Sheridan: Con-Law

WHAT KIND OF TRUTH DO YOU WANT?

The first casualty of war, they say, is the truth.

It's political season now with the presidential election occurring in less than two months.

A group of ministers has petitioned the IRS to deny tax immune status to religious organizations who support candidates from the pulpit.  The attorney defending the political pulpits has said that ministers have the right to preach biblical truth to the congregation, and if this means proselytizing against candidates who favor a woman's right to an abortion and in favor of those against, then so be it.

"Biblical truth," I thought, "what is that?  Another term for lies?

Then I read a column by Dionne in the WaPo in which he decries all the lies and half-truths coming out of one of the campaigns.  Dionne seems to want "political truth."

What is political truth?  More lies?

How about historical truth?  More lies?

I grant that the truth can be found at the bottom of a bottomless well, as an attorney character in "A Civil Action," points out, but we deal in truth every day in court, in business, in investigations of one kind or another, etc.  It's a federal crime to lie to a federal officer after you've been put on notice, which you usually are.  A tax return, for example.

It seems to me that once you modify the word 'truth' with an adjective such as political, or biblical, you are negating the word modified.

Biblical truths are beliefs based on faith.  Faith, according to Archie Bunker, is believing something that no one in his right mind would believe.  That goes double for political truth.

Can you think of any other truth-negating modifiers of the word truth?

The thoughts of Mao?  Millions of followers accepted his word as gospel until he led them over the cliff not once but many times, such as in the Great Leap Forward which killed anywhere from 25-30-40 million Chinese, all numbers I've seen in recent reading about China.  Then he killed millions more in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in which young Red Guards all over the country destroyed everything that represented 'old,' including schools, teachers, party members, monuments, buildings, books, you-name-it.  The country went crazy.  But Mao spoke the truth, it was fervently believed, until he no longer did.

If the Chinese can go crazy, and the Germans, and the Russians, and the French, and the British, so can we.

We'd better try to keep our eye on the ball a little better or we'll find ourselves seeking dragons to slay abroad far more frequently than is good for our, and the world's health.  Let's see, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq...how many wars in pursuit of political and ideological truth do we need before we realize that as the world's leading nuclear power we have a duty to keep our wits about us at all times and not fly off the handle when we get excited, or panicky, or talk ourselves into a sweat where we thing the sky is falling.  Never underestimate the creativity of a hysteric, for worst-case thinking seems like a truth of its own, despite not having its feet on the ground of reality.

"Don't take any wooden nickels," my Dad used to say.  That and

"Don't believe everything you hear, and only half of what you see...and none of what you read..."

Grandpa Leo was good that way.

PSYCHIATRY

In the United States, a young  man named  Hinckley who was obsessed with a certain Hollywood movie star shot Pres. Ronald Reagan in order to impress the young actress.  At the trial, after Hinckley's mental condition was put on display, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

It is unusual for a jury in America to find a defendant NGI.  Usually the way it works, as I've seen it over the dedades of criminal practice in San Francisco, is that the defense attorney moves to have the client examined psychiatrically and the court appoints two psychiatrists to perform an evaluation.  If they agree that the defendant did not know what he was doing, or that it was wrong, which is the legal test for insanity under the M'Naghton Rule, the prosecution and defense submit the matter for trial on the psychiatric reports, after discussing the matter first with the judge in chambers.  The judge finds the defendant NGI and he is sent off to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, but not for longer than the prison term prescribed for the offense charged.  After that, the defendant is eligible for release.

If the psychiatrists are in disagreement, the issue of sanity can be tried to a jury.  In the first murder case I was assigned to try as a young prosecutor in 1972, the stabbing in a crowded Tenderloin bar by a newly released ex-convict of his new girlfriend, the defense entered a plea of NGI at the start of trial after the jury had been sworn in, which interrupted the jury trial for weeks while the psychiatrists did their thing.  They disagreed.  At the resulting trial, which took three months, we had a battle of the shrinks.  I was forced to do a lot of medical research out at San Francisco General Hospital and U.C. San Francisco.  This is where I learned not to be afraid of doctors, or their alleged learning.  When a doctor enters a courtroom, he's forced to explain in English, and his opinions are as subject to challenge as a lay witness or police officer.  He's on my turf, in other words.  I'm okay as long as I've done my homework.  It's a terrible thing to see a doctor opining wrong and displaying the flaws in the facts or the analysis, or his pre-existing ideology, on the witness stand.

One of the difficulties with psychiatry for courtroom purposes is that, unlike illnesses caused by bacteria, viruses, and physical wounds, it depends on arguments.  Is homosexuality a mental disease or disorder?  It was back then, but was later voted out of existence.  You can't vote the flu out of existence as a disease, but you can as to homosexuality, depending on the political winds.

What kind of medical science is this?

It's the kind of science which holds that if you cannot get along in society there must be something wrong with you.  In many cases this is true.  Individuals who believe that God is telling them to drown their children or to enter school houses with guns (we've experience three such cases in the past two weeks alone, one in Amish Pennsylvania), have often experienced a break with reality, unable to see the world the way normal people do.  Or there may be other factors, such as the Goth-like boys at Columbine H.S., Littleton, Colorado a decade ago.

How much differentness is within normal limits (WNL) as the psychiatrists call it, and how much is over the line.

In the former Soviet Union, today's Russia in large measure, the official view was that if you were, or remained a dissident, defined as a person who thought differently, meaning from the view that this was a Socialist Paradise, clearly there was something wrong with you.  For conducting anti-Soviet activity you could be sent to the Gulag, the remote system of prisons, or instead to a psychiatric hospital where you would be drugged into conformity, medically lobotomized.   This is seen as a human rights abuse.

But now that the Soviet Union is no more and Russia is a democratic paradise we no longer have to worry about this, right?

Wrong.

It's baaack!  Psychiatric abuse may never have gone away.  These Russians are a curious folk.  They remind me of us in some ways.  No one would ever say that our president is crazy just because he often seems to make no sense despite being a Yale grad.  But I have heard sane citizens say that they thought he was totally nuts.  Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, seem to be workng off a different agenda than the rest of the world.  I hope they're right.  We don't make our top leaders take a personality test before being appointed, or after they show disturbing characteristics on the job.

What would we do if we ever had a president who went insane, I wonder.  Would removing him be lawful or on the order of staging a coup?  Usually when a president becomes too ill to function we hide it.  Pres. Woodrow Wilson's wife and his doctor kept him hidden while they ran the show.  Which is more unconstitutional, declaring president physically or mentally incompetent, or allowing these unelected people to govern for him?

Amendment 25, ratified 1967, regulating presidential disability and succession, provides that

Whenever the Vice-President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive  departments or such other body as Congress by law may provide, transmit to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the duties of his office, the Vice-President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.  Sec. 4.

Section 5 provides that the president may contest the above finding and action by transmitting a declaration in opposition in which case he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice-President and a majority or either of the above officers or body shall determine otherwise within four days and transmit this finding to the House and Senate as above prescribed.  Congress then has 21 days in which to make a finding of incompetence by a 2/3 vote during which the VP continues to act as Acting President, otherwise the president resumes his office. 

You can imagine the constitutional crisis this may present such as in a case where the president believes there are people in the world out to get us and the country is divided on what to believe.  Reality is defined by more than psychiatrists.  It's defined by what you, I, and the other voters believe. 

Why leave the important decisions to shrinks, I say, when we have politicians.

Look, no one said the world wasn't a crazy place.  It's our job as lawyers to provide the element of sanity between a crazy world and a crazy government.  Sometimes we have to use the technique of paradoxical intervention, telling Napoleon in the modern mental ward to clean his room because that's what all good generals do.

The report on the Russian use of psychiatry to cure the mental disease or disorder of political incorrectness is below.

MARK TWAIN ON TRUTH

Do let us economize when using scarce commodities, shall we?

THEIR MILITANT IDEOLOGY

Wisdom, a maybe-wise guy once said, is knowing what not to believe.

Here's why we've got to keep fighting in Iraq, according to Donald Rumsfeld, as the toilet flushes:

"If we left Iraq prematurely the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. 

And if we left the Middle East, they'd order us and all those who don't share their militant ideology  to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines."

And finally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld intoned, America will be forced "to make a stand nearer home."  (NYT Editorial, 8-04-06)

Okay, so the domino theory is back.  Vietnam went communist when we pulled out in 1975 and nothing happened, except the country went communist, but that's their problem, not mine.  The surrounding countries were already communist (China), or worse (Cambodia). Not my problem.

Vietnam and the surrounding countries remained the surrounding countries, as bad as they ever were, no better, no worse.  Pol Pot killed a million Cambodians, but we didn't start fighting in Vietnam to prevent that.

It's Rumsfeld's bit about "their militant ideology" that stopped me in my tracks. 

Whose militant ideology?

We are the most militant country the world has ever seen. 

We have a two-ocean navy that doesn't like to sit around doing nothing.  If there's trouble, they want a carrier off-shore launching jet fighter-bombers.  We have a round-the-world air force that can drop a nuke anywhere, if ordered, and an army that has the world divided into sectors such that no place is safe. 

We have Marines who travel light, shoot first, and don't ask a lot of questions, before OR after.

And then we have Special Forces in unstable places all over the world.  The Peace Corps with guns, they've been called, just keeping on the alert in case something tips. 

Not only that, but our Armed Forces even fight together, instead of against each other, in something called 'Joint,' meaning a combined effort.

We have interests all over. 

Our interests have interests.  And they pay, from oil money to big-engineering money to, in the olden days at least, banana money in the Caribbean.

The British Empire maintained a first-class navy and had troops garrisoned in colonies all over the world.  The globe was painted red.  The sun never set on the British Empire.  That's because the Lord would never trust the British in the dark, some Irish wit said.

Who will trust us in the dark?   

We are a very dangerous, armed and not very peace-loving people.

We think we can do no wrong.

When people get mad at us, we think they're the ones who are nuts.

When allies tell us to cool our jets, we consider them as having gone over to the enemy.  Germany, France, and Italy come to mind.  The Brits are us.  They've been there, done that, so they don't criticize.  They just don their red coats and join the fray. 

You know why the Brits wear red coats, don't you?

To conceal the blood when shot in battle.

You know why the French wear brown pants, don't you?

Ze little Americain joke.

Nations don't have psychiatrists.  They may need one, but they don't have one.  Nation's have critics.  But critics are easier to ignore than shrinks whom you pay.  Free advice is not valued.  Nations also have (temporary) allies, but they can be ignored as well.

America has a disorder.  I'll leave it to you to decide whether it is a character or personality disorder, but here's what it is, a neurosis or a deep-seated psychosis.  In any case, we are Lurch, and can do a lot of damage.

We think our shit doesn't stink.

We do things in the world and wonder why people don't like it.

Criticize us?  The people who gave the world Democracy, Due Process of Law and Freedom of the Mind? A Christian nation, some say, favored by God himself?  Who beat the British, and then saved them and the French in World War One and World War Two?  The Greatest Generation?  Who put men on the Moon and cars on Mars?  The greatest power the world has ever seen?

Isn't it our Manifest Destiny to lead the world, just as we tamed a continent and took some land from Mexico?  Wasn't God on our side then?  Wasn't God on our side when we took the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1898?  Didn't we Christianize the already Christian natives of the Philippines?

We're God's gift, right?

That's us.  That's our attitude.  Never lost a war.  Never can.  Never will.  I believed that growing up. 

Forget Korea and Vietnam, they don't count. Not big enough.

Panama and Grenada?  Please.

The Persian Gulf War?  Oil. 

The Highway of Death?  100 hours. 

Afghanistan!

Iraq.  Ooh, Iraq.  Now there's a mess.

Israel is fighting a war.  Terrorists rain a hundred to two hundred rockets a day on Israel.

Try to wipe out a guerrilla force that launches rockets from backyards using air.  Who do you blast?  This backyard or the one next to it?

You destroy a lot of homes and civilians.  We support Israel.  Against the whole Arab world.  I support Israel.  I support U.S. policy that supports Israel.  I expect a lot of Arab antagonism against Israel and the U.S. and our policies.

We knew that fundamentalist Muslims hated the idea of an American Christian army, what they call  a Crusader army, remaining standing on Saudi Arabian land after the Persian Gulf war, 1991.  They blew up the Marine barracks in Saudi, and continued bombing our embassies in Kenya and Dar Es Salaam.

The first World Trade Center bombing, the one that didn't bring the buildings down, and the bombing of USS Cole in the port of Yemen, from a rubber raft, no less, are further examples of the fact that people around the world hate us with a mad passion.  Those people have a militant ideology, especially Osama Bin Laden and his organization, Al Qaeda.  We are denounced daily in mosques all over the world. 

Nice guys like us are being denounced; can you believe this?

We've been warned for decades, since Munich in 1972, the PLO, the Red Brigades and Baader Meinhof in Europe that we'd be next.

Yet it came as a big surprise to see us attacked on September 11.  The intelligence community knew in an instant that UBL (Usama/Osama Bin Laden)'s Al Qaeda was responsible for the devastating attack, the most lethal on American soil since Pearl Harbor brought us into WWII.  We had FBI guys screaming that we needed to pick up these terrorists.  The CIA had traced some of them from Indonesia.  Does the CIA speak to the FBI?  Not joint enough yet.  It costs money, time, risk and effort to acquire valuable information.  You don't give it to the shop next door.  Does Macys tell Gimbels?

We were surprised by Pearl Harbor, too, and sought to hold people responsible.  Meanwhile, President FDR had been preparing the nation to enter the war as much as he was able, to such an extent that he was thought to have welcomed the opportunity.  Some thought he'd created the war by massing our battleships in Pearl Harbor to make a tempting target.  This always seemed far-fetched to me.  It's a lot easier to credit Navy bureaucratice stupidity than presidential ingenuity, for me, at least.

Our Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice-Wolfowitz-Perle-Kristol conservative and neoconservative axis decided that in order to show the world that we mean business, we could not take the 9-11 attack lying down.  We needed massive retaliation, and not just against Afghanistan.  We were going to blast the next guy in line, name of Saddam, for good measure.

Within two weeks we invaded Afghanistan, training ground for Al Qaeda and home of the Taliban, the former mujahadeen we backed into forcing the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from the country.  We provided Stinger surface-to-air missiles to soldiers wearing sandals and tunics to shoot down Soviet aircraft.  A lot of the missiles were left after the war.  Some, it's said, have been turned around against us, or our interests.  Osama was fighting Soviets then, driving the infidel from Muslim land, as he sees things.  That would be the Christian, Western Soviets, as in European crusaders.

In the Eleventh and Twelfth centuries, Europe under the Pope, sent armies of Christians to the Holy Land to free it of Muslims.  We called each other 'infidels,' incidentally. These were not nice armies.  They massacred a lot of innocent civilians.  To this day, the worst that the Muslim world can call its enemies is "the Great Satan" (that's us, to Iran) or "Crusaders" (that's also us, to Osama and his ilk).

It may serve our purposes for us to continue to think of ourselves as an exceptional people. 

"Exceptional" and "exceptionalism" are learned words used by scholars to describe the feeling that we are not like other people, such as those evil Germans who followed that insane Adolf Hitler, or those benighted Russians who supported Josef Stalin for all those years. 

The fact is that Germans loved Hitler because he was them and they were him.  He perfectly reflected German attitude and feeling, and vice versa.  Fuhrer and follower were united in the belief that his/their ideas were going to result in a thousand year rule ("reich") that, in the event, ended in 1945.  There are still Russians today who worship Stalin, a man who killed 25 million of their fellow Russians and terrorized the nation.  Germans and Russians made no move to overthrow their most exemplary leaders.  As a kid I wondered why they didn't.  They probably wondered the same about us.

These were nations who needed a psychiatrist to help them deal with their issues before they inflicted a lot of woe on themselves and others.  We don't have national psychiatrists, though, do we?

So what do we do?  All we can do is to talk, as we're talking here, and not be so quick to dismiss comments from other nations that have similar interests.  We don't need to think of them as friends, even when the advice is offered as a friend offers advice.  When it comes to international relations, nations don't have friends, they have interests.  We act as friends as long as our interests coincide.  After that, it's been nice knowing you.  See you after the war.  Japan and Germany became our friends, er, allies.  We almost get along with Russia, after the fall.  Some day we may even get along with France, but I'm not counting the days.

Militant ideology.

I'm not a psychiatrist, although as a lawyer in criminal practice I've been accused of talking like one.  I've dealt with a lot of twisted people, and not all of them were clients.  Some of them were officials, others were civilian witnesses.  People see the world through the most interesting lenses, not all of them clear.

One of the things that people do is to project their view of themselves onto others.  I knew a very smart guy who had accumulated a boatload of money from fraudulent real estate dealings that ultimately put him in the penitentiary for thirty years.  He was so clever, and such a twisted guy, that he felt that he was entitled to cheat because so many other people cheated so often and seemed to get away with it.

You can read about such people every day in the indictments pages of the business or sports sections of your newspaper.  With this fellow, even when someone did something straight, he would figure out a theory as to how Mr. Straight was really doing something quite crooked, if only all the facts were known.  Mr. Crooked saw the world through a lens that was crooked.  But you can't see your own lenses while you're looking through them, can you?  You need to remove them or listen to someone tell you there's a problem with your lenses.  They don't fit any more.  You're not seeing clearly.  Your lenses are tinted.  You've got cataracts.  You're myopic.

Mr. Crook had the deep-seated belief that the world was a very crooked place and the only way to beat the crooks was to out-crook them.  He may have been quite correct, but that didn't help his case after he was indicted. 

He was so adamant about this, in fact, that when he insisted he'd done nothing wrong, at time of sentencing after he was duly, and righteously, convicted, the irate judge gave him the absolute maximum, thirty years in the slammer, thus setting the curve for a host of other similar characters who followed in other cases across the land.

Which brings us back to Mr. Rumsfeld, a warrior from way back, to before Vietnam, maybe to Korea.  Rummy believes the world to be a hostile place, filled with people trying to kill each other, and us, for advantage.  We, the U.S., occupy a favored position in this world, and it's not just because we're nice guys on whom God has smiled.  We've had to work and pay, in fighting and blood, for over two hundred years, to acquire and maintain this privileged position.

The sugar coating on the bitter pill may be that we see ourselves as being a lot better than those stupid Germans and Russians who followed those madmen, Hitler and Stalin. 

We could never fall into such a trap, by following madmen, could we?

How would we know?  How would those Germans and Russians know?  They followed madmen who looked like them.  Who do we follow?  Who do we like most?  Plain spoken madmen who can choose among alternatives but not think which makes more sense?

Were they, the Germans and Russians, stupider than we?  Were we smarter?  How did we get so smart, and they not?  We came from them.  We all read the same books.  How did we become inoculated against stupidity or madness?  Did they miss their injections?  Have we missed ours?

Germany and Russia were both Christian nations.  Obviously Christianity provides no inoculation against stupidity or madness.  Nor any other faith, for that matter, as far as I'm aware.  Faith is a tool of war, as well as peace.  Any side can pick up the tools of war.  Faith is more powerful than nukes for rallying the troops.  Nukes are good for wiping out your enemy, provided you shoot first.

A lot of Americans today see the U.S. as a Christian nation.  Prof. Noah Feldman of New York University Law School (a very good law school, the alma mater of yours truly) writes in his good book, Divided By God (FSG, 2005), that both warring groups in America, whom he calls "values evangelicals" and "legal secularists" fight over our founding myth, the one that we teach school-children about how this country was created.  Some claim, reports Feldman, that:

the framers gave us a "Godless Constitution" with strong separation of church and state, and, to the contrary, that the Constitution assumed a Christian nation and prohibited the federal government only from officially preferring one denomination over others.  (P. 21)

Feldman asserts that

both these perspectives are, in fact, wrong, having developed over the last fifty years in order to justify positions in a contemporary legal and cultural fight under circumstances very different from the framers'.

We fight over how we see ourselves.  Osama sees us as a Christian nation which supports Israel and puts crusader forces on holy Muslim soil.  Our Christians seem to be playing into Osama's propaganda machine, but far be it from me to get in the way of a Christian soldier as marching onward for his country, under God, of course.

The fact is that in a democracy (that's us, we export Democracy) we're stuck with the duty of making our own laws, rules, and policies and of taking responsibility for our own actions.  God doesn't sit in the voting booths and force the voters to make the correct decisions.  We have Blue states and Red States.  We don't know how God voted.  Obviously he controls no election.  Only the vote counters do that.  Ask the late Mayor Daley or LBJ about vote counting.  Or read Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate, part of his biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, about how they counted votes in Texas.  Clue:  find out how much you're losing by and get a friendly voting box stuffer to add just enough votes to snatch victory from defeat.

God doesn't occupy the White House any more than he occupies the Internal Revenue Service or the Environmental Protection Agency, which some people think is the CIA, or the voting booth.

If God ran our government, we wouldn't need Congress would we.  Tom DeLay and his good friend Jack Abramoff wouldn't need to get in trouble sloshing money from Indian tribe gambling casinos onto Congressmen to get them to vote right.  God wouldn't need the dough.  He could just make all he wants, like some Super-Mint in the Sky.  My God would, anyway.  Wouldn't yours?  What's the sense of being all powerful, all knowing, and all over the place if you can't have your way in Washington?

But we were talking about Rumsfeld claiming that the bad guys had a militant ideology, as though we didn't.

Can't he do better than that?

Why not admit that we have a militant ideology, but that ours is better. 

Why stick to a claim which can be turned around on us so easily.  Militant ideology.  That makes me laugh.  How do you think we got to where we are without having a militant ideology.  Mexico lacks a militant ideology.  Canada lacks a militant ideology.  They don't need one.  They have us. 

Japan had a militant ideology, but WWII and those two A-bombs turned some Japanese into peace-loving, anti-nuclear, manufacturing and trading folks, for awhile.  Yet Prime Minister Koizumi makes a political point of honoring the Empire of Japan's war dead, including vicious war criminals, showing that the ember of militant ideology remains aglow. 

China is outraged at Japan's failure to fully disabuse itself of the stink of atrocity that produced, to give one example only, the Rape of Nanking, despite nice words of apology, because honoring the ember gives the lie to the apology.

It is as though Mel Gibson apologies for the words while not recognizing that he is infested with a virulent form of mental cancer.

You have to be careful of what you don't recognize, but that others do see, so clearly.  You have to be blind or deaf, to fail to hear or see their objections.  You need to wipe your lenses, the ones inside your head.

Nations fail to see all the time.

Croesus, the King of Lydia, asked the Oracle of Delphi whether he should invade the neighboring kingdom of Cyrus the Great of Persia. 

If you do, "A great empire will fall," was the oracle's, well, Delphic, response. 

Croesus invaded, and lost his kingdom.  The oracle was correct, in a manner of speaking, allowing for the Delphic ambiguity.

America is blind to its future.  We wanted to act against terrorism after 9-11.  Invading Afghanistan was not a great enough show of force. Afghanistan was the training ground for terrorists.  The terrorists who attacked on 9-11 by commandeering the jetliners were all Saudis, but the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is our gas station.  We have interests in common.  They provide the energy we crave in a worse way than addicts need heroin.  We protect their oil field which supply Japan, Europe, and the West, meaning us and our allies.  We focused little, however, on the ideology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  We went after Saddam, who didn't attack us on 9-11, didn't support Al Qaeda on 9-11, and didn't possess weapons of mass destruction.  Other than that he needed to be taken out on general principles as a bad guy who wouldn't play ball with the organized world, led by us.  Saddam was a regular evildoer, in other words.

Saddam was definitely a bad actor who needed going after, it's just that doing so had little to do with 9-11, and I don't think we really care.

The problem is that deciding to invade is one thing, but then figuring out what to do next is something else.  You can ask our army to invade, but if you ask the general who has his hands, and mind, full of planning for the invasion, you're really bothering him a lot to ask him to plan for the victory celebration and rebuilding that follows.  It's bad luck when planning an invasion to lose focus on achieving success by imagining the party and reconstruction.

So we handed off the rebuilding plans to this group and that and ignored the recommendations.  Result?  Baghdad today, and civil war tomorrow, if you don't want to call what's happening a civil war.

See

Fiasco, the American Military Adventure, by Thomas E. Ricks, (Penguin, 2006). 

Cobra II, The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. 

The Battle For Peace, by General Anthony Zinni (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006). Zinni preceded Tommy Franks as top general at Central Command. 

Gen. Tommy Franks's autobiography, American Soldier.

Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer (Henry Holt & Co., 2006).

"Militant ideology" refers to a set of attitudes and beliefs.  Attitudes and beliefs are both inescapable and essential for survival in a difficult world of scarce resources.  The world is full of people who are also competing for survival but who have a different set of attitudes and beliefs, only with them at the center, just like us.

Are we guaranteed to be sitting pretty forever? 

We think no more about this than General Tommy Franks wanted to think about the victory party and the nation building that was sure to follow if and when he successfully invaded Iraq, which he did, then quit. He retired the day after he won the war.  Left it to the next guy to clean up the mess.  No discredit to him.  The man is smart.

The next guy is still trying, but the mess is bigger than he is.  Hence Rumsfeld and two top generals testifying before Congress, yesterday, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Okay, so the bad guys have a militant ideology, and so do we, but ours has been more successful in putting us in first place among nations.  This is like leading a golf tournament you can't get out of.  You can exhaust yourself and find yourself dropping back.  Look at the Dutch, Spain, France, Great Britain, all great empires at one time, until conditions changed.  Then they fell off.  We're riding high, with Rumsfeld, Bush, Rice, et. al., leading the charge.  Now we've run into a problem.

What happens next?

Who's looking?

Are you?

Who's looking out for your grandkids if you aren't?