretched Bantustan Israel offers them — he intends to approach the Arab world the same way.

For those Israelis who dream of a way out of the hell Sharon and Hamas have led them into, the parallels have become too painful to ignore. In Ha’aretz on March 6, Gideon Samet wrote, “Sharon’s continuing success also includes the enlistment of the American president in the cause to prevent any initiative for a peace process. Indeed, there’s something hypnotic and almost horrifying about George Bush Jr.’s behavior. He’s becoming a kind of American Arik [Sharon], leading his country, against stiff opposition, into a war for which seemingly there’s no alternative.”

An American Arik:Those words should send shudders down the spine of every American — and every Israeli and every Palestinian. The nightmare scenario since 9/11 has always been that Bush, led by the rabidly pro-Likud members of his inner circle, guided by his fervent Christian affinity for Israel, plotting to strip critical Jewish votes and money from the Democrats in the runup to the ’04 elections, filled with a genuine hatred for Yasser Arafat, ignorant of the history of the conflict, angry at traitorous, pro-Palestinian Europe, and supported by a public whipped up into an anti-Arab frenzy by war against Iraq, abandons the peace process and the “road map” (which last week he once again refused to accept, out of deference to Israeli sensibilities) and refuses to challenge even a single one of Sharon’s repressive policies.

Coupled with the possible dire fallout from the Iraq war in the Arab world, this would have the effect of making the U.S.’s relations with the Arab world finally and definitively indistinguishable from Israel’s — an outcome dreamed of by hardcore Likudniks and their American supporters, but a nightmare for everyone else.

Despite these fears, and even accepting that Saddam poses no threat whatsoever to the U.S., the peculiar thing about the war we are about to undertake is that it could end up being completely successful and completely justified. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam is a worthy goal (unless we kill so many that the benefit is lost). The war could, as Christopher Hitchens predicted in a debate with Mark Danner, be “rapid, accurate and dazzling.” Iraqis could greet us in the streets. And if the U.S. doesn’t cut and run, postwar Iraq could become stable and prosperous, and help move the region toward democracy. The war might not serve as a recruiting tool for thousands of bin Ladens. The precedent established by the launching of a preventive war is troubling, but it could prove harmless. It might even deter rogue states from seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Despite the blow to its power and prestige, the U.N. could recover. Our allies could work with us again.

No critic of the war who reflexively denies that these outcomes are possible, on the grounds that America has ugly aims (or has an ugly history), can be taken seriously. Good results can follow from bad intentions — and in this case America’s intentions are not even uniformly bad.

But the war could also go completely wrong, in ways more horrifying to contemplate than it is satisfying to imagine the ways it could go right.

A reasonable alternative to war exists, and key elements of it are already in place. A beefed-up inspections regime should be installed, with a diminished but still significant military force offshore, paid for by the allies. The allies would reserve the right to use air strikes to punish Saddam if he fails to make sites available to inspectors or otherwise flouts the process. Recalcitrant neighbors like Saudi Arabia could be persuaded to sign off on using their territory, since the alternative is war. (The most cogent argument for war, Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm,” argues that containment has failed — but Pollack does not discuss containment of this magnitude, backed by force.) This allied pressure would keep Saddam boxed up — and could point the way to a new form of international conflict resolution along a kind of SWAT team model, stronger than police action but less catastrophic than war.

That the Bush administration is not willing even to try this approach reveals that it sees value in using its unparalleled military machine simply for the sake of using it. This approach may cow some potential rivals, but it will alienate more. Above all, it will open the ultimate Pandora’s box — war.

“September 1, 1939″ is a great poem about history, a less great one about politics. This is why, in many ways, it sums up our present dangerous and ambiguous moment better than it did the aftermath of 9/11. For we have gone from being in a political moment to a historical one.

I use the words somewhat eccentrically, to distinguish between events that are simple enough to be fully explicable (“political”) and those that are too complex to be defined (“historical”). The war against Afghanistan took place in what I am calling the political realm: It had a clear, limited and achievable goal, one understood by all — and widely supported around the world. The impending war against Iraq, on the other hand, is a historical event. It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable.

The distinction also has a moral dimension. To exist in history is to have passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic: politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal.

The two great competing ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were both self-consciously historical movements. As Czeslaw Milosz brilliantly noted in his classic study “The Captive Mind,” it was precisely the abstraction of communism, its claim to have attained the summit of morality and to have incorporated into itself all possible contradictions, that made it so meticulously horrifying. In similar fashion, fascism contained a kind of blankness at its core: the self-glorifying violence of the state simultaneously concealed and revealed the emptiness of its founding concept, the national tribe.

The lesson every government should have learned from the bloody 20th century, one written in blood across the tortured soil of old, very old Europe, is very simple: Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too abstract, too dangerous. Avoid men with Big Ideas — especially stupid men with Big Ideas. Take care of politics: let history take care of itself. In a word, don’t play God.

George Bush is a deeply religious man, and he deeply believes in the God-given mission of the United States to shed light — Auden’s “affirming flame” — upon the world. But as we wait for the bombs to fall, we can only pray that he does not release darkness.

“September 1st, 1939″
By W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

My companion and I, both Middle East experts, had been called to consult with Vance concerning the disastrous hostage-rescue mission that had grounded American helicopters in the Iranian desert. Vance had been on holiday when the decision to proceed was made in a meeting of the National Security Council, spearheaded by hawkish Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski (who, ironically, is a voice of caution in the current debate about war with Iraq). Vance asked our opinion of the mission and how it had affected American-Iranian relations, and we both agreed that it had been an ill-conceived, unmitigated disaster that would set back the release of the hostages for a very long time. In fact, they would remain 444 days in captivity.

Vance lowered his head as we talked, shook it from side to side, and said again and again, “I know! I know!”

News of his resignation reached me an hour or so later. I was sad for Vance, but proud of his decision to stick by his convictions.

Another resignation that made me proud was that of career diplomat John Brady Kiesling from the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece, which was recently made public. His resignation letter is worth quoting:

“The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.”

Kiesling later asks: “Has oderint dum metuant really become our motto?”

This phrase, now quoted regularly among the most militant denizens in the White House, means, “Let them hate us so long as they fear us.” It was penned by Lucius Accius, the Roman poet (170 B.C.), and was said to be a favorite phrase of the emperor Caligula.

It is no secret that Colin Powell is at odds with the group that Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware and others have called the “ideologues” in the White House. These consist of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John R. Bolton. Bolton was reportedly forced on Powell against his will.

Espousing a pragmatic view favoring diplomacy over violence are Powell and the “uniformed military,” consisting of the generals and field commanders.

Powell, a military man himself who never supported “regime change” in the first Gulf War, finds himself in a bureaucratic hammerlock. His supporters are all under the command of people with whom he appears to have serious disagreements. At the same time, the hawkish Bolton sits in Powell’s office undermining his philosophy.

Ever the good soldier, Secretary Powell was compelled to squander his reputation for honesty and forthright dealing in a presentation before the United Nations fraught with questionable information and half-formulated conclusions. His credibility was used to serve people with whom he has a basic disagreement. The joy with which his speech was greeted by militants in the White House and right-wing Republicans had as much to do with his perceived “conversion” to their side as it did with the content of the speech.

Having done the bidding of the White House warriors, Powell has now been sidelined. He was sent to East Asia, and the public did not hear from him for several days. He emerged on March 5 to complain in a speech at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Strategic and International Studies that the Iraqi government moves to disarm were “too little too late.” However, he showed that he was still not committed to war, saying, “If Iraq complies and disarms even at this late hour, it is possible to avoid war.”

I fear that Secretary Powell has been used as badly as Cyrus Vance was used by Brzezinski. Kiesling, the career diplomat in the Athens embassy, has shown his boss the way. It’s time for Powell to show his true mettle and leave the fray while his honor is still relatively intact.

“Hardball” lost some of its edge in the early days of the Bush administration. Matthews needs an enemy, or at least a cause, to keep him charged. But the show has become must-viewing again for anyone tuned into the nation’s latest political drama (one that cable news poohbahs also hope will boost ratings): Who wants to bury a dictator? This time around, though, Matthews is bucking the right. He’s the only mainstream cable host who’s openly opposing the administration’s rush to war, and almost every night he battles bloodthirsty Iraq hawks and rails against spineless Democrats who won’t muster the power to stop them. Even more remarkably, considering the media establishment’s reluctance to take issue with Israeli leaders, he never misses an opportunity to critique the Bush administration’s pro-Ariel Sharon Middle East policy, which he insists endangers the U.S. as well as Israel by denying the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations to statehood.

Some liberals still won’t watch “Hardball,” remembering the excesses of Matthews’ impeachment shtick. In his new book, “What Liberal Media?” Nation press critic Eric Alterman insists Matthews is no better than Fox’s O’Reilly, calling him “a showman rather than a journalist,” though Matthews was a Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner and then the Chronicle for 15 years. Like O’Reilly, Alterman notes, Matthews is never more apoplectic than when going after elitist liberals, especially Hillary Clinton, whom Matthews nicknamed “Evita.” He once bragged to Ad Week, “You’re never going to see Hillary Clinton on my show,” because, he predicted, she wasn’t man enough to face his hardball questions.

But Hillary Clinton, at least, seems to have forgiven Matthews — and he’s sweetened on her, too. They sat down for an hour-long conversation late last year as part of the “Hardball College Tour,” at State University of New York’s Albany campus, and it was as flirtatious as a first date. In a long talk with Salon, Matthews admitted the New York senator has won him over with her hard work, but he says he still can’t stand her husband. Still, with the Bush administration on the verge of war with Iraq, the “Hardball” host even admitted to second thoughts about his over-the-top crusade against Clinton, given the magnitude of the issues that threaten the nation today.

In the wide-ranging conversation conducted earlier this week, on the day that ratings-challenged MSNBC announced it had added ultra-right attack dog Michael Savage to its lineup, Matthews assailed neo-conservative Iraq hawks, slapped Bush for sitting “on Sharon’s lap” (but explained why he likes him anyway), laid out what’s wrong and right with Fox News, and worried about whether his antiwar stand is hurting his ratings.

You like to say that the missing element in the war debate is a debate. Why do you think that is?

It’s so tricky to give an honest answer to this. Motives are so hard to get to. There are people opposed to this war who are trying to stop it, and there are people who are just posing as critics. For example, if the Democrats wanted to stop a court appointment because it was essential to NARAL, or Norman Lear’s group, People for the American Way, they’d do everything they could: They might filibuster, you know they’d campaign hard against the person, they’d really try to win. From Bork to Thomas to Estrada, they go in, they try to win. And back during the Vietnam War, that was a real opposition, where you use all the power in your hands to stop something that’s wrong for the country. You had [Sen. Wayne] Morse, you had [Sen. Frank] Church — they went after the money. I don’t see that in this debate at all. I see people who are just posturing.

Well, Ted Kennedy wants the president to come back to Congress for approval before we invade.

But they voted for the resolution before the election. And I can’t explain that — I can’t explain Dianne Feinstein’s vote. I can’t explain John Kerry’s vote. I can’t explain Chuck Schumer’s vote. This was a blank check for war

Though some of them tried to spin it differently.

This was worse than the Gulf of Tonkin. It was, “Whenever you get around to it, here’s your hall pass, Mr. President.” The Democrats just don’t have a foreign policy that they’re willing to defend, that they’re willing to use to take down the president’s. We’re dealing with the power of suggestion here. Once it was suggested that Saddam Hussein might give his weaponry to terrorists, or might use weapons himself in the region, then it became hard for the Democrats to say, “Well, that can’t happen.” They were unable to stand up and say: “Here’s our policy. It’s ‘Unite the world against terrorism.’”

Unity is the most important thing on the road to stamping out terror. You need global rules of law and order, and they have to be enforced. Start with that principle. Certain arms agreements have to be enforced. There has to be respect for multilateral action. Then you use all that force to stop certain things from happening.

You don’t say, like the Bush crowd, “I got this guy over here and I don’t like him and I’m gonna get him, whether you back me or not.” That’s like what’s-his-name, the guy who shot the kids in the subway

Bernard Goetz?

Yeah, that’s what it reminds me of. It’s that kind of foreign policy. We just go after the guys we don’t like. I think we were on the road to greatness at the end of 2001. You had Germans picking up all kinds of terrorists in their country. The world was united behind us. Even Iran was helping out. There was an active effort to stop al-Qaida.

Then the administration tied it in to the regional dispute between Israel and its enemies, as if that’s about international terrorism. No, it’s not. That’s a particular regional issue involving people who don’t want Israel to have whatever it has, and Israel wanting to play tough with them. But now we’re against that too — as if we’re going after the Basques, and the Provisional IRA too. We’re not. We supported the contras. We’re not against all opposition to government, or all paramilitary operations.

But we started to sit on Sharon’s lap, and say, “Oh we have the exact same foreign policy as Israel.” Well, not necessarily. We support a two-state solution — that’s been our policy. Sharon’s not adopting that. I understand why — he’s under pressure. But the U.S. has married a down-the-line, right-wing policy toward Israel with an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim policy toward the region. And that’s too bad. We’ve always had a dual role in the region — friend of Israel, and honest broker. We’ve given up the honest broker role completely.

And you think that’s driving our policy in Iraq?

Well, the right-wing policy with regard to Israel — the people who don’t want to deal with Arafat, who don’t want a Palestinian state — the whole sort of right-wing view is consistent with the view toward Iraq. It’s the same policy and the same people. The conservative media world, the Bill Kristols, they’re all saying, “Don’t deal with Arafat, and push regime change in Iraq.” It’s all the same policy, and that’s the policy that’s destroying this administration.

And then what? On to Iran, on to Syria? If you talk to the conservatives who come on my show, they want to squeeze Iran and Syria, maybe Lebanon too. And I don’t know how much of this is the president’s policy himself. You don’t know whether he’s thought through how this is going to affect the Middle East. I mean, they contend we’re going to be received as liberators, not aggressors or colonizers. Well, how do they know? I mean, somebody honest like Ken Pollack will say, “You know, we don’t really know.” We’re taking on a billion people. A battle for Baghdad could ignite a war with Islam. I think people in the Muslim world are going to see this as the Second Crusades. Every geography book in the world is going to say “American-occupied Iraq” over the map of Iraq. That’s going to be the most glaring indignity the Arabs have ever faced. Every school in the Arab world will be a madrass school.

The way bin Laden points to the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia

Right. And nobody ever explained to me why we kept troops there all these years, when we know it drove them crazy. We’re not even using them this time around. So why not get them out? Why didn’t we recognize how much it bothered them spiritually and politically?

I know one thing: There are a billion Islamic people in the world today, and there will be about 2 billion by the time we’re dead. They’re not going to give up their religion. Five years from now, 10 years from now, there’s going to be a huge Islamic population in the world, they’re going to be nationalistic, they’re going to be religious, and they’re going to be militant. The question will be, “Do they hate us or not? Do they have a grievance?”

Well, do they?

Well, they will after this, won’t they?

But don’t they already have a grievance, with our policy toward Israel and the Palestinians?

I don’t understand how we can justify the occupied territories. It serves no goal, except the political goal of Sharon within Israel. It doesn’t serve an American interest. It really doesn’t really serve Israeli interests — it serves the interests of the political party that’s getting the votes of the settlers on the West Bank.

You’re one of the few mainstream American commentators or journalists who’ll take on these questions directly — openly question our support for the Sharon approach, oppose the Iraq war. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, who’s with me? Nobody’s with me, on television anyway. I think there are several factors here. Most people agree you have to stop weapons of mass destruction — the question is how. Then there’s the emotional response to 9/11, there’s an emotional demand for payback, which a lot of journalists are reluctant to question. And then there’s Israel — a lot of people support Israel, and it’s important to Israel to take out Iraq. So it’s all mixed together. It’s a combination of motives.

What’s driving the president?

With Bush, it’s probably a combination of oil, the father, the politics of the evangelicals in the South, who support Israel, and Jewish voters. It’s very dangerous to speculate about motives, though. It doesn’t get you anywhere. All it does is agitate people. I believe the president. I believe the words that come out of his mouth. I believe he wants to be a liberator. I think he believes the neo-conservative tracts — he’s adopted the lingo of this crowd. “Weapons of mass destruction.” “Regime change.” They own the Op-Ed pages. I keep wondering: Is there such a thing as a neo-conservative who doesn’t have a column? I’m serious about this. Is it required to have a column to be a neo-conservative? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have some kind of column who’s a neo-conservative.

You’ve never run into one of them just sitting in a bar

No! Never! And here’s the thing: I traveled in the Third World with the Peace Corps. I’ve never felt anything but hospitality around the world. I don’t think they hate me. I don’t feel the hatred a lot of these right-wingers assume. I just don’t have the problem a lot of these people have. Most Americans don’t travel much — some of these guys never leave the country. Still they say, “They hate us already. It doesn’t matter what we do in Iraq.” But nothing’s more dispiriting than saying there’s nothing we can do. It’s a matter of immense degrees of difference between not liking your secular lifestyle, and killing you — or killing themselves to kill you, which is even a step beyond that.

We’ve got to recognize that when we march into Iraq, we’re setting up the card tables in front of every university in the Arab world, the Islamic world, to recruit for al-Qaida. Why don’t we just go set up the card tables ourselves, right now? Sign them up to commit suicide. And you never hear anybody talking about this. It would be helpful if there were someone telling the president, well, yes, there is this danger from Iraq, but there’s almost a certitude of inflaming the world against us if we intervene.

That used to be Colin Powell’s role.

Yeah, what happened to him? I really don’t understand that.

I loved all those stories about “Well, he really got mad at the French.”

Yeah, who was floating those stories? They were everywhere. I mean, c’mon. Are we going to have a dither? A war over personal pique? Who put that out? Someone needs to talk sense to the president. But these people are not world travelers. This president, much as I like him, had all the opportunities in the world. I mean, if somebody said to me, junior year of college, you can go anywhere, your old man’s paying for it, I’d have been gone in a flash. But I had to work. Every summer my mother would say, “Get that job and hold on to it until August 30.” I mean, the idea that Bar could have sent him off on a Grand Tour

But he wasn’t the least bit interested

Why? Why isn’t he interested in the world? Because here’s the bad news for him: He’s in the world now.

But I have to ask: Why did you preface that by saying you like him? It seemed reflexive. Why do you like him? I mean, I’m not saying you should hate him, but c’mon, do you really like him as a president — and how can you, when you say all that critical stuff about him, and all of it is true?

You know why? Because if I was with him, I’d try to change his mind. I wouldn’t pee in his mouth. That’s why. And there are certain people in politics I just don’t like, and I wouldn’t try. I just think they’re arrogant, they’re

Like Clinton

Ugh  yeah, yeah, right. I mean, when I’m with him, I’m as charmed as anyone else. It’s hard not to like him. But

You don’t.

Well, I’ve come to like Hillary a lot.

Yeah, I noticed — you guys had a lot of chemistry on the “Hardball College Tour,” Chris! What’s up with that?

Look, she’s going out there, she stuck her neck out, she took a risk running for Senate, she had the balls to do it, she took on the job and she won. And she’s a good senator — in fact, she’s probably going to be the next Senate majority leader. I mean, I think what she ought to do is forget this frickin’ presidency idea, because she’ll never be able to bring him back with her, the American people don’t want him hanging around upstairs, hanging out with Hugh Rodham in front of the refrigerator, making up lists of pardons. C’mon. He’d be embarrassing upstairs at the White House. So I think she’d have a hard time. I think a woman president would have to be very conservative to get elected.

She probably couldn’t have the Clinton kind of marriage, that’s for sure. But as we sit here and talk about what’s facing the country under the Bush administration — the rush to war, the threat of terror — do you ever regret the amount of time you spent on your show talking about impeachment, or how critical you were of Clinton?

[Ten-second pause.] Well, faced with the possibility of a catastrophe in terms of our history  Yeah. I do. I mean, if I had to put those two things up against each other, if I were forced to make that juxtaposition

And I guess I’m forcing you

I still think I could defend myself by pointing to the value of the presidency. I don’t think the Democrats protected the value of the presidency. I mean, Bill Clinton has a problem, but the fact that [Clinton Cabinet members] Billy Daley and Donna Shalala allowed him to use them as part of his protection I thought was really awful. Somebody should have stood up and said, “Mr. President, I’m turning in my resignation. I care about your policies and what you came here to do, but I cannot defend my role in a coverup of your obvious misbehavior.” I mean, when Clinton went out and he had Feinstein sitting in another room waiting and he said, “I did not have sex with that woman” — that woman! — he used the presidency to cover for his personal behavior.

I don’t believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question — you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you. I don’t know why his lawyers didn’t tell him, “You don’t have to answer any questions about your private life, Mr. President. Let them sue you. Take the heat. You don’t have to answer.” But he decided to take advice from Dick Morris, and if you want advice to lie or cheat, you go to a guy who lies and cheats. And then he lied, and he used the office to do it. He used [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright, for God’s sake. And now it’s a problem for the Democrats even though he’s not there any longer.

You think the Democrats should have censured him.

The Democrats just never ruled on this. They should have come together and said, “We’re gonna censure this guy.” They never did. They never went to him and said, “Stop lying. Stop lying right now.” They let the Republicans do it through impeachment. You know, there were 29 [Democratic] votes for censure in the Senate. And if the Republicans had any sense, they would have censured him before the ’98 midterm election, and they would have won the election. The problem was, what was provable wasn’t impeachable, and what was impeachable wasn’t provable. You just couldn’t prove obstruction of justice, unless Betty Currie and Vernon Jordan or Monica Lewinsky talked. All Lewinsky had to say was: “It was clear to me they were buying my silence by trying to get me a job and get me out of town.” She didn’t say that. Betty Currie didn’t talk. Vernon didn’t talk.

I want to change gears for a minute and ask, What’s going on with cable news? Why is Fox so successful?

Because there’s a percentage of Americans, 5 to 10 percent — who feel alienated from secular culture, from television, from the movies, who feel the media is just liberals on the coasts

But is the media liberal?

Well, read the last chapter of my book

Give me the short version.

OK, quickly: Just look at who won the third debate between Bush and Gore. I knew Bush won, because people liked him more. People just didn’t like Gore. But all the journalists thought Gore won big, he cleaned the guy’s clock. Everybody was saying that, even [conservative New York Times columnist William] Safire

But if Safire says it, then it isn’t a “liberal” point of view

Well, OK, he’s a conservative, but he looks at a lot of things the way elite liberals look at them. The media elite thought Gore proved he knew so much, but the fact was, as they say, Gore knew a lot, but Bush knew enough. People liked Bush.

But that doesn’t prove that the media is liberal.

Well, then why did the media choose Gore as the winner in that debate, while the people picked Bush?

Because you’re right, they overvalued Gore’s being smart, his being quick, knowing details. But that’s not the same as saying the media picked Gore because they agreed with his liberal policies. I think it’s a cultural divide more than a political one — you can’t lump Safire in there and say it’s liberalism…

That’s why I can lump him in — it’s not political, you’re right, it’s culture. That’s why they all liked Gore more

OK, but it’s not because they support liberal politics

It’s establishment vs. anti-establishment. That’s why Fox is doing so well. They get this. This demographic doesn’t want to see the young, the hip — they don’t want celebrities. I had Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy on recently — it did terrible! I love Brian Dennehy, but the audience doesn’t. They’re angrier than I am. I’m not angry.

Oh, you still seem angry sometimes. But how much do you think about this stuff when you’re programming?

A lot. I tell my staff, we’re riding a tour bus around, and we’re going to stop and look at some weird stuff — but we’re taking our viewers around safely. They’re just looking out the window at it. I’m trying to create a sense of comfort for my center audience. My audience is much more center right, or centrist.

Than the rest of MSNBC?

Than what? [Laughs.]

I said, “The rest of MSNBC.”

[Laughs.] Uh, I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about. I’m just kidding. We’re trying to get it together. We’re working on it.

Roger Ailes tried to lure you to Fox, didn’t he?

Oh, I love Roger.

Did you think about it?

I always think about Roger. He’s a pioneer. But we’re gonna do it here. We’re turning things around here. Besides, I’m not going to pander, or pee all over Jesse Jackson every night just to make a point with the conservatives. The difference between me and them is that I’ll look at Jesse Jackson and I’ll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they’ll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser. There’s the historic Jesse Jackson. There’s the great orator, one of the best in the country. There’s a guy who has a heart. And there’s a guy who’s kind of an asshole too. I’m not just gonna go after the black Jesse Jackson they all want to make fun of, but I know the wrong people are gonna laugh at that. I don’t want to play to that crowd. I don’t.

And on the war, I think my numbers would be a lot higher if I were out there beating the drum for this war. In fact, I don’t think it, I know it. But I can’t be for the war. I can’t find a reason to be for this war. I’ve looked, and I can’t, so Im not. The people who are backing this war are more interested in their own ideology than what’s good for the country. It’s not about America. Which is scary.