The Rag Blog

SAN FRANCISCO – We are being walled in. Every second that we stay here, they are adding another inch to the wall they are building along the southern border of this country and the northern one of the next country down. The border wall will eventually extend 1964 miles between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, roughly six times the length of the wall the Israelis are throwing up inside Palestine and 20 times that of the Berlin Wall, which once separated the totalitarians from the so-called free world.

The Wall is a project of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Guard, and a gaggle of corporate predators. It is only congruent that Israeli security planners were brought in for consultations and a sort of perverse poetic justice that a San Diego subcontractor has been indicted for exploiting the labor of the very undocumented workers the Wall is being built to keep out.

Those who build this Wall tell us that it will keep illegal people out of the United States of North America but no person is illegal. It is not yet against the law to be alive except maybe in Bush’s Iraq. Although the Border Wall is designed to keep workers on the other side, the goods they produce and the services they provide are perfectly free to pass through the barrier from one corporate predator to another.

Homeland Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of the globalizers of greed, argues that they are building this Wall for our own protection. That the illegal people on the other side are all potential terrorists. This is the same reason that Israel builds the notorious “security barrier” which prevents Palestinian farmers from tending their fields and the olive trees they have nurtured since biblical times. This is the same reason that the Army Corps of Engineers throws up blast walls between neighborhoods in Baghdad and between those neighborhoods and the increasingly vulnerable Green Zone. Indeed, we all live in the Green Zone now.

The Army Corps of Engineers is in the wall business. Perhaps the only wall the corps does not build is between the lower ninth ward of New Orleans and the sea which engulfed that vibrant black neighborhood two years ago this past August 29. The Army Corps of Engineers has its priorities.

We watch them as they wall us in, as if it is not happening to us. We watch them as they pour the concrete, string up the razor wire, install the searchlights and the electronic sensors, the surveillance cameras, the armed patrols and snarling dogs and unmanned drones. We do not understand yet that they are trying to keep us from breaking out of the compound.

They need to keep us walled in here so that we will know no other reality. So that we will always keep buying their useless junk and pledging allegiance to corporate vampires. There is a reason why they call it Wall Street.

We are allowing them to wall us in into their war. Bush lays it on trowel by trowel. It’s just like building fences down on the ranch. That’s what he calls the Border Wall. A fence. You thought there was a way out of here? That the Democrats would throw up ladders to get across this Wall of War? The fix has been in since last November’s elections.

Now Bush flies at night to a photo op in Anbar, evading the press corps in the underground passages beneath the White House. Now General BetrayUs, a ventriloquist’s dummy of Goebbelian dimensions, oozes to a willingly bamboozled Congress that Iraq is all better now. Now Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Lee roll over at their Master’s Voice and vote to tag a few hundred more miles on to this Wall of lies. We will never be able to leave now. We have walled ourselves into Iraq.

I am a writer. I build my walls out of words but the only word for our times is arrrggghhh!

We are the builders of our own walls. We have walled ourselves into our own fears, bolted the doors and windows and hunkered down deep in the compartmentalized bunkers they force us to rent each month with our blood and our sweat. We do not even know who lives on the other side of the six inches of sheet rock that separates us from our next-door neighbors. All we can think is that they want our stuff. Bush said that. They want what we have. According to the newest numbers, there are nine guns for every 10 red-blooded citizens of the United Snakes (note – undocumented workers are not included in this sampling.)

Fear is a big item in the wall business. You can’t build one without it. The bigger the fear the taller the Wall and the taller the Wall, the greater the profits. The Blackwaters and the Dynecorps have made their fortunes keeping the looters at bay. How many folks on your block or in your building are employed to guard someone else’s property or person?

Why do they hate us so much, Bush wailed as the towers were tumbling six 9/11s ago now? No one ever quite answered that extremely crucial question. Ignorance requires active participation and we are walling ourselves into the mind-numbing ignorance of the eternally lobotomized.

We choose to avoid what is on the other side of the Wall. We do not know what it looks like over there or how it smells. The garbage pits of Tijuana where our own offal is dumped every day to the delight of emaciated Indian scavengers. The bloated bellies of the starvation army stretching from TJ to Tierra del Fuego. The stench of shit and blood hanging heavily over Baghdad this morning.

We don’t care. We are so scared by it all that we can’t allow ourselves to care. We punch up the remote and the screen hides us from the rest of the world. We bust up a joint and forget that we live in the shadow of the Wall and we cannot get out of here.

We are stuck inside the intestinal Walls of the beast’s belly. There isn’t much light in here and we cannot see out. We cannot see how we look to others. We cannot see what is in their eyes. We will never learn the answer to Bush’s question after 9/11 took his mind away. Why do they hate us so much?

I have a dream. It is their nightmare. I dream that we are locked up in some maximum security prison, maybe old Folsom or Abu Ghraib or the T. Don Hutto detention center, and the word on the grapevine is “jailbreak!” We listen up for the signal and when it comes, we let each other out of our cages, overwhelm the guards, and scale the Wall on ropes fashioned from our bed sheets. At the top we stop to catch our collective breath and take a look at what the world really looks like on the other side. For once, we cannot see the Wall.

The insurgents who were shooting at U.S. troops six months ago are now on the payroll [includes video].

Title: Director’s Cut: New Video shows the truth in Anbar that Petraeus does not want us to see.

When Bush was in Iraq two weeks ago he posed for photographs with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Anbar Awakening, an alliance of Sunni tribes who vow to back the United States and fight against al Qaeda.

Last Monday, General Petraeus testified to Congress that “a year ago” Anbar province “was assessed ‘lost’ politically … Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al Qaeda and reject its Taliban-like ideology.”

Three days later, the assassination of Abu Risha in Ramadi dramatically undercut Bush and Petraeus’ claims of Anbar victory and peacekeeping. But what else is the administration keeping from us about Anbar?

Rick Rowley, a journalist and independent filmmaker of Big Noise Films, was one of the last people to videotape and interview the Sunni sheikh, and his video report Uncovering the Truth Behind the Anbar Success Story, presents a very different picture of the Anbar Awakening.

Embedded with the U.S. Army and Iraqi militias, Rowley shows us that the Sunni “freedom fighters” with whom the United States is now allied are not just insurgents who had been killing Americans but war criminals responsible for sectarian cleansing.

Rowley, and his co-producers David Enders and Hiba Dawood, are the only Western journalists to bring a camera into the refugee camp where the displaced Shiites recount being attacked, bombed and driven out by the very tribes Petraeus and Bush are hailing as heroes.

Rowley’s report, which includes interviews with candid U.S. soldiers and footage of a military commander handing a Sunni leader a wad of cash, suggests the role of bribery and coercion in building alliances that serve short-term goals in Anbar province, but in the long run deepen a multisided civil war. I talked to Rick Rowley about his report and what he thinks it indicates about Iraq’s future.

Katie Halper: What brought you to Iraq, and what were you hoping to capture?

Rick Rowley: We knew that one of the major stories the Army was going to use to justify keeping troops there was the supposed success in Anbar. The first investigation we did was into the Anbar reconciliation program. We spent six weeks crisscrossing Iraq, embedding with different militias to try to get a picture of the state of Iraq during the surge.

KH: You were the last Western journalists to videotape an interview with Abu Risha. What was he like? What was his significance?

RR: He seemed stiff and scripted. He told us some incredible lies during the interview. Three times he said he was the leader of all the Arab tribes of Iraq — both Shia and Sunni. And like a bad poker player’s tell, every time he told a lie he sniffed loudly.

He was a figurehead for a movement, the face they put on this story. Operationally, militarily, he wasn’t particularly important. In his interview with us he said there was 100 percent security in Ramadi, that he was head of all of the tribes in Iraq. That has proven, in a horrifying way, to not be true. His assassination has blown a hole in the American story about security in Anbar. It’s going to have a chilling effect on other tribes in other parts of the country who were thinking it might be safe to work with the Americans.

KH: Bush and Petraeus are hailing our alliance with Sunni tribes in Anbar. Can you tell us about these “freedom fighters” the U.S. is now allied with?

Once a mighty war god, Bush has run out of tricks, troops and time. Will Americans finally rise up to stop his endless war?

Sept. 18, 2007 | The Iraq war has moved into a weird purgatorial endgame. Almost no one believes in it anymore, but it keeps going. Americans keep dying, Iraq continues to fall apart, there is no end in sight, but nothing changes. Much of the country wants the war to end, but the political system is deadlocked. As George W. Bush’s presidency winds down, there will be a crucial struggle between two opposed forces: inertia vs. outrage, resignation vs. engagement. At stake is not just what we do in Iraq but a deeper question: Do we care?

If history holds, the war will just keep rolling along as an anesthetized nation watches dumbly from the sidelines. Bush has succeeded in making an endless, pointless war seem normal. He just won another tactical victory, convincing wavering GOP politicians to sign off on his stay-the-course policy. A great lassitude seems to have descended over the country. The debate has gone on for too long, and the outcome is always the same. No one even wants to think about it anymore. The war is invisible.

But beneath the surface, something may have changed. Most Americans have been skeptical of Bush’s war and everything he has said about it for a year or more. Still, they have entertained hope that the situation in Iraq would improve. Bush’s “surge” was his last gambit: Everyone knew that there were no more troops to throw in. It had to work. Now that it is clear that it didn’t, there is nothing else Bush can do.

This is an unprecedented situation. Bush always had another trick up his sleeve, another milestone to point to, another winning tactic to propose. But he has run out of tricks. The thing he dreaded most has come to pass: He is now completely at the mercy of events in Iraq.

Of course, Bush was always hostage to the harsh reality of Iraq. But he was able to counter that reality by invoking his master narrative about how Iraq was the front line of the war on terror, a battle of good vs. evil, a crucial battle on which the fate of the West depended. Even though Americans increasingly rejected that narrative, it had enough resonance to perform its function. At least Bush came across as consistent.

Now Bush’s grand war story has not only been discredited by reality, he himself has been forced to adjust it in ways that make him look both hypocritical and powerless. His aura as an aggressive winner has been destroyed. This fact has not sunk in yet, but it could lead to the final erosion of American support for the war.

Bush has justified the war by arguing that it’s necessary to fight terrorism, and that we’re winning. Gen. Petraeus bought more time for Bush by arguing that the surge had resulted in some minor tactical victories. But by declining to say whether the war in Iraq was making us safer, Petraeus did more damage to Bush’s justifications for the war than all of the experts who have concluded that the war has made America less safe. Both Petraeus and Iraq ambassador Ryan Crocker admitted that we are not winning the real war in Iraq, the political one, and there are no realistic expectations of doing so.

Only dead-enders still believe that Bush’s Iraq war is either winnable or constitutes “the front line of the war on terror.” Most Americans see it as a terrible blunder that has thrown Americans into the middle of a civil war, and that is breeding far more terrorists than it is eliminating. Petraeus and Crocker’s reports only confirmed these beliefs. Bush has no recourse. These are his people. And he doesn’t have any more to trot out.

Trapped by reality, Bush can no longer use his time-tested rhetoric to rally America. Instead, he is forced to contradict his own grand ideological claims. His pathetic speech last week was a preview of what we are likely to see in the diminished last phase of his presidency. The grand rhetoric about “victory” was replaced by the weird CEO-like phrase “return on success,” an expression so plastic it radiated “corporate bullshit spin” from every syllable. Worse, Bush had to acknowledge the destructive facts on the ground. He had to deal with the painful reality that unless he extends tours of duty, which would be political suicide, he has to start bringing troops home, no matter what the situation in Iraq is. This forced him to make the absurd claim that the surge’s “success” in Iraq has made it possible to bring home 5,700 troops by Christmas. Disregarding the fact that these troops were slated to come home anyway, not even Bush’s most ardent supporters could believe that there is any actual connection between the allegedly “improving” situation in Iraq and the redeployment of 5,700 troops.

By insisting that the stakes in the war are nothing less than the fate of Western civilization, yet refusing to impose a draft or ask Americans to make real sacrifices, Bush has painted himself into a corner. If the war in Iraq was really the vital front line of the war against terror that Bush claims it is, he should not be pulling troops out, but pouring more in — even if it meant reinstating the draft. For the first time, Bush’s actions explicitly belie his words. Bush, once the great and powerful war god, now comes across as a desperate politician hiding behind a curtain, trying to score popularity points by bringing troops home while simultaneously warning of apocalypse if we lose the war. Bush’s obvious hypocrisy and powerlessness, exacerbated by his lame-duck status, have caused him to lose his image of invincibility — the only thing he ever had going for him.

In short, we’re now in the endgame, and everyone knows it. Even the entropic force of war eventually runs out. The fact that even staunchly conservative GOP senators like Elizabeth Dole are edging away from Bush shows how much the ground has shifted.

Unless a miracle happens to stabilize Iraq in the next six months, the end of Bush’s presidency will be slow-motion political death for him. Each bombing, each sectarian murder, each failure of the Iraqi factions to reach agreement will be another nail in his coffin. If the situation in Iraq worsens, which is, sadly, the most likely scenario, Bush cannot send more troops in, because there are none to send. But if he pulls them out, as he will be under enormous pressure to do, he will look like a weakling and a hypocrite. There is no way for him to get out of this self-created box — except by ratcheting up tensions with Iran and Syria in the hopes of provoking an accidentally-on-purpose regional war that would serve as a do-over for his entire misguided Middle East adventure. Insane as that idea would be, he might grab at it to save himself.

Assuming that this nightmare doesn’t materialize, the best-case scenario would be a political breakthrough, in which moderate GOP politicians, terrified of losing their seats in 2008, join with Democrats to force Bush to begin ending the war. The time has never been more propitious.

But America is being pulled in opposite directions. The failure of the war, and Bush’s meltdown, could lead Americans to turn decisively against it. But it could also heighten the exhausted passivity, the resignation, and the sheer apathy that have marked America’s response to the war.

The deepest, darkest fear of those opposed to the war is that Americans simply don’t care enough to end it. The dead and the maimed are hidden from view. The war’s economic impact goes unnoticed. The lack of a draft means that the rich and powerful have no personal stake in the war. Its effect on most Americans, in short, is zero. It is almost as if it is being fought by a mercenary army on behalf of some unknown entity. It may go down in history as the first war that never ended because people forgot its existence.

So America needs to wake up. Those opposed to the war, of whatever political persuasion, need to appropriate that old World War II chestnut, “Don’t you know there’s a war going on?” We need to think about what we could do with the $550 billion the war has cost so far. We need to remember that every day that this war goes on, jihadis rejoice, the chances of a devastating regional confrontation increase and our national security is jeopardized. Above all, we need to remember that real people are dying every day in this war — Americans and Iraqis.

One of the many tragedies of Bush’s response to 9/11 was that he squandered the sense of national unity that sprang up after the terror attacks. The country today is more bitterly divided than at any time since Vietnam. But we can regain that unity — not through partisanship, not through Bush-hating, but through a renewed acknowledgment of our responsibility to each other. We need to remember that every American who falls in Iraq is someone’s son or daughter. We need to commit ourselves to working with the Iraqis, whom we have so terribly wronged, and with the rest of the world to ensure that our departure will not cause Iraq’s people to suffer even more. We need to remember that war is not normal, that it is the worst thing in the world, to be undertaken only in extreme need. And we need to remember that a nation that does not rise up when arrogant and foolish leaders sacrifice its less privileged members is in danger of becoming a nation in name only.

BAGHDAD – American officials scrambled to head off a potential crisis Monday after irate Iraqi authorities canceled the license of the controversial American security company Blackwater USA, whose guards were accused of shooting to death eight civilians while guarding a U.S. State Department motorcade.

The swift response to Sunday’s deaths marked Iraq’s boldest step against foreign security contractors who have long been accused of racing through Baghdad’s streets and firing without restraint at anyone they see as a threat.

It also cast a focus on the continued lack of control by American officials over heavily armed private security contractors, at least 20,000 of whom supplement the U.S.-led military forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The ouster of all Blackwater guards could cripple security arrangements for U.S. diplomats and other workers who rely on private guards for protection.

But several contractors predicted Monday that it was doubtful the Iraqi government would carry through on the threat to expel Blackwater.

“For all intents and purposes they belong to the [U.S.] Department of State,” one contractor said of Blackwater, whose employees have often been the victims of violence, including a gruesome 2004 incident in Fallujah when four guards were killed and mutilated.

While many details of Sunday’s incident remain in dispute, the gravity of the situation was apparent in the reaction of officials in Washington and Baghdad.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday night to express regret over the shootings involving the North Carolina-based company, which provides most of the security for U.S. Embassy personnel traveling in Iraq. Al-Maliki on Sunday condemned the shooting as a “crime.”

‘A full investigation’

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman stressed that officials wanted to get to the bottom of the incident. “We take this very seriously and we are launching a full investigation in cooperation with the Iraqi authorities,” spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo said.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said the Iraqi government should use the incident to look into overhauling private security guards’ immunity from Iraqi courts that was granted by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer in 2003 and later extended ahead of Iraq’s return to sovereignty.

“This is a golden opportunity for the government of Iraq to radically review the CPA Order 17 and make the review part of the investigation process,” al-Rubaie said.

Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, accused Blackwater of breaking the law.

“They committed a crime,” Khalaf said. “The judicial system will take action.” It was not immediately clear, however, how Blackwater employees could be prosecuted due to the immunity provisions enacted.

Private security companies expert Peter Singer said the case posed a sticky dilemma for the Americans.

“If [al-Maliki] is already describing this as a crime … we have a very interesting bridge to cross,” said Singer, an analyst with the Brookings Institution. “Do we turn over American citizens to an Iraqi judicial system that is inept, corrupt and now politicized?”

The incident Sunday was the latest of many in which private security contractors employed by U.S.-led forces have shot and killed Iraqi civilians.

No U.S. security contractor has been prosecuted in the U.S. or Iraq. The latest incident is the first in which the Iraqi government has challenged the blanket immunity for foreign private security contractors, who number 20,000 to 30,000.

Khalaf said eight people were killed and 13 wounded when the security convoy sped by Nisoor Square at the edge of the Mansour district in western Baghdad. Two Iraqi witnesses said no one had attacked the convoy.

“It is my right to study an honorable career,to choose my partner, to build our life. It is my right to work any job. We must protect women’s rights. The rights of the women and the rights of the children are hidden in the shadow of the law”.

(From the lead song, “Ala Dal’ona,” on the CD, “Needle in the Groove.”

“It’s very important to be here, because where there is darkness it’s nice to make light.” – Fatima Khaldi, co-founder, Women for Life, northern Palestine.

In Salfit district in the northern West Bank, the women’s educational organization Women for Life with its girls’ spin-off, Flowers Against the Occupation, in 2005 conceived the idea of a girls’ summer music camp. Music camps for girls were unheard of in this rural, deeply-Muslim area where girls don’t usually learn musical instruments. Getting to concerts in Ramallah is made impossible by Israel’s curfews and sieges; its maze of checkpoints; its draconian internal closures (sealing off villages from each other) and external closures (sealing off the West Bank and Gaza from Israel.) Despite such obstacles Women for Life co-founder Fatima Khaldi, the girls from “Flowers” and Boston-based Hannah Mermelstein pushed on with the camp. (See The Boston Globe Magazine, 7-22-2007, “Counter Tourism,” an article about Mermelstein and fellow Bostonian Dunya Alwan’s “Birthright Unplugged” tours of the occupied West Bank for American Jews.) They produced “Needle in the Groove,” a sixteen-song CD whose lead, a traditional Palestinian folk tune rewritten by Khaldi as a women’s liberation song, is sung a cappella by two of her daughters, Shams and Mayisa. The rest of the pieces are freedom songs by American women folk-singers. The CD’s liner notes include photographs of quilt patches designed by the girls and the musicians. Proceeds from “Needle in the Groove” sales helped fund the camp. (For more detail about the CD and photographs of girls in “Flowers Against the Occupation,” see Needleinthegroove.org.) Mermelstein recruited five American women musician-activists to teach at the camp – DC-based Pat Humphries and Sandy O of the folk duo “Emma’s Revolution;” Andrea Prichett, a guitarist from Oakland, California, of the band “Rebecca Riots;” Sarah Allen Pella, a Seattle-based rock drummer of the band “supermodelumberjack,” and the Boston-based writer of this article, a pianist. They raised money for the trip and donated instruments to the summer camp and Women for Life. The camp’s pilot session took place this past August.

I know the girls will love the keyboard, a “Roland Oriental.” I’ve found it in a Ramallah music store owned by musician-teacher Omar who tells me he’s also “Palestine’s first stand-up comedian.” “It’s professional quality!” he assures me as I lose myself in its Arabic drum patches, organ and oud sounds. I phone Fatima Khaldi who’s in Ramallah on business, announce I’m buying the keyboard, and that Omar’s driver will take it north to Bidya, seat of “Women for Life.” Fatima arrives within the hour, wrapped in hijab and jilbaab – the long, straight Muslim cover-up coat most adult women wear in rural Palestine even in the sweltering August heat. She has a deeply-lined, warm, mobile face, and almost immediately we’re in conversation about her life (divorced, a social worker, raising five children by herself – heroic in rural Palestine), and the music camp. It will be a strike against the occupation, she says. “I know that one day Palestine will be free. You agree, don’t you?” Her eyes rivet mine. I hesitate a second and then: “Yes, it will be free.” Does she know about our Civil Rights movement? Martin Luther King? She nods. I begin singing “We Shall Overcome,” and she chimes in, eyes shining.

It used to take less than half an hour to drive from Ramallah to Bidya. Now, because of the checkpoints and other hazards of the occupation, it can take upwards of an hour. Omar’s driver hurtles up the narrow road at 60 miles an hour circumventing Huwara checkpoint, notorious for Israeli soldiers’ abuses. The West Bank in summer rises around us, its austere Mediterranean beauty reminiscent of parts of the former Yugoslavia. Twenty years ago and more, I used to drive the length and breadth of the region, feasting my eyes on these steep, stony hills lined with their unbroken traceries of dry-wall terracing and olive trees billowing green and silver in the breeze. Israel’s colonization of the area was well underway then (the region’s rich land and abundant aquifers made it coveted territory for the occupier) but you could still travel all around and view an unspoiled loveliness. No more. The names of settlements come up with dizzying regularity – Elon Moreh; Ariel; Tappuach; Revava. At one point as we drive north, a gigantic menorah rises like a fist in the middle of the road, announcing Israel’s messianic dominion.

The settlements sprawl throughout the district like so many California red-roofed suburbs, encircling all the Palestinian villages and towns. In the late 1960s the Allon Plan and World Zionist Organization’s Drobles Plan stipulated that Israeli settlements should ensnare and divide all Palestinian living centers from each other. To annex the settlements to itself Israel has slashed the region with its separation wall. The World Court declared the wall illegal in 2004 but Israel bludgeons on with construction to date, separating hundreds of thousands from their land. This is as true in Salfit as elsewhere; to Salfit’s north the wall has encircled all of Qalqilya, obliterating the economy of a city once famous for its peaceful commerce with its Israeli neighbors. A million olive trees, which formed a large part of Palestinian agricultural sustenance, have been destroyed since 1967 (many have been uprooted and resold in Israel.) Half a million have been destroyed since 2000, many for the wall. Gashed by the staggeringly ugly, 25-foot-high concrete barrier, criss-crossed by wide, Jewish-only highways that enable the settlers to access their colonies without having to come in contact with Arabs, pockmarked with hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints, the region’s ecology has been devastated, its beauty defaced, and the agricultural sustenance that used to be the backbone of its economy crushed.

It takes us 45 minutes to reach Bidya, a hot, dusty little place, its main drag flanked by homely shops. The back of the building housing Women for Life’s offices gives onto a lot reminiscent of poorer sections of Bedford Stuyvesant in New York City — two small battered-looking grocery stores flank the building. Centuries-old traditional Palestinian architecture was low, made of regional stone. It had lovely features among which, gothic-arched living quarters. You can still see it in Jerusalem’s Old City, in East and West Jerusalem, but it has all but vanished from most of the West Bank. Because Israel has confiscated so much Palestinian land, new Palestinian construction is often vertical, adding third, fourth and even fifth floors to already-existing structures. The effect is ugly and out of harmony with the surrounding landscape. Exhausted with the heat, we cart keyboard, amplifier, keyboard stand and mike to Women for Life’s suite of offices on the fifth story. Fatima’s 17-year-old daughter Mayisa, one of the two a cappella singers on “Needle in the Groove,” bounds up to me. “So,” she says in perfect English, grinning, “you are going to teach us?”

“SIR, I don’t know, actually”: The fact that America’s surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week’s festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush’s troop “reduction” are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn’t say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is “on balance” more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.

Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we’re back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, “is virtually impotent.” Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America’s P.R. in the jihadists’ world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international “special sports envoy.” We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.

This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush’s recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam.

Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus’s sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland’s similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as well of the “repeated successes” of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. “The strategy we’re following at this time is the proper one,” the general assured America, and “is producing results.”

Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there’s a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress, regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland’s Congressional appearance.

Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears’s latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann, our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their “Briefing for America,” as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.

Even if military “victory” were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the “surge.” Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don’t want to hear anything that might remind them of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric’s much-promoted weeklong visit to the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast’s all-time low. Angelina Jolie’s movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint Eastwood’s wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its latest season, “24” lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did between January’s prime-time address and last week’s.

You can’t blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the president’s real “plan for victory” is to let his successor clean up the mess. They don’t want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence.

Last week Democrats often earned that rating, especially those running for president. It is true that they do not have the votes to overcome a Bush veto of any war legislation. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats have to go on holiday. Few used their time to cross-examine General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on their disingenuous talking points, choosing instead to regurgitate stump sentiments or ask uncoordinated, redundant questions. It’s telling that the one question that drew blood — are we safer? — was asked by a Republican, John Warner, who is retiring from the Senate.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the “General Betray-Us” headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the “Defeatocrats” and “cut and run” McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war’s cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. “General Betray-Us” gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America’s doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

It’s also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America is more important — dare one say it? — than trying to outpander one another in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s essential to turn up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or frightened Republicans to endorse.

They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus’s boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals who turned down the White House post of “war czar” last fall? The war should be front and center in Congress every day.

Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan (“Return on Success”) Thursday night, is counting on the public’s continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can’t afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can’t be held hostage indefinitely to a president’s narcissistic need to compound his errors rather than admit them.

WASHINGTON (Sept. 16) – Several thousand anti-war demonstrators marched through downtown Washington on Saturday, clashing with police at the foot of the Capitol steps where more than 190 protesters were arrested.

The group marched from the White House to the Capitol to demand an end to the Iraq war. Their numbers stretched for blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue, and they held banners and signs and chanted, “What do we want? Troops out. When do we want it? Now.”

Army veteran Justin Cliburn, 25, of Lawton, Okla., was among a contingent of Iraq veterans in attendance.

“We’re occupying a people who do not want us there,” Cliburn said of Iraq. “We’re here to show that it isn’t just a bunch of old hippies from the 60s who are against this war.”

Counterprotesters lined the sidewalks behind metal barricades. There were some heated shouting matches between the two sides.

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
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At midnight on Thursday, I lay on my back in the Colosseum and looked at a pageant of stars above Rome. Where the lions tore into gladiators, and only a few metres from the cross marking the place of Saint Paul’s crucifixion – “martyrdom”, of course, has become an uneasy word in this age of the suicide bomber – I could only reflect on how a centre of cruelty could become one of the greatest tourist attractions of our time. An Italian television station had asked me to talk about capital punishment in the Middle East for a series on American executions and death row prisoners. Two generators had melted down in an attempt to flood the ancient arena with light. Hence, the moment of reflection.

Readers with serious money may also like to know that it costs £75,000 to hire the Colosseum for 24 hours, a cool £10,500 just for our little night under the stars. Yet who could not think of capital punishment in the Colosseum?

Watching the first episode of the Italian television series – which recounted the visits of an Italian man and woman to two Americans who had spent years on death row in Texas – I was struck by how both prisoners, who may or may not have remembered amid their drug-induced comas whether or not they murdered anyone, had clearly “reformed”. Both deeply regretted their crimes, both prayed that one day they could return to live good lives, to care for their children, to go shopping, walk the dog. In other words, they were no longer the criminals they were when they were sentenced.

Given their predicament, I guess anyone would reform. But I suspect that guilt or innocence is not what the death sentence is about. My Dad was perfectly aware that the young Australian soldier he was ordered to execute in the First World War had killed a British military policeman in Paris, but the Australian promised to live “an upright and straightforward life” if pardoned. My father refused to kill the Australian. Someone else shot him instead. Capital punishment, for those who believe in it, is almost a passion. I rather think it is close to an addiction, something – like smoking or alcohol – which can be cured only by total abstinence. And no excuses for secret Japanese executions or lethal injections in Texas or head-chopping outside Saudi Arabian mosques. But how do you reach this stage when humanity is so obsessed with death in so barbaric a form?

Whenever the Iranians string up drug-dealers or rapists – and who knows their guilt or innocence – the cranes which hoist these unfortunates into the sky like dead thrushes are always surrounded by thousands of men and women, often chanting “God is Great”. They did this even when a young woman was hanged.

Surely some of these people are against such terrible punishment. But there is, it seems, something primal in our desire for judicial killings. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall, there would be a packed house every night. I’m sure he was right. Did not those thousands of Romans pack this very same, sinister Colosseum in which I was lying to watch just such carnage? Was not Saddam Hussein’s execution part of our own attempt to distract the Iraqis with bread and circuses, the shrieking executioners on the mobile phone video the Baghdad equivalent of the gladiators putting their enemies to the sword? Nor, let us remember, is execution only the prerogative of states and presidents. The IRA practised capital punishment. The Taliban practises execution and so does al-Qa’ida. Osama bin Laden – and I heard this from him in person – believes in the “Islamic” punishment of head chopping.

I remember the crowds who lynched three Palestinian collaborators in Hebron in 2001, their near-naked bodies later swinging from electric pylons while small children threw stones at their torsos, the thousands who cheered when their carcasses were tossed with a roar of laughter into a garbage truck. I was so appalled that I could not write in my notebook and instead drew pictures of this obscenity. They are still in the pages of my notebook today, hanging upside down like Saint Paul, legs askew above their heads, their bodies punctured by cigarette burns.

The leading antagonists in the preposterous “war on terror” which we are all supposed to be fighting – Messrs Bush and bin Laden – are always talking about death and sacrifice although, in his latest videotape, the latter showed a touching faith in American democracy when he claimed the American people had voted for Bush’s first presidency.

For bin Laden, 11 September 2001 was “punishment” for America’s bloodshed in the Muslim world; indeed, more and more attacks by both guerrillas and orthodox soldiers are turning into revenge operations. Was not the first siege of Fallujah revenge for the killing and desecration of the bodies of American mercenaries? Wasn’t Abu Ghraib part of “our” revenge for 11 September and for our failures in Iraq?

Many of the suicide attacks in the Middle East – in “Palestine”, in Afghanistan, in Iraq – are specifically named after “martyrs” killed in previous operations. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq stated quite explicitly that it had “executed” US troops in retaliation for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl south of Baghdad.

Yet I fear the real problem goes beyond the individual act of killing, judicial or otherwise. In a weird, frightening way, we believe in violent death. We regard it as a policy option, as much to do with self-preservation on a national scale as punishment for named and individual wrongdoers. We believe in war. For what is aggression – the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example – except capital punishment on a mass scale? We “civilised” nations – like the dark armies we believe we are fighting – are convinced that the infliction of death on an awesome scale can be morally justified.