Nuclear weapons also are a made-in-the-U.S.A. product, and given that we are the only nation to have used them, one would expect that we would have a special responsibility to eschew their future use.

Instead, the administration’s plan not only targets the three “axis of evil” nations — Iran, Iraq and North Korea — but Syria, Libya, Russia and China as well.

Consider the absurdity: We risk escalating a worldwide nuclear arms race to nuke a shadow terrorist enemy whose most effective military action to date was begun with box cutters. Clearly, that threat could have been met best by taking the modest steps of maintaining armed air marshals on civilian planes and employing better-trained airport security guards.

Nuking our own or anyone else’s airports would not have saved the World Trade Center and the human beings who were there Sept. 11. The hijackers succeeded because our $30-billion-a-year intelligence apparatus failed to perform and we consistently coddled Saudi Arabia’s backers of religious hate even after their minions blew up our embassies.

Having squandered the Clinton-led Israel-Palestine peace initiatives, President Bush watched from the sidelines as the Mideast caldron, the source of most of the world’s terrorist threats, boiled to overflowing. The enduring terrorist threat has little to do with the caves of Afghanistan and everything to do with the failure to secure the Mideast peace promised by Bush’s father’s Gulf War.

Clearly, Arab-Israeli peace should be the highest order in a war on terrorism. This administration, however — whether to gain poll approval or because of its allegiance to military contractors — has raised the military options above any diplomatic efforts. So why not also throw some nuclear weapons into the mix?

Because it is ludicrous. Does anyone really believe that nuclear weapons might save the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, when it assuredly would incinerate them? Or that targeting Russia and China for potential nuclear attacks would lead those nations to embrace further moves toward nuclear stability and arms control? Or cause them to be less threatened by our announced plan to scrap the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and build a missile defense?

In fact, Chinese or Russian military planners would be attacked by their own hard-liners if they failed to respond to this report by placing even greater emphasis on making their own nuclear forces more robust, survivable and again on hair-trigger alert in anticipation of an American first strike. To encourage heightened fears of U.S. nuclear intentions at a time when the Russians and Chinese are our allies in the war against terrorism is dizzyingly counterproductive.

We need to encourage those countries and other nuclear powers to think of nuclear weapons as dangerous junk that at best will boomerang and destroy all that they care about. As the anthrax example demonstrates, our own investment in weapons of mass destruction can easily turn into our own undoing.

What madness to even entertain the thought that nuclear weapons are anything other than the means to the world’s destruction. What we need instead is a U.S.-led worldwide campaign to shun nuclear weapons as inherently genocidal, to effectively end proliferation of nuclear weapons technology and material and to treat those nations that dally in the business of nuclear arms as barbarians in need of restraint.

It is we who have defined rogue nations as those bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. How then can we so cavalierly entertain the idea of again leading the world down the path to nuclear Armageddon?

I’ve been thinking about that all week, since I’m one of the “liberal commentators” Horowitz was complaining about in his rejoinder to David Talbot’s cover story, “Axis of Stupidity.” More than once since Sept. 11, I’ve nodded respectfully to Bush’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, only to quickly rap him for his other sins — the way the White House has tried to micromanage the news about the worldwide war on terror, the shortcomings of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address; just last week, his administration’s behind the scenes work to scuttle tough campaign finance reform while pretending to back it.

But I think Horowitz raised a fair question, one that deserves an answer: If you believe Bush did a good job in the wake of Sept. 11, as I do, can you still think he’s doing a lousy job overall as president? Isn’t commander in chief his most important role? And, considering the president’s mostly mistake-free execution of the war, is it really fair for critics to seize once again on his easy-to-spoof verbal foibles — like his weekend gaffe in Japan, when, confusing “deflation” with “devaluation,” he sent the ailing yen into a teeth-chattering tailspin?

Of course, the answer to Horowitz’s question is yes, you can support Bush’s handling of the war to date and still criticize the job he’s doing as president. Because it’s becoming increasingly clear that almost everything admirable about Bush’s early war effort — the hard work lining up international support; the careful outreach to Muslim nations and communities to make clear the war wasn’t against Islam; the four weeks of restraint after Sept. 11 before bombing began on Oct. 7 — represented an all-too brief departure from his administration’s normal modus operandi. Now that the smoke has nearly cleared in Afghanistan, the bad old Bush has become plain for all to see — from his administration’s nose-thumbing unilateralism to its obsessive secrecy about its inner workings to its simplistic religious world view.

There were two whopping examples on Tuesday alone: the stunning news that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence is preparing a disinformation campaign about the war, including planting false stories in the foreign media, and a remarkable story about Attorney General John Ashcroft assuring a Christian broadcasters’ group that God is on our side in the war against terror. Both news items illustrate what’s most worrisome about the latest phase of a war that seems increasingly ill-defined and unlimited: an arrogance and self-righteousness that makes everything permissible — including trashing the country’s most precious democratic traditions — as long as it’s presented as an anti-terror measure.

In effect, Horowitz admonished the media that it was improper to criticize a president who has just prosecuted a successful war. But the truth is the media has already docilely accepted this argument. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is being hailed by pundits as a “rock star” for his jolly, tell-them-nothing, Borscht-belt-on-the-Potomac sessions with reporters, should we really be surprised that the Pentagon thinks it can get away with dishing out blatant lies too? And when smart journalists like the New York Times’ Tom Friedman and CBS’s Lesley Stahl praise Bush for acting a little “crazy” in order freak out our enemies — even if it wigs out the rest of the world too — maybe the real surprise is that the administration thinks it needs to use disinformation at all, given the media’s eagerness to spout the White House line.

But arrogance combined with ignorance may yet cost Bush, and the country, quite dearly. John Ashcroft’s remarks to a group of Christian broadcasters this week were particularly unnerving, a window into the administration’s fundamentalist worldview. Contrasting “the way of God and the way of the terrorists” (and forgetting for a moment that the terrorists believe they, too, are acting in God’s name, even though they call him Allah), Ashcroft said the following:

“Civilized people — Muslims, Christians and Jews — all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom — a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.”

Ashcroft’s inclusion of Muslims and Jews in his theocratic musings fooled no one. His remarks made clear that like other hard-line Christian rightists, the attorney general puts his religion ahead of the Constitution. This is an administration that divides the world into believers and nonbelievers, and that’s dangerous.

Ashcroft has a particularly feeble grasp of the division between church and state, of course, but anyone who thinks he was straying off the reservation with his remarks should consider why Bush can’t stop talking about “evil” and “evildoers.” (It’s also worth noting that Ashcroft was subbing for Bush himself at the Christian broadcasters meeting, after his trip to Asia forced the president to send a stand-in.) Bush’s obsession with evil is not only simplistic and childlike, as pointed out in “Axis of Stupidity,” it’s also language that marks him as a religious fundamentalist, a true believer who can’t conceive of a different way of looking at the world. I have no doubt he agrees with Ashcroft, and even though I happen to be a believer, that rattles me. Why? Because there is too much religious fervor in world politics today, and it has brought nothing but misery. It’s not reassuring when the administration starts to out-fanatic the religious fanatics who have declared war on us.

So even though I supported his early moves in the war, I think Bush deserves far more scrutiny, and criticism, than he’s been getting. Even his verbal gaffes matter (although I agree with Horowitz on one point: Bush isn’t stupid, and they’re not a sign of stupidity). It’s not about the media playing petty gotcha games: Mixing up “deflation” and “devaluation” had international consequences. Even his goofy comments at the DMZ border between North and South Korea bear examination, not just a snicker: Commenting on a grisly attack on American soldiers by axe-wielding North Koreans along the DMZ, Bush mused, “No wonder I think they’re evil” — as though he hadn’t quite known why he thought they were evil up until that point, but was just aping his advisors’ views. (Or maybe he was really talking about “Axes of Evil” in his State of the Union speech — bada-bing! OK, that was a cheap shot.)

Bush’s gaffes aren’t a symptom of stupidity, but of his rich-kid’s luxurious detachment, his frat-boy’s “Whatever, dude!” attitude. He may not be dumb, but he’s a lightweight. He’s used to people cleaning up after him. It was wrong to give him a pass on that trait when he was running for president, and it’s wrong now, even in wartime. He veers weirdly between this fortunate-son insouciance and, when seeking gravitas, a born-again absolutism (the force that helped pull him out of his drunken youth).

Yes, Bush did succeed in mopping up the terrorists in Afghanistan — with the glaring exception of their leaders. But his brief success as commander in chief can’t erase his increasingly apparent flaws as president. From his ideology-driven bungling of the economy to his historic assault on civil liberties to his dangerous global overreach, this is a president whose performance falls far short of his poll numbers. And it’s time for the media to start calling it like it is.

After a scuffle with American Airlines employees in Germany, the North Korean delegation, despite the country’s recent conciliatory gestures toward the West, reverted to Cold War rhetoric, rescinded its RSVP to the U.N. meeting and flew back to Pyongyang on Lufthansa.

American Airlines security employees at the Frankfurt airport subjected the North Koreans to special FAA security screenings designated for nationals of countries formerly known as “rogue states,” but recently rechristened “states of concern” by Madeleine Albright’s State Department. Depending on which account you believe, they were either gently patted down (according to American Airlines) or aggressively strip-searched, including “even the sensitive parts of the body,” in the words of outraged Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon.

The trouble began when the delegation, led by designated head of state Kim Yong Nam, tried to board a connecting flight from Frankfurt to the U.S. on American. According to the airline, some members were patted down and asked to remove certain garments of clothing “such as a jacket” and their shoes. When others member of the delegation balked, they were not allowed to board the flight.

In a statement released to reporters Wednesday, American Airlines said that some delegates then decided to undergo the security measures, but were too late to board the flight before takeoff. They refused the alternative flight on German carrier Lufthansa that was offered, and instead went public, accusing the U.S. of trying to force them into “strip searches.”

“U.S. air security officials … opened suitcases and handbags of each member of the presidential entourage, forced them to take off clothes and shoes and thoroughly searched even the sensitive parts of the body,” Choe Su Hon said at a news conference. “This incident cannot be construed otherwise than an intentional and premeditated plot made in advance according to the manuscript of the U.S. administration.” In a statement, the Foreign Ministry also warned, “the United States will come to know what a dear price it will have to pay for having hurt our people’s dignity.”

A State Department insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, told an Associated Press reporter Tuesday that the Koreans had not informed the U.S. that they would be flying an American carrier from Frankfurt. Generally, diplomats who are accredited by the United Nations and the State Department are exempt from the more stringent security rules attached to passengers from countries on the United States’ terrorism list, but the North Korea delegation was not. Stringent airport security provisions have been in place for North Koreans since the State Department designated the country a “state sponsor of terrorism” for its alleged responsibility in the bombing deaths of 115 aboard a South Korean jet in 1987. According to the State Department’s global terrorism homepage, North Korea also provided refuge to members of the Japanese Communist League-Red Army Faction; which hijacked a North Korean-bound Japan Airlines jet in 1970; attempted to kidnap a North Korean diplomat who was trying to defect to Thailand in 1999; and stands accused of acting as a weapons shop for terrorist organizations. North Koreans aren’t the only foreigners subjected to the pat-downs, bag searches and body searches imposed on the 15-member delegation by American Airlines. Other nations bearing the State Department’s scarlet letter are Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria.

Nonetheless, American Airlines issued an apology: “We are sorry for the inconvenience caused Monday to the North Korean diplomatic delegation.” The airline also reiterated in its statement that it was bound by FAA security policies: “As a U.S. carrier we are obliged under Federal Aviation Administration regulations to carry out stringent security procedures for all passengers traveling on our international flights.”

The North Korea contretemps raised questions about whether other summit attendees were submitted to embarrassing security searches. Calls to American Airlines’ spokesperson seeking answers to additional questions remained unanswered at press time.

When asked to comment on the security procedures, Rebecca Trexler, spokeswoman for the FAA, said, “I can’t. We can say that they’re enhanced security procedures, but I can’t describe publicly what they are because that would be telling the bad guys what to do. My understanding is that they weren’t strip-searched, they were subjected to pat-downs, and I think they asked them to take off their jackets and shoes. They [the American Airlines employees] were in compliance with FAA regulations.”

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart stopped short of an apology for the incident, but did state, “We regret that they got on a plane and headed back home.”

The northernmost Koreans had been oozing goodwill in recent weeks, making subtle and overt humanitarian and diplomatic gestures toward South Korea. The Pyongyang government, for example, permitted several dozen aging Communists to see their 90-year-old mothers in South Korea last month, and has allowed other North-South family visits.

The strip-search flap left many wondering how it would affect the end of the ice age between the two Koreas. South Korea’s president Kim told the AP he didn’t expect it to stop “the trend of a thaw between the North and South.”

That’s certainly egghead reading material. But at the next debate, when CNN’s Judy Woodruff asked Bush what lessons he had drawn from Acheson’s career in foreign affairs, he barely answered the question, offering only familiar bromides from his stump speech, such as “we must promote the peace” and “free trade brings … hope and prosperity.”

Moments later, Sen. John McCain, in a less than subtle dig, called attention to Bush’s vacuous response by making a specific reference to Acheson: “When Dean Acheson walked into Harry Truman’s office in June of 1950 and said, ‘North Korea’s attacked South Korea,’ Harry Truman didn’t take a poll. Harry Truman knew what we had to do.”

Actually, according to Chace’s book, Acheson phoned Truman, who was in Missouri, with the news, and it took Truman a full day to decide how to respond. But give McCain a B-minus for improvising an answer that placed Acheson, more or less, in his correct context.

Who would have guessed that Dean Acheson would be a campaign issue
28 years after his death? Luckily, Bush still has a chance to redeem himself on this front. Below is a pop quiz based on the Acheson biography. We invite the Texas governor to take the test (without, of course, looking at the answers that follow). If nothing else, a decent score would put to rest any doubts about Bush’s reading comprehension skills.

Questioners in future debates should feel free to steal from the list that follows, as well.

1) When Acheson was a student at Yale, what was his grade point average?

2) To what was Acheson referring when he said he had visited “one of these mad and not a little degrading spectacles [and] nothing would induce me to do it again”?

3) In 1933, Acheson was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury to serve beneath Treasury Secretary William Woodin. How did Woodin obtain his position? How much banking experience did Woodin have? What did Woodin’s appointment reveal about U.S. politics?

4) After falling out of favor with President Roosevelt, why did Acheson not ally himself with the Republican Party?

5) Of what job did Acheson say, “there is only one test — who can best pilot the ship in … crisis?”

6) According to Chace, what was Acheson’s credo?

a) “I am ready to lead.”

b) “Look at my record.”

c) “Not compromise but decision.”

d) “I want to accomplish something.”

7) When President Harry Truman, 13 days after the death of President Roosevelt, was first informed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the secret project to build an atomic bomb, how long did the meeting last?

Whom did McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to President John F. Kennedy, describe this way: “[He] seldom went beyond the counsel he had to choose from. He was not an initiator but a chooser; the buck stopped here, but he waited for the buck to arrive”? Hint: Keep your eye on the buck.

9) Explain the Bretton Woods agreements. Keep your answer to sound bite length.

10) True or false: When Truman in 1947 issued the Truman Doctrine, a challenge to Communism, and declared “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he and Acheson meant this literally and intended to stick to these words regarding U.S. actions around the world.

11) Which of the following took the position in 1948 that the “United States has little strategic interest in maintaining the present troops and bases in Korea” and advised Washington to accept Soviet domination of Korea and send aid instead to “countries of greater strategic importance”?

a) the American Communist Party

b) Sen. Prescott Bush

c) Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

d) the New York Times editorial board

12) When confronted with a hard decision — what to say about accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, whose brother had been a law partner of Acheson — did Acheson rely on advisors and consultants?

13) When Acheson spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1950, he decried Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt and concluded his remarks on this subject with the words of poet John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore …” Complete the quote Acheson used. (Hint: The lines do not rhyme.)

14. When Acheson briefed President-elect Eisenhower in 1952, what foreign policy problem did he have no solution for?

15) How did Acheson describe President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba?

a) “poorly planned”

b) “worth trying”

c) “a bungled toy-soldier campaign mounted by a playboy”

d) “asinine”

16) During the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon proposed a strong military response that could have led to an invasion of Cuba. Why did that nearly lead to nuclear war?

17) What lesson of the Korean War did Acheson believe applied to the Vietnam
War?

18) In 1967, Acheson, who was an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson,
suspected he was not being provided accurate information about the war in
Vietnam, and he stormed out of a White House meeting with the president.
Afterward, a Johnson aide called Acheson and asked why he had left so
abruptly. What was Acheson’s reply?

19) What books did Acheson like to read? You will receive extra credit for drawing lessons applicable to the present from any of them.

1) As Chace writes, “his grades rarely rose above a C average.”

2) Political conventions.

3) Woodin, president of the American Car & Foundry Co., was appointed because he had contributed $10,000 to Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign. He had no banking experience. The appointment showed that in politics, money talks and big-bucks contributors get paybacks from the politicians they fund.

4) Acheson objected to the Republican effort to red-bait FDR’s New Deal by tagging it as communism. “It seems to me utterly fantastic to suggest,” Acheson said, “that Communism is in any manner involved in this campaign. It serves only to arouse spirit of bigotry … I am against any party which inflames this spirit.”

5) The presidency.

6) c) “Not compromise but decision.”

7) Fifteen minutes.

Harry Truman.

9) These international monetary accords, negotiated in 1944 in New Hampshire, established the economic and financial underpinnings of the postwar world and set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

10) False. Acheson shortly thereafter said the Truman administration was not committed to “an ideological crusade” everywhere around the world. Years later, he explained that in the early days of the Cold War such rhetoric was necessary because it was “clearer than the truth.”

11) b) Eisenhower. Four years later, when Eisenhower was the Republican presidential nominee, Eisenhower opportunistically blasted Acheson and the Truman administration for inviting the attack on South Korea by putting it outside “America’s so-called defensive perimeter.”

12) No. He later said, “I felt that advisors were of no use and so consulted none. I understood that I had responsibilities above and beyond my own desires.” When asked about Alger Hiss, Acheson referred to a New Testament passage calling for compassion and said, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” He was vilified by political foes for this.

13) “… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

14) Vietnam. At the time the French were trying to quell a
nationalist-communist movement there, and Acheson didn’t believe the French could succeed.

15) d. “asinine.” He thought Kennedy’s obsession with Castro’s Cuba was, Chace writes, “a distraction from the central strategic concerns of the United States.”

16) The United States didn’t know that Soviet troops stationed in Cuba possessed tactical nuclear weapons and were authorized to use them should the Americans invade. The presence of these weapons were not disclosed until 1993.

17) Distrust the predictions of the U.S. military.

18) “You can tell the president — and you can tell him in precisely these words — that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”

19) Biographies of statesmen, such as Benjamin Disraeli. Fiction by Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens. Books on the Civil War. And Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War.”

For those keeping score at home, this war is technically not over: 250 miles north of the Cass ‘N’ Rock, upwards of a million troops are locked in a 45-year-old standoff between North Korean and United Nations Command forces along the most militarized border in the world.

Holding true to the absurdities of Cold War-era nomenclature, this border is called the Demilitarized Zone.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

It’s just after 8 in the morning, and I am taking a USO bus north from Seoul to the DMZ. This trip is not as sensitive and dangerous as it sounds: Approximately 70,000 people took the trip last year, including President Clinton.

In the seat next to me, a 50ish woman from Virginia is entranced by the empty yellow countryside that surrounds us. She’s been staying in the urban madness of Seoul for four days, and she says she never knew that the Korean landscape could look so quiet.

But the landscape is not as empty as it appears at first glance. Gaze long at these roadside foothills and you can just make out trenches and camouflage netting, infantry soldiers and artillery. A mere 40 road miles separate Seoul from the entrenched front rank of a million-man North Korean army, and every inch of the space in between has been groomed to defending South Korea’s capital from attack. As we near the DMZ, the military presence becomes more obvious: razor-wire fences on the Imjin River, anti-tank barricades framing the highway, medieval-looking iron-spiked barrels gracing the asphalt.

The Virginian asks me if I’ve ever been scared, living and working in Korea for the past two years. I tell her that Korea is a strange place where gruesome traffic deaths are an hourly occurrence, rival sects of Buddhist monks get into public fistfights and department store buildings collapse because the local building inspectors live off bribes. If anything, I tell her, I am scared of getting run over by a delivery truck or smashed by a poorly installed I-beam. The threat of war is a forgettable annoyance that I think about only when a civil defense drill halts my bus when I am late for work, or when my middle-age landlady tells me how she learned to throw hand grenades in her high school gym class.

What I don’t tell her is this: If the North were to launch an all-out surprise attack on Seoul this evening, we’d stand about a 50-50 chance of living through the first hour. That’s a statistic I don’t dwell on much.