Secretary Rumsfeld explained that his resignation was prompted by a promise to his grandson, who had just watched the movie “Liar, Liar,” that he would stop lying for an entire day. “My grandson said that if Jim Carrey, an actor in a movie, could tell the truth for a whole day that I should be able to do so as secretary of defense in real life. He had tears in his eyes, and looked at me so earnestly that I agreed to his request without thinking through the consequences.

“I later realized that telling the truth in a single press conference, let alone for a full day, would mean that I would have to resign. I’ll be honest and tell you that I considered breaking my pledge to my grandson. But it’s funny. While I have been able to lie to the country until now, I just can’t break my promise to the little guy. So here it goes. The truth.”

He then read the following prepared statement:

“The truth is that I have failed our nation in regard to fighting terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11. My miscalculations have vastly increased the probability that tens of thousands of Americans will die from terrorism in coming years. Personally, I cannot serve as secretary of defense knowing that when terrorists next kill innocent Americans that I and my administration will have some of their blood on our hands.

“Japanese leaders long regarded it as a matter of personal honor to take responsibility for mis-serving their society, as I have learned through my extensive study of Japanese history and civilization,” said Mr. Rumsfeld, who reportedly regards himself as smarter than anyone else in Washington.

“Unfortunately most U.S. politicians like myself won’t even admit the truth, let alone take responsibility for our mistakes. We accuse our critics of serving the enemy, present false claims of success, or engage in a wide variety of other strategems to avoid responsibility for our obvious failures. I love my country too much, and have too much self-respect, to behave in such a shameful way any longer. It is clear to me that I will be despised by history as just another arrogant, bumbling U.S. policymaker who was too egotistical to heed the opinion of others. Through this act of simply telling the truth I hope to at least redeem myself in the eyes of my grandson.”

In response to reporters’ questions, Mr. Rumsfeld admitted that he had disastrously mishandled America’s military response to Sept. 11. He acknowledged that most of Afghanistan is being run by warlords and support for the Taliban is increasing as it had after the Russian occupation there; that the U.S. is bogged down in Iraq, with U.S. casualties expected to rise; and that the U.S. military is drastically overextended, unable to respond to far more serious threats such as North Korea or Pakistan.

Mr. Rumsfeld also admitted to massively underestimating the costs of his Iraq policy, which now exceed the total of the growing state budget deficits that have forced education and healthcare cuts affecting millions of Americans.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he most regretted that his policies have strengthened terrorist organizations that threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in coming years. “My single biggest mistake was devoting hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops, and shifting dozens of America’s best experts targeting al-Qaida, to the far lesser threat posed by Saddam,” he stated.

“The policies I have recommended have inflamed the entire Muslim world against us, helping al-Qaida recruit terrorists committed to killing Americans. I must agree with the al-Qaida supporter quoted on ‘Nightline’ who stated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the best thing that had ever happened to them. And my foolishness in rushing into Iraq before ensuring allied support has meant that our allies are refusing to supply soldiers, thereby disrupting the lives of the many decent Americans who thought they were joining a weekend National Guard. I have been the worst defense secretary since Robert McNamara, and cannot retain my self-respect without resigning.”

Responding further to reporters’ questions, Mr. Rumsfeld explained why he is more responsible than the president for the failure of U.S. anti-terrorist policy. “As a former baseball team owner and education-oriented governor, the president did not know anything about foreign policy or have the slightest idea of how to fight terrorism after Sept. 11. He relied almost entirely on the advice he received from myself and Mr. Wolfowitz on military matters, Vice President Cheney on political, business and economic affairs, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice on geopolitics, and Karl Rove on domestic politics.”

Mr. Rumsfeld explained that he was also ashamed of his hypocrisy in supporting the administration leak of national security documents to reporter Bob Woodward suggesting that the president was actually in charge of our anti-terrorism policy. He said the leak not only misled the American people but violated his own call to stop leaks that he issued immediately after Sept. 11. “When Woodward made it clear that he would take our version of events at face value in return for the NSC notes and an interview with the president, I betrayed my own values,” he stated. “Woodward has great credibility because of his role in Watergate, and we wanted to use him to build public support for the president and the invasion of Iraq.”

Mr. Rumsfeld was asked whether he felt Messrs. Cheney, Powell and Rove were also morally obligated to resign because of their bad advice to the president. He responded coldly, “I’ve made my choice. Now it’s up to them. They have to live with themselves, as I do with myself. I don’t know how they feel about lying to their grandchildren.”

Vice President Cheney’s office responded to Mr. Rumsfeld’s press conference with a written statement: “The vice president respects Mr. Rumsfeld’s decision to tell the truth as he sees it, but does not agree with his judgments. As he explained on ‘Meet the Press’ on September 14, 2003, the vice president believes that every single decision he and the administration have made on Iraq has been an enormous success. He notes that Iraq is at peace, our soldiers have been welcomed by cheering crowds, we have restored electricity, water and hope to the people of Iraq, and that the Middle East is closer to peace than ever before. Accordingly, the vice president cannot agree that he is to be blamed for anything whatsoever in relation to terrorism or Iraq. On the contrary. And he feels he deserves special credit for creating jobs for Americans by ensuring that his former employer Halliburton gets the lion’s share of funds for Iraqi reconstruction without competitive bidding, thus avoiding unnecessary delays.”

Karl Rove responded that “it is as ridiculous to suggest that I bear responsibility for our Iraq policy as it is to imply that I approved outing Joe Wilson’s wife. And, as much as I respect Secretary Rumsfeld, I must note that the only ones who will benefit from his incomprehensible decision to tell the truth will be Wesley Clark, Howard Dean and John Kerry. I urge the secretary to avoid doing anything further to help the Democrats.”

Although neither President Bush nor his office have commented publicly on the matter, the president was known to have mixed feelings about the secretary’s decision. A confidant of the president reported that Mr. Bush liked the idea that Mr. Rumsfeld was taking the blame for his administration’s failed anti-terrorism policy.

But, his friend says, the president wishes Mr. Rumsfeld would do more. “Couldn’t he also take the fall for the Joe Wilson thing? We need to put somebody out there, or this thing could drag on until the next election,” the chief executive is quoted as saying. “My guys who leaked the information won’t take responsibility because they’re afraid to go to prison, and I understand that. But Rummie will be so popular for telling the truth that I can get away with granting him clemency.

“The problem is that Rummie has this stupid idea of ‘honor.’” Imitating Secretary Rumsfeld, the president whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “Please! Don’t dishonor me! Don’t dishonor me!” “The president is totally focused on the next election,” his associate told Salon. “He doesn’t have time to worry about his honor.”

Siegel’s new book, “Parenting From the Inside Out” (co-authored with Mary Hartzell), provides information about the latest research in brain development, but also gives clear, concrete examples of how parents can apply these findings to their own lives.

Salon caught up with Siegel at his Santa Monica, Calif., home, down the street from his office near UCLA, where he is an associate clinical professor at the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development.

Why do you call your book “Parenting From the Inside Out”?

It was a phrase that emerged from an interpersonal neurobiology approach, but it basically just means that if you start from the inside, your outward behavior will follow. As parents, understanding ourselves and how the brain works can help us to repair communication and reestablish our relationship with our children.

In your book you tell how you became furious at your son in a toy store, and threatened to ban him from using video games for the next year. All your years of academic training and research were on the line. It was a moment of truth. What did you do next?

(Laughter) You know, I was flooded in this parental “low road.” I couldn’t control my body. My heart rate was going, my breathing was really fast, I was really agitated. I was totally inflexible. I couldn’t pull myself out of it, and the things he said just made it worse.

I knew I had to take a break. I did a lot of things physically — stretching, moving around, getting a drink, getting some fresh air — because I knew that the state of our body directly goes up into our brain and determines our feelings. I gave myself time until I became clear, when my prefrontal cortex, my center for rational thought, started joining together and integrating my whole system. I could feel my emotions become regulated, my body got calm, I was ready to be attuned.

The consequences I’d given my son were ridiculous. And I started to become very tearful when I realized that I’d profoundly missed an opportunity to share in his enthusiasm about playing a new video ballgame. I apologized to him, and told him I had been a jerk. You could see his breathing got a little bit calmer.

Later on he did this imitation of me, as the crazy person I had been at the toy store, and it was perfect: We all cracked up.

In your book, you suggest that something as physically insubstantial as a mother’s smile or a father’s tone of voice, i.e., interpersonal communication, can affect the physical development of a child’s brain, and have a lifelong impact on his or her ability to relate. I find that mind-blowing.

It is mind-blowing, literally. It’s “contingent communication,” and what’s important about contingent communication is that it isn’t just the sharing of positive, joyful emotions. Even more important than that is the contingency of those responses. Smiles can change the brain, but the smiles have to be also a part of this attuned connection.

So, in layperson’s terms, contingent communications means that when a child does something, the parent responds appropriately. When the child signals hunger, feed them. Don’t put them in bed.

Exactly. Contingent response means a response that’s tuned in.

And you say this communication has a physical impact on the brain and its development?

Yes, along with the neuropsychologist and author Alan Schore and others, I believe that attuned communication actually enables the front part of the brain — especially the prefrontal cortex — to become integrated with the deeper emotional and bodily centers in the brain itself. That’s the overall hypothesis. It’s not about exposing a kid to Mozart, or other kinds of early stimulation. It’s about this contingent, attuned communication that promotes integration.

What would be a concrete example of how “integration” works?

Well, ideally, integration helps the kids have flexibility, and adaptiveness. Let’s say there’s a playground situation, where a girl is playing with her friend, and a third girl shows up to play. An adaptive response would be for the first little girl to say, “OK, you want to play, let’s play. Let us finish this game, and then you can play in a minute.”

And then the three of them play together. But what that girl has had to do to get there is this: She’s had to take a deep breath, realizing the sense of closeness and connection she felt with the first friend will still maintain itself even with the third girl. That’s a perfect example of a flexible response.

What is happening in the brain to make this happen?

Well, let’s walk in the prefrontal cortex, which is a kind of a manager, allowing for the integration of thought, feeling and memories. When the third girl first appears, the amygdala, or emotional center of one of the girls who is playing, starts firing off in anger. There’s a squirt of all sorts of firing, saying, “Get that girl away from here, tell her to go away.” Her facial expression starts to get rigid, her jaw becomes tight, her eyebrows start to lower, the classic facial expressions of anger.

But at the same time, the prefrontal cortex of the integrated girl, which enables empathy, is able to think about the larger context of what’s going on. This is a playground, that girl’s in class with them, she has her own internal experience, feelings. She is starting to look disappointed. As the first girl’s anger expressions become revealed, she realizes this is not something that ought to happen, it’s not right. It’s making that girl feel bad, it’s a form of selfishness.

And she is then able to modulate her emotions by literally having the prefrontal cortex release GABA — which is gamma amino butyric acid — and it’s going to now fire off these GABA fibers, which signals the amygdala to calm down. There are also indications that there may be a firing of mirror neurons, which allow us to have emotional resonance, to feel the feelings of another person within ourselves.

That requires neural integration, which is totally different than if the first girl had been fragmented and couldn’t integrate her neural processes.

So parents should above all teach their children to have flexible and adaptive responses, which requires helping them integrate their rational and emotional brain functions. How can parents achieve those results?

To achieve neural integration in your child, you have to first achieve it in yourself. Neural integration in yourself is self-understanding. It’s like what Robert Firestone talks about in his book “Compassionate Child-Rearing,” the notion that how we understand ourselves can actually deepen our ability to be compassionate with other people. For parents, what that means is you need to do some self-reflective work and not just respond in knee-jerk ways. The new area of brain research builds on the findings of attachment research, which clearly demonstrate that self-understanding is the No. 1 predictor in a parent of how the child will be attached to that parent.

For example, let’s say when you were a child you were bullied by other kids. And then you find your own child is very assertive and it pisses you off. So rather than understanding her experience of longing to be close with one friend, you just see her as the bully who attacked you. And so you have no patience for understanding her. That wouldn’t really promote integration in your child.

You still don’t want her to be bullying other kids, but you want to understand. What is she feeling that she would be so assertive as to not allow a third child to play with her? You’d want to always start with attunement, to understand and resonate with your child’s experience.

What are some of the things new parents should know, say, as they’re sitting with their infants?

The first thing a parent should understand is the difference between right brain and left brain. So much of what happens in our culture promotes left hemisphere emphasis: language, logic, linear thinking. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is about your body, it’s about nonverbal signals: eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, your gestures, the timing and intensity of your response, how you hold the posture of your body. One of the exciting things about having a baby is that babies are almost totally dominant in their right hemispheres. And you’re going to relate to them nonverbally. So it’s an opportunity actually to start increasing your awareness of your own sensations, your nonverbal cuing into your child.

Emotional attunement begins with nonverbal communication: eye contact, facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, timing and intensity of response, your posture, the way that you align those nonverbal signals to someone else’s signals.

But then as the child gets older, it absolutely can involve words, for example, “reflective dialogues” in which you actually talk about what she’s feeling and thinking. You talk about what she remembers about her experiences, her perceptions, the sensations in her body, her intentions, beliefs and attitudes. This allows you to show and share an empathic understanding with your child.

How do parents you’ve worked with respond to the message that they need to face their own emotional pain if they want to truly help their child?

When people understand themselves via brain mechanisms, it actually alleviates a sense of shame and guilt, opens the door to self-compassion, and guides them to a process of connection with their children that I never would have predicted would happen. For example, Mary [Hartzell] and I were teaching a course in her preschool. We talked about this amazing finding that the prefrontal cortex, this front-most part of the brain which is just behind your eyes, has been associated in cognitive neuroscience studies with processes like regulating the body and emotions, attuning to other people, being flexible, having empathy and self-awareness, being in touch with your intuition and morality, and losing your fears.

When you have a meltdown as a parent, you lose many of those nine functions, what we call the “low road.” Your emotions become out of control. You’re no longer attuned to your child, it’s hard to remain in an empathic stance, you can’t be flexible, you lose insight into yourself. Then you start having difficulty with your own old garbage, your fears come back. You lose your intuition and, sometimes, morality. When you’re integrated, it’s “the high road,” and you have those nine functions present.

When we said this, a number of parents started to cry. One parent said, “Thank you so much, because I thought I was insane because of what I did with my child. You have now helped me understand that my brain is disconnecting inside of myself, and I’m acting in ways I don’t want to act.”

And the next morning she reported, “You know, just understanding the model of the brain, and how I was flipping it, helped keep me from entering the low road. I got away from my child, didn’t do anything destructive, took a deep breath. And then I came back on the high road. I realized I could apologize and explain to my child what had happened to me. I had never made a reconnection like that before.”

It also brings us into the here and now. We don’t have to feel that we are doomed to repeat our parents’ mistakes with our own children.

Absolutely. The great news is not only that the brain makes new connections throughout the life span, but there’s some evidence to show that you can grow new integrative pathways. And when you give people that scientific fact, that the brain may be able to grow integrative fibers, they realize that even if they have unresolved issues of trauma or loss, or a lack of a prefrontal integration, they can still parent successfully.

Repair occurs because the shame is dissolved. And one of the most important things for a child is that the parents can make a reconnection after a disruption. There is always room for repair and healing — inside of ourselves, and with our children.

The following is what might occur if the Briefer from Lessing’s novel were compelled to explain our planet’s current crisis to one of the beings who has volunteered to help save it. The discussion begins after the being has spent several hours watching the war on satellite television. The innocent, sad-eyed extraterrestrial creature is filled with queries about this troubled place called Earth, so we will call him the Questioner.

The Questioner: Excuse me, I’ve just watched several hours of TV coverage of the war in the nation called Iraq. I saw howling mobs in something called the “Arab world” chanting “Death to America!” and live coverage of buildings being blown up by this America’s bombing and shelling, civilians screaming and sobbing over dead relatives after these attacks, captured American soldiers with bewildered expressions, and reports of whole cities going without food or water and fears of epidemics.

Apparently thousands of people have died in just the first few weeks of the war, and many more thousands will die in coming weeks and months. What is responsible for all this human suffering and mayhem?

The Briefer: Well, the planet Earth is divided into nation-states. The mightiest nation, the United States of America, with 280 million people, a $400 billion defense budget, and a GDP of $10 trillion — has attacked Iraq, a nation of 25 million people, with a defense budget of $1.4 billion, and a GDP of $80 billion.

Q: How do American leaders justify initiating this war?

B: Their fundamental rationale is that Iraq poses a threat to American lives.

Q: I’m confused. I thought you said the United States, the giant nation, initiated the war.

B: It did.

Q: But how could Iraq, outspent 350 times militarily, pose so great a threat to the U.S. as to justify all this suffering?

B: U.S. leaders fundamentally justified their attack by claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened U.S. citizens. In a March 6, 2003, press conference, the U.S. president, a man named Bush, declared, “My job is to protect the American people … I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath. And that’s exactly what I am going to do.” By “Bible” he referred to a book he believes is inspired by an all-powerful God who guides his actions against enemies who believe their very different God guides their activities against him.

Q: What evidence did he present that Iraq intended to use these weapons against the U.S.?

B: None. While most people believed Iraq possessed such weapons, the main U.S. intelligence agency — the CIA — said it was unlikely to use them unless attacked by the U.S.

Q: So the giant country attacked the tiny country to prevent them from using the weapons that its own CIA said Iraq would not use unless attacked?

B: Yes.

Q: But that’s insane! Are you seriously suggesting that all this killing that I just saw on Earth’s TV is entirely unnecessary? It would mean that America’s leaders are entirely irrational!

B: Yes. They are irrational, if we define “rational” as engaging in behavior that logically connects means and ends. The U.S. president’s stated goal is to reduce threats to Americans. But his actions are endangering Americans, increasing the probability that thousands — maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands — will die in coming years.

Q: But why are Americans endangered? You just said the U.S. is not seriously threatened by Iraq.

B: It isn’t, but it is threatened by a separate, more serious enemy upon which the president is not focusing. The more serious enemy is a loose confederation of thousands of anti-American religious fanatics spread throughout dozens of nations that practice a religion known as Islam. The best-known such organization, though it is only one of many, is called al-Qaida, which launched a catastrophic attack on important American buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.

Q: Is there no link between Iraq and al-Qaida?

B: Virtually none. The ruler of Iraq, a secularist named Saddam Hussein, opposes the religious fanatics who compose al-Qaida and would depose him if they could. He also did not wish to give the United States a pretext for attacking him. U.S. leaders presented no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida were linked. Two former U.S. intelligence analysts concluded in a book called “The Age of Sacred Terror” that “there is little evidence that state sponsors like Iraq and Iran provide Al Qaeda with meaningful assistance. Bin Laden [its leader] … was preparing to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House, while state sponsors of terrorism were drawing relatively little American blood.”

Q: So the U.S. president attacked the smaller country that posed no immediate threat, while giving far less attention to the enemy which really threatened the U.S.? Do you really mean he has attacked the wrong enemy?

B: Yes, and even more troubling for American citizens, the real enemy has been strengthened by their country’s misdirected attack against Iraq. U.S. warmaking in Iraq has alienated the vast majority of public opinion in virtually every country on Earth, destabilized friendly governments, and reduced the likelihood that more neutral governments will cooperate in the intelligence and police work needed to attack the anti-American extremists.

He has also particularly enraged more than a billion Muslims, making almost certain the rise of Islamic violence against American targets and U.S. citizens all over the world. The president of Egypt, a U.S. ally, declared on March 31 that “if there is one [Osama] bin Laden now, there will be 100 bin Ladens afterward” as a result of a prolonged U.S. war against Iraq. Religious terrorists had previously even tried to bomb American tourists in Bali, one of the most peaceful and remote parts of the world. No American will ever be able to feel entirely safe anywhere in the world again.

Q: Didn’t U.S. leaders realize that attacking Iraq would increase terrorist threats against Americans?

B: They did. U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and many other responsible officials stated publicly that attacking Iraq would increase the likelihood of these attacks. Official warnings of terrorist attacks have dramatically increased since the Iraq war began.

Q: So the giant country attacked the smaller country that posed no immediate threat, knowing that this would increase the more immediate danger from religious extremists it did not attack?

B: Yes.

Q: But that means the American president’s bungling would make him partly responsible for any future American deaths from terrorist attacks!

B: Yes, especially since he started the war before ensuring homeland security.

Q: What? You can’t be serious!

B: I am. Experts say, for example, that the biggest domestic threat to the United States comes from the possibility of a nuclear weapon being smuggled onto one of 7 million containers a year coming into U.S. ports. It would cost $2 billion to protect U.S. ports, but only some $300 million — much of it misdirected — has been allocated. Similar or larger gaps exist in many other areas. For example the president has refused to support a program to defend U.S. civilian airliners against shoulder-fired missiles that have already been used to shoot down similar airplanes.

Q: But that amounts to criminal negligence! How could he fail to protect his own citizens before provoking more attacks against them?

B: Good question.

Q: But wait, I see a rational argument. If Iraq possessed these weapons of mass destruction, didn’t it make sense to go after them now while Saddam’s regime is weaker rather than wait until it has grown stronger?

B: No. A former CIA analyst named Kenneth Pollack wrote an influential book advocating an invasion of Iraq — but he said that before attacking, the U.S. first needed to build domestic and international support, decapitate al-Qaida, fulfill its broken promises to rebuild another country it had invaded named Afghanistan, and resolve a major territorial dispute in a nation called Israel. By attacking Iraq before taking such actions, and inflaming world and Muslim opinion, it is the U.S. that is weakened, not Iraq.

U.S. leaders would have been far stronger had they waited a year and taken the actions recommended by Pollack, particularly since foreign inspectors roaming Iraq made it unlikely that the Iraqi government would develop, let alone use, these dangerous weapons during this period.

Q: Well why didn’t U.S. leaders wait a year so as to accomplish those goals? To attack now sounds absolutely crazy!

B: It is indeed crazy. Even those who made the best case for overthrowing Saddam for the sake of the Iraqi people could not make a reasonable case for doing so prematurely in 2003 rather than properly in 2004.

Q: But why would U.S. leaders behave so irrationally?

B: That’s a matter of speculation. Some suggest present U.S. leaders are ideologically and emotionally committed to a doctrine of world supremacy called the Bush Doctrine and felt it would be easier to implement it this year rather than during the coming presidential election year. Others believe they have no understanding of the region they are attacking and were overly optimistic about the prospects for a clean victory. Others think they themselves were so terrorized and panicked by the Sept. 11 attacks — which made U.S. leaders believe that they themselves could be killed — that they are incapable of thinking logically or behaving rationally.

Q: What do you think?

B: All of the above. Their ignorance of realities on the ground is particularly obvious. It was predictable, for example, that Muslims would be enraged by the humanitarian disasters that would likely ensue from U.S. intervention. By launching war first  and without international support — the United States was certain to be blamed for the whole mess. It was unlikely to be greeted as liberators by the people whose relatives it had killed and whose homes it had bombed.

But U.S. leaders deluded themselves that they would speed to Baghdad with a small force, be welcomed as liberators, and achieve victory with minimal civilian damage. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, said three days before the war began, “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.”

Q: They certainly appear to be incompetent, even on their own terms. It sounds as if they are dangerously detached from reality.

B: Yes, well, irrationality has actually been quite common among leaders of powerful nations for most of human history. A historian named Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called “The March of Folly,” in which she defined “folly” as the propensity of leaders since the fall of Troy 2,400 years ago to act against their own interests because of fixed notions divorced from reality. What is frightening about our time is not that powerful leaders still behave irrationally, but that they — and the even more insane people who oppose them — now possess an unprecedented technological capacity to kill, and also to destroy the biosphere upon which people on Earth depend for life itself.

Q: But how could such a leader, this President Bush, have come to power in America? How is he qualified to be leader of what is called the free world?

B: He isn’t. He was only considered for president because his father had held the office before him. He did not win the majority vote of his people; an anachronistic quirk in the American election system allowed him to be installed in office by partisan high court judges aligned with his family and party. His previous experience included failing at business, being given a share in a baseball team by men who wanted favors from his father, and serving as the leader of a state where his only known interest was education.

He does not even claim any expertise in foreign affairs or in the Middle East, where he has never set foot. He is actually proud of relying on his “instincts” — rather than understanding — for his major decisions. He has chosen narrow ideological zealots as his closest advisors, people who seek to establish U.S. military hegemony over the word.

Q: But surely his military specialists realize that’s impossible.

B: The U.S. properly places civilians in charge of the military. The problem is that the president’s present choice for secretary of defense is a turf-minded and ideological egomaniac who thinks he knows better than his own military how to wage war on Iraq, despite his total lack of experience in waging such a war. He gave the military far fewer troops than they requested, rushed them into Iraq too far and too fast, and miscalculated his opponents’ reactions. He is so incompetent that his own soldiers are now going hungry and many of his officers have turned on him just two weeks into the war. The doctrine of seeking military hegemony over the world is coming from ideologically motivated but irrational civilians, known in previous times as “crackpot realists.” The military itself is deeply reluctant to undertake such an impossible task.

Q: Doesn’t anyone close to him know better?

B: He does have a secretary of state, Colin Powell, who clearly knows better. But such people rise to such positions because of their willingness to play the “good soldier,” that is, display unquestioning loyalty to the person who appointed them. By his own admission President Bush, as revealed in an adoring memoir of him by a kind of royal court journalist named Bob Woodward, runs a top-down administration and demands absolute personal loyalty from his subordinates. Powell’s only honorable option would thus have been to resign — an action that would have meant reversing a lifetime habit of service to superiors. He may also believe he is doing more good by staying and fighting from within, although this belief seems unwarranted since his superiors simply exploited his credibility to gain domestic approval for their ill-considered war — a war that Powell failed to prevent and then failed to win world support for.

Q: But surely the U.S. is not a one-man dictatorship. What about the American public?

B: Most Americans don’t feel they know very much about foreign affairs and tend to give the president the benefit of the doubt. This tendency was strengthened by Sept. 11, the first major attack on American soil by people whose goal was to kill Americans purely because they were Americans.

The public was terrified, and naturally turned to the president for protection. The president experienced an immediate boost in popularity, which has remained high ever since. His popularity cowed the legislature, media and many members of the intelligentsia. After the war started, most Americans rallied behind the president, even though public opinion in virtually every other country on Earth was opposed to it by huge margins.

Q: You mention a legislature. Doesn’t the U.S. have a deliberative body that might have introduced some sanity to the situation?

B: Yes, but unfortunately its members’ highest priority is their own political survival, which they felt would be threatened if they opposed the war. So the legislators gave the president a blank check to wage war and then turned their backs on it. One noble legislator, Sen. Robert Byrd, questioned his colleagues’ honor for refusing to have a serious debate about the war. They proved his point by not even bothering to respond.

Q: Do critics have a voice through the American mass media?

B: The media, reliant upon the administration for information and official interviews, and dependent upon the public for revenues and therefore worried about offending the popular mood, allowed the president to set the terms of the debate. Although some criticism was provided, the vast majority of the coverage — particularly on the powerful TV medium — favored the president’s position. At no point did the media powerhouses raise loud alarms, accusing the administration of behaving irresponsibly and irrationally. It does not help that the American media is owned by a few large corporations that are constantly seeking further wealth and power by appealing to the government to remove the regulatory obstacles in their way.

Even the most eminent journalists are loath to stand up against the administration. A prominent TV newsman named Tim Russert, for example, questioned Mr. Rumsfeld about his 1982 visit to Iraq without asking why the U.S. had supplied its dictator Saddam with the components needed to make chemical weapons and continued to support him even after he had used them against his own people and his neighbors. Russert routinely bullies the few critics of U.S. power that he allows on his TV programs, while coddling the administration officials upon whom he depends for ratings and revenues.

An influential newspaper columnist named Thomas Friedman disingenuously supported the war on the grounds that we needed to bring democracy to Iraq, without ever seriously making the case that the Bush team would actually do so. This clever positioning allowed him to avoid being perceived as a dove, while giving him room to oppose the war if the aftermath didn’t work out.

Q: But as the war started going badly, did these political leaders and media people not recognize the errors in their thinking?

B: No. Once the war began, they were silenced by the charge that critics of the war did not support the U.S. soldiers who were fighting and dying on the field. A nation’s flag can make a very effective gag.

Q: So where does Earth go from here? Is there any hope of changing American policies?

B: Well, they have a saying on their planet: “Hope springs eternal in the human beast,” oops, I mean “breast.” It is important to remember that a majority of Americans did not vote for President Bush. This majority includes millions of Americans who have refused to be blinded by war fever and have taken to the streets to protest the war. A similar peace movement thwarted two American presidents during an earlier war in Indochina and may eventually grow strong enough to keep President Bush from damaging U.S. interests any further. After all, he faces election again next year.

Q: What do you mean “damaging U.S. interests any further”? Does President Bush have military designs beyond Iraq?

B: Yes, Iraq is but the beginning. The president’s “doctrine” was created by the Project for a New American Century, a group of hawks inside and outside his administration. It calls for extending U.S. military supremacy over the world for decades to come. The Washington Post has reported that administration officials are already talking about attacking Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, next.

Their irrationality is conveyed by the absurd title they chose for their group. It is obvious to all but this narrow band of zealots that the 21st century is not “the American century” — a term originally coined by the founder of Time magazine to describe the 20th.

This is the world century, in which the human species will preserve the biosphere it needs to survive, and avoid mass murder on a scale yet undreamed of, only if it learns to build a new, cooperative, multilateral world order. President Bush is presently committed to policies that will destroy the very cooperative world order we need to survive.

Q: Are you saying he must be stopped or the human race’s very survival as a species could be threatened?

B: President’s Bush’s irrational war-making is not even the planet’s biggest problem. The more serious threat he poses to Earth’s survival is his inexcusable refusal to seriously address the ongoing destruction of the biosphere from global warming, biodiversity loss, water aquifer depletion and a host of other systemic problems. The man in charge of monitoring Iraq’s weapons programs, Hans Blix, properly declared on March 15 that “the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I’m more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.”

Q: Can I be of any help?

B: Yes, we are counting on you, friend. If you thought Earth was hell before, you might not have seen anything yet.

Ellsberg understands U.S. Vietnam policy perhaps better than any living American. In his New Yorker review of “Secrets,” Nicholas Lemann joked that Ellsberg was the Forrest Gump of the war, turning up everywhere, from remote hamlets in Vietnam to the inner sanctums of the Defense Department. Ellsberg was at the Pentagon reading cables from the destroyer Maddox when it reported being attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964, the incident that convinced Congress to give President Lyndon Johnson a blank check to wage war in Vietnam. He was on an airplane with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when the latter exclaimed privately that U.S. forces were losing in Vietnam — and then publicly declared that “I’m glad to be able to tell you that we’re showing great progress in every dimension of our effort” at a press conference when they landed. And he risked his life on the ground in Vietnam in a quest to understand the real war, driving roads with U.S. advisor John Paul Vann that no other Americans would dare travel, observing U.S. helicopter pilots hunting Vietnamese peasants like animals, and engaging in combat himself against Viet Cong forces.

But Ellsberg is also one of America’s foremost experts on Vietnam policy because of his insatiable curiosity about the war, and the culture that spawned it. He has spent much of the past 40 years trying to understand how U.S. policymakers could have waged America’s first losing war at a cost of the death of 58,000 Americans and 2-3 million Indochinese. He goes beyond his book in this Salon interview to speculate on the motives of American leaders, and to draw the parallels he sees with today’s U.S. policy toward Iraq.

The issue is not whether Iraq is “another Vietnam,” a slogan opponents have used to discredit American military adventures from Central America to Afghanistan. The Iraqi army enjoys nothing like the popular support the Vietnamese communists enjoyed, and the war is unlikely to last for a decade. But any number of reasons why the U.S. failed in Vietnam could have relevance in Iraq — most notably, cultural and historical ignorance on the part of U.S. policymakers. As McNamara observed in his 1995 Vietnam memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” “Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.” Ellsberg believes that our present leaders are equally ignorant of Middle Eastern politics, and worries that a unilateral American strike against Iraq could turn the Muslim world even more against the U.S., costing the support of Muslim countries in the war on terror and helping create a new generation of terrorists.

Whether or not one agrees with Ellsberg’s analysis, reading “Secrets” makes clear that Vietnam is not merely history. Presidents are still capable of acting irrationally and distorting the truth, and Congress is still too willing to cede war-making power to the executive branch. Even more disturbing, it reminds us that American leaders have made wartime decisions that weakened rather than strengthened national security — but that asking questions about our war aims is patriotic, not subversive.

What are the major lessons from Vietnam that today’s young people, who may not know very much about the war, should know?

Very smart men and women can adopt and pursue wrongful and crazy policies, and get those policies adopted and followed. And they can keep the basic illegitimacy and craziness obscured, at least, by secrecy and lies about its causes and prospects. The Pentagon Papers show that all U.S. presidents over a 23-year period lied, virtually continuously, about what they were doing, what they intended to do, what the costs were expected to be, what they actually had done, and about what the reasons for doing it were.

The 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers prove that nothing our leaders said should have been taken at face value. It’s naive and even irresponsible for a grownup today to get her or his information about foreign policy and war and peace exclusively from the administration in power. It’s essential to have other sources of information, to check those against one’s own common sense, and to form your own judgment as to whether we ought to go to or persist in war.

Why do you use the word “crazy” to describe our policies in Indochina?

The most widely accepted explanation given for increasing our involvement in a hopelessly stalemated war, which got larger and larger from year to year, with no perceptible progress, was that the president had been drawn into a quagmire by overoptimistic advisors, particularly the military. The idea is that the president, thinking of other matters and not focusing on Indochina very much, simply followed military advice in what he did.

But the documents prove that no aspect of this was true. No president had ever been told that involvement in Vietnam would lead to success, quickly or easily or on a small scale.

The Joint Chiefs did recommend that we get in, but only on a very large scale. They wanted him to greatly expand the war beyond the borders of South Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam itself, on the ground. They also wanted a much greater expansion of the air war, right up to the borders of China and if necessary beyond those borders. Had we followed that policy Chinese ground troops would almost surely have come in, which would have led to pressure by the Joint Chiefs and others for the use of nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs I have to say in that instance look almost incomprehensibly crazy in their willingness to risk nuclear war. That looks crazy.

And the actual policy that successive presidents actually did follow — which was of large-scale ground and air involvement in South Vietnam, with large but limited bombing in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — was almost as irrational.

The United States was never prepared to allow self-determination in South Vietnam, because a democratic election would have led to communist participation in power and probably a communist-led government, since the communists had the prestige and the organization that grew out of having successfully defeated a colonial power.

Just to postpone that result, president after president was willing to send many people to die and to kill. Now, understood in those terms, one then stands back from the policy and says, but humanly how is this to be understood? It looks crazy. That’s what I mean by crazy, a crazy disproportion between the human costs and the risks of the effort, and the legitimate benefits if any that can reasonably be expected.

What I’m saying is that very smart men — and nobody is smarter than McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs were not dumb people by any means — were espousing a terribly unwise policy that could lead to a catastrophic result.

What are some of the major lies that were told in support of this policy?

My first night in the Pentagon, on August 4, 1964, I heard my president, Lyndon Johnson, saying that he was retaliating against North Vietnam because of unequivocal evidence of an unprovoked attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that were on routine patrol in international waters. And that this retaliation was limited and that “we seek no wider war.” Now that’s five or six separate assertions, and I already knew within hours or days that every one was false.

Did they tell Congress things that they didn’t want to tell the public, on the grounds that it might help the other side?

Yes, they did tell Congress things that were not made public at the time, or for years thereafter. And nearly all of the things they told Congress in joint committee hearings, in top-secret closed sessions, were top-secret lies. In other words, Congress was lied to just as egregiously, and to the same effect, as the public.

You also say in your book that they lied about the progress we were making in Vietnam once we began to send U.S. troops, a process that began in February 1965 that saw a high of 500,000 men at any one time, 58,000 dead, and more than 3 million troops sent between 1965 and 1973.

Yes, and that’s the decision that looks so crazy given what the president knew the prospects were. The president knew from the fall of 1965 that he was getting into a very large war, which would probably go to a scale of 500 to 700,000 troops or more. But the public was never told that.

Instead he constantly implied that the last 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 troops that were sent were all that was required “at this time.” The scale of the war to be expected was never explained to the public, lest it cease to support the war, lest it call on Congress to force negotiations, force coming to terms in some way and ending the war. So that was always lied about.

The prospective costs of the war were also concealed from the public. For example, Clark Clifford (U.S. secretary of defense in 1967-68), in arguing to the president on July 23, 1965, at Camp David, said to the president, “I see nothing but catastrophe for my country.” He then gave an amazingly prescient prediction that the war would involve 500,000 U.S. troops and 50,000 U.S. dead. “That is not for us, Mr. President,” he said. But it was. We sent 550,000 troops and lost 58,000 killed in action.

We know from Johnson’s tapes that he rarely did believe that we were headed for any kind of success from beginning to end. He was saying to his mentor and close friend, Sen. Richard Russell, the head of the Armed Service committee, things like, “I don’t think they’ll ever quit, and if I was in their position I wouldn’t. They’re going to keep going and we are not going to beat them.” This is while he was sending boys to die.

Why do you believe Johnson behaved so unwisely?

Well, I don’t speculate on motives in my book, but since you ask I’ll give you my own personal opinion. For a long time I believed his motive was essentially domestic politics, that he believed he would lose office if he was accused of losing Vietnam to communism. I would say that is the consensus explanation right now. And also that he believed it would hurt us internationally, if our credibility was destroyed and so forth.

But I have decided that this explanation does not square with what was then knowable about domestic politics. The president’s decision to escalate went against that of his political advisors such as Hubert Humphrey, Clark Clifford and Richard Russell. I would say that he had no domestic risk at all in getting out of Vietnam in ’65 after the defeat of Goldwater. Had he done so, even with a Communist South Vietnam, he would not have had inflation, he would have had money to spend on his war against poverty and his Great Society programs, he would not have provoked the domestic political crisis that forced him to not seek reelection in March 1968, and so forth. And I do not believe that was unforeseeable in 1965.

I would say that he consciously chose a policy that was riskier for him politically than the alternative. So how do we explain that? My best guess is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called if he got out of Vietnam, an “unmanly man,” a weakling, an appeaser.

He preferred to risk office, and to lose office, as a tough guy, than to gain and retain office while facing some strident charges from politicians who were beaten that he was a weakling. And I believe that he was not alone in that. Many Americans have died in the last 50 years, and maybe 10 times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.

You’re saying this is a psychological fear.

I think there is a heavy psychological element in it, and that from 1965 to 1968, there was not a realistic political aspect to it.

Was this only true for Johnson?

Five U.S. presidents behaved unwisely in Vietnam, though Johnson and Nixon of course did the most damage. And the question has remained for 30 years since the war ended: Knowing what they knew how could they have done this? Since the policies made so little sense politically or economically, I have concluded that staying in office and avoiding certain charges of weakness, of unmanliness, of softness, and weakness on communism, or weakness in any way at all, was their main motivation.

Each of those is seen as a kind of overwhelming importance to the individual people. People outside the president and his subordinates say, “Well, we can understand motives like that, but are those reasons for killing hundreds of thousands of people, for sending Americans to die, risking nuclear war? It’s hard to imagine humans doing that.”

But the truth is that those humans in office — who, before reaching that point, were individuals like anyone else — find themselves drawn to make choices that appear insane to most outsiders, and the outsiders are right.

Is the solution to elect honest leaders to office?

There seems to be no prospect of that. History gives us no reason to expect that statesmen of any party or nation will be willing to tell the truth about what they are doing.

I think the answer is what the founders amazingly wisely provided for in our Constitution, which is to prevent any one man from making the decision on war and peace on his own. They left the decision exclusively in the Constitution in the hands of a broad representative body, the Congress. And secondly, you can’t let the decision of how much to tell the public about matters of war and peace be exclusively in the hands of that one man. Because that gives him the war power that makes him a king. A king in foreign policy is close to what we’ve had in the past 50 years. And it’s what we have now. And we should get away from it. We should go back to the idea of checks and balances, and the war power residing in Congress, not the executive branch.

Do you believe our current policies toward Iraq are as irrational as our policies in Indochina a generation ago?

Yes, I do. I believe that an invasion of Iraq will increase the danger of terrorism to this country, and thus will be measured in American lives. Al-Qaida is a real threat to this country, and I believe the chance of al-Qaida getting weapons of mass destruction from Saddam will be greatly increased if we attack Iraq, by the spectacle of Muslims, civilians and military, being killed by the United States.

I think that will increase the availability of weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaida, and Americans will die as a result of that, in addition to whatever else al-Qaida can do.

Secondly, al-Qaida will acquire tens or hundreds of thousands of new recruits for suicide attacks, in the wave of rage I think will sweep over the Muslim world when they see this war being conducted for what they correctly perceive as being without justification, as a war for oil and other purposes that don’t justify it.

Third, the possibility of cooperation with the U.S. by governments of countries with large Muslim populations, which is essential to the struggle against al-Qaida, will become impossible for those governments. They will find themselves unwilling to do what will cost them their office and perhaps their lives.

They will not be able to cooperate with the U.S., after we’ve killed many Iraqis in this war. And without that cooperation again, al-Qaida’s task becomes easier, and Americans and other Europeans and others will die as a result, including Israelis, just as I believe Sharon’s policies are at the cost of many more Israeli lives than they are saving.

So far we’ve talked about the war mainly as irrational. But you have famously described the war not as a mistake but a crime. You base this charge on the evidence in the Pentagon Papers that U.S. leaders from 1954 to 1968 knew they were opposing self-determination in South Vietnam, and were waging an aggressive war against a people who did not threaten us. What impact did your conclusion that the U.S. was morally wrong in Vietnam have on your actions?

The evidence made clear that our war was a crime against the peace. And for me to see that impelled me to take nonviolent actions I was not led to do when I considered it simply a mistake. When I saw the war as unjustified homicide, it seemed to me that it should stop not just gracefully or whenever possible, but that it should stop as soon as possible. I decided I should do more than I had yet done, a course that involved great risk for me including life in prison.

Do you also believe any war against Iraq would also be criminal?

Even if there was a threat, it is not a threat that would justify the extreme dangers of committing mass murder against civilians that is likely to occur, and even the murders I think of Iraqi soldiers. Unjustified aggressive killing of Iraqi soldiers is also murder. Iraqi soldiers have not done anything in the past five years or so, certainly not in the past year, that sentences them to death by our president or by our Congress or by the U.N.

So whoever authorizes it, it’s aggression and it’s murder. And by the way we were earlier asking, well, what difference does it make to call it that, death is death, what does it matter whether you call it murder? It made a difference to me when I was a Marine, when I was in Vietnam, and finally when I came to see what we were doing as murder, I didn’t want to participate in murder or aggression. And I went further than to avoid that than I would have done.

And I think right now if people came to perceive what we were doing as totally illegal and unjustified, they might do more to oppose it than they would otherwise. I don’t have a lot of faith that that will come about. The media will simply not allow that perception on the whole to emerge. But I do think a media doing its job and senators to some degree doing their job, as 23 did do, can get across the fact to the public that the human costs and the risks of this are enormous.

What do you think a person in the Bush administration who opposes this war should do?

I encourage people who are in the position now that I was in then — namely of seeing us about to embark on a wrongful, unjustified and illegitimate war that is a crime against the peace — to consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964.

That is, if they have documents indicating that the president is lying the public into such a war, they should take those documents to the Congress and to the press, and tell the truth — even if it costs them their clearance, their job, their career, even if puts them in prison.

You have remained an activist for the 30 years since you revealed the Pentagon Papers. Do you ever feel like just giving up?

Where there’s life, there’s hope. For instance, if the bombing stops, there’s a small chance of avoiding an invasion. If an invasion starts, there’s still a chance of avoiding nuclear weapons. And if nuclear weapons happen, what then? Well, I will feel like dying, but I will also pick myself up and say, well, let’s make what we can to avoid it happening next. There really is always the next time. We’re not facing the world blowing up as we did during the Cold War. It will take a miracle to stop this war, but not more of a miracle than South Africa having a peaceful transition, not more of a miracle than the Berlin Wall coming down and East Europe being liberated.

“President Bush distanced himself today from a report by his administration concluding that humans were to blame for far-reaching effects of global warming on the environment. ‘I read the report put out by the bureaucracy,’ he said.” — “President Distances Himself From Global Warming Report,” New York Times, June 4, 2002

The failure of the Johannesburg Conference to produce a plan that will actually save the biosphere symbolizes the state of the environmental movement today. We are winning battles, like holding a major conference attended by more than 100 heads of state. But we are badly losing the war.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the environmental movement, and its countless studies, books, articles and hours of activism, are failing to halt the rapid deterioration of the biosphere. Most of our victories have been local — preserving wilderness, cleaning up rivers and toxic dumps: important victories, but ones with little impact on biospheric threats like global warming.

Our work on global warming has done an impressive job in educating the public about the existence of the problem, but it has not succeeded in mobilizing real action to solve it. At Johannesburg, attendees were unable to commit even to supplying 15 percent of the world’s energy from renewable sources by 2010 — a small part of the effort needed to avert global warming and other biospheric threats. And while our promotion of renewable energy has made great strides since the 1970s, renewables — not including hydroelectric power — still comprise only 1 percent of world energy production.

Our strategy did not succeed even under a sympathetic president like Bill Clinton. Greenhouse gas emissions increased 12 percent between 1990 and 2000, despite Mr. Clinton’s 1993 pledge to reduce them to 1990 levels by the turn of the century. Al Gore, who called for making the environment the “organizing principle of civilization,” did not even organize his campaign around it. And under George W. Bush we are today merely fighting to prevent further losses.

The bottom line is that our movement has not mobilized a constituency in the developed world large and powerful enough to force corporations and politicians to make the long-term investments necessary to save the biosphere. It is clearly time for a rethinking that can produce a “human” environmental movement adequate to the new challenges we face. The key is the United States, which not only produces 23 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions despite having only 4 percent of its population, but also blocked renewable-energy targets at Johannesburg. The fundamental question is this: What can so move Americans emotionally that they will be willing to make the massive investments necessary to save the biosphere at the cost of short-term consumption?

Until now, economics has usually trumped the environment. Auto companies succeeded in blocking higher fuel-efficiency standards recently by cynically playing on people’s fears of job losses. Only if we can develop a case that touches feelings deeper than economic fears can we prevail. But how to do so?

The most powerful emotion we can tap in to is the universal human concern for one’s children and grandchildren — people’s desire to transcend death by leaving their descendants a world worth living in. The fact is that people care far more about their children and grandchildren than for pandas, parks or windmills. And the desire to live on through our descendants is a far stronger drive than is commonly realized. We can build a new environmental movement that can save the biosphere around the theme of “investing in our grandchildren and future generations.”

Much of our civilization is driven by our desire to find “immortality projects” that can give our lives a meaning that will transcend death. This is one reason parents have children, politicians seek to “make history,” and people identify with nations and religions. The threat to the biosphere thus creates an opportunity to create constituencies in the developed world that never existed before, and that are necessary for the biosphere to be saved. Precisely because we are the first generation in history whose technological reach extends indefinitely, we are the first who can lead lives that will have real, tangible meaning for all humanity for the rest of time. The message we need to repeatedly bring into every household in America is this: “In the 21st century, our love and our expenditures to feed, house and educate our kids and grandkids needs to be extended to cleaning up the biosphere on which their lives will depend. If we fail to do so they will curse us, no matter what else we have done for them. If we succeed, we will know that our lives will have real meaning for them and all who follow them.”

Only this kind of message has the potential to mobilize the vast new constituencies needed to force corporations and politicians to make the investments needed to save the biosphere.

The focus at Johannesburg on the threat posed to the Third World was welcome and long past due. But history has shown that Americans cannot be mobilized for environmental action based on the Third World. They will act only when they can understand the threat in more immediate terms. Jane Goodall’s chimps need to be saved. But this will probably only occur if enough Americans can come to feel the shame she does about what we are doing to all those who follow us.

The idea of creating a new environmental movement based on the threat we pose to our own progeny rather than animals or the wilderness is not proposed as a simple change of rhetoric — though massive TV advertising of this message would be necessary. Creating a new movement focused on investing in our grandchildren and future generations will require much more: a major psychological shift for a movement that basically sees people as the major problem, the “cancer” threatening other species on earth.

Many of us, including me, joined the environmental movement partly as a way of avoiding messy one-on-one relationships. Deeply hurt as children, we have tended to withdraw from close interactions with people other than our family or those who think like us. We often find greater satisfaction in our work, nature or spiritual pursuits than we do in hanging out with people, and we feel closer to animals than to the average human beings around us. It is this psychology that explains the fact that our calendars, TV ads, and conferences feature nature and animals more than human beings.

This aversion to deep and meaningful one-on-one human interaction is understandable, and it is as common in politics, business, journalism and the arts as it is in environmental circles. But it may be that only as those of us who care about the environment can rediscover the love for humanity that was so poignantly squelched within us as kids will we be able to meaningfully communicate with the millions of Americans who are more willing to invest in their grandchildren than animals or parks.

Not everyone will agree with this proposal. But whatever the debate about the future course of our movement, it must begin with an obvious fact: our present approach cannot succeed and we badly need a change.

Human life is flourishing today compared with 100 years ago, if the most basic measure of human life is the number of humans times the number of years lived. Longevity, education and access to education are up, while infant mortality, slavery and outright starvation are down. We no longer face the kind of world or superpower wars that killed nearly 100 million people in the 20th century — however serious ongoing local wars and terrorist threats. Women and minorities have made tremendous progress. Colonialism is dead. There is vastly more democracy, social justice and social welfare today than in the year 1900.

One of the few major areas of life in which we are incomparably worse off than a century ago, however, is the environment. People alive in 1900 did not even dream that a century hence the very biosphere that sustains human life would be under assault.

Of course, this is not the environmental movement’s fault. On the contrary: Our movement has won innumerable victories and the planet would be far worse off without us. But we have been overwhelmed by events. We built our movement by persuading politicians to spend money on such short-term, tangible benefits as preserving wilderness and creating national parks; cleaning up rivers, toxic dumps, air quality and water; or saving lovable species. People could see the benefits of their expenditures.

But today we face a threat that no generation before us has confronted. The biosphere on which life depends is threatened by the combined impact of global warming, biodiversity loss, ocean and coral reef pollution, chemical contamination, water aquifer depletion, and deforestation.

These threats endanger future generations far more than ourselves. Saving them by making the massive long-term investments needed to preserve our biosphere will not yield as many immediate benefits. There will not be new national parks for us to drive to, or lower cancer rates from less toxic fumes, or lovable species we have saved to stock our zoos.

It will cost significant money in the short run to combat global warming by subsidizing new renewable industries, raising fuel-efficiency standards, and creating electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. Combating biodiversity loss, ocean pollution and other biospheric threats will cost even more. As Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken and others have so brilliantly shown, such investments will create whole new industries and millions of jobs over the long run, and they will power our economy for decades to come — much as early ’60s subsidies for computer chips have driven our economy. But like all other investments, they will shift money from current consumption.

This fact lends itself to the kind cheap demagoguery exhibited by Trent Lott, who might have displayed the roomier Toyota Prius hybrid auto that gets 52 miles to the gallon rather than a tiny purple one-seat car. Self-serving and short-sighted politicos like Lott and our president will always be able to show that the costs of meeting long-term threats like global warming far outweigh the short-term benefits.

Saving the biosphere is thus largely a political issue. Although the vast majority of Americans consider themselves pro-environment, most do not vote that way. Nor can we count on corporations to save us by adopting pro-environmental measures on their own. Even the Ford Motor Company, run by strong environmentalist William Ford, fights fuel-efficiency standards, pushes SUVs, recently dropped its electric car program, and is far behind the Japanese in producing hybrid cars.

Only if we create a new political movement that can reach and inspire vast new constituencies to vote for the environment can we succeed in pushing corporations and politicians to do what is necessary to save the biosphere.

Whether we can do so depends on the answer to a deep biological, psychological and spiritual question: whether our evolutionary past dooms our future. E.O. Wilson, in his seminal article “Is Humanity Suicidal?” presents convincing arguments that humanity is incapable of acting long term, primarily because our evolution has favored short-term over long-term thinking. But he also refers to counter-evidence indicating that people can think beyond their immediate needs.

Our generation will determine which point of view is correct — and it is clear that we have no choice but to fight our short-term evolutionary impulses. The threat to the biosphere means that our species will prosper over the long term only if we who are alive today are capable of thinking long term.

Any new environmental movement that can successfully challenge our short-term evolutionary impulses is likely to have the following four characteristics:

(1) Systemic. It will focus on the systemic threats to the biosphere we face — that is, global warming, biodiversity loss, ocean pollution, etc. — rather than such local issues as cleaning up a toxic waste dump or saving a patch of wilderness.

(2) Long-run. It will mobilize people to make long-term investments that will produce great wealth over the long run but not immediate, tangible benefits. CNN reports that “there is virtual unanimity among scientists that we have entered a period of mass extinction not seen since the age of the dinosaurs, an emerging global crisis that could have disastrous effects on our future food supplies, our search for new medicines, and on the water we drink and the air we breathe.” Solving this crisis will cost us money but yield us few immediate tangible benefits.

(3) Human. It will concentrate on touching the deep psychological cords that connect one generation to the other, grandparents to children and grandchildren, rather than continuing to focus on preserving the wilderness or animals.

(4) New constituencies. It will mobilize new supporters and groups of supporters rather than rely on present ones.

An obvious objection to this proposal is the following: Why should we believe that Americans who have rejected less alarming environmental claims, ones open to short-term and tangible solutions, should accept far more alarming and much more abstract warnings — even though the fate of their children and grandchildren is being evoked?

There are several responses to this. First, the public will find it increasingly difficult to remain in denial about the catastrophic threat to the biosphere as the scientific consensus around global warming — including Bush’s own Environmental Protection Agency — continues to grow, and events in the real world like the melting of the icebergs continue to occur.

Second, there is significant reason to believe that people are willing to make greater sacrifices for their descendants than for anything else. Adults today make enormous sacrifices and investments in their children and grandchildren’s future. Most parents who can afford it do not put their kids on half-rations to maximize their own consumption. The costs of raising a child, including college tuition, is a major portion of most household budgets. People bequeath their fortunes to their children and grandchildren, and the wealthy leave bequests to universities and other institutions. Even those without religious faith often find a transfiguring or unifying meaning in the love they have for their children.

Finally, keeping the debate in the present inevitably dooms us to failure. It is always cheaper to consume in the present than to invest in the future. It is only when we shift the debate more radically, to the existence of a future for our descendants, that we have a chance of winning.

But while there is much reason for hope, we can only realize it if we are willing to make a massive effort to reach people using the most powerful message we have. An organization here or initiative there is unlikely to succeed, given the power of those pushing short-term economic thinking.

A successful campaign would require a sophisticated and large-scale effort that includes creating a message focused on the threat to our grandchildren, a strategy to take this message into every home in America, and tactics capable of mobilizing the millions of people necessary to force the politicians to make long-term investments in our future. It would focus particularly on reaching the young people who will be paying the price for our profligate actions.

Given the limited amount of money available for environmental funding, part of such a campaign would see existing environmental organizations shift a portion of their present scientific and technical effort to a more sophisticated psychological approach focused on the human issues involved.

In addition, it will be necessary to create entirely new organizations. From their founding, they would be focused on educating the public about the threat to future generations and on building support for measures that can save them.

Our present legal system, for example, gives representation only to those now alive and leaves future generations at our not-so-tender mercy. Since we are the first generation to so threaten our descendants, we have an urgent need to create legal protection for them. One way might be to create Public Advocates for Future Generations in every city in the nation and to give them the budgets and power to represent the coming people of the earth.

All of this does not imply, of course, that existing environmental efforts should be abandoned. They are necessary to educate people about the threats facing their grandchildren and future generations. All those involved in the movement dedicated to saving this planet have done an honorable job and have nothing to apologize for. But new objective conditions require a new movement. As Joseph Campbell said, there is no shame in climbing down our ladder and moving it to a new wall when conditions warrant. We err only when we remain on it despite the overwhelming evidence that the wall on which it rests is crumbling.

It is clearly time to move our ladder.