The right wingers, muscle flexers, ideologues, pre-emptive strikers, the bunker blasters and the jingoists -- in short, the leaderless Bushies -- have once again screwed things up.

They weren't satisfied with neglecting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the boiling point, or obsessing over a non-threatening goon like Saddam Hussein while ignoring a real-threatening goon like Kim Jong Il, or dropping Afghanistan back into the Taliban's lethal hands. Those were mere previews of inimitable incompetence and deliberate recklessness.

Now, the feature presentation.

I refer, of course, to the creeping Iraq War. Some analysts for some inexplicable reason describe the calamity as a postwar situation, when in fact hostilities have just begun. Our initial military invasion -- what the Pentagon brass, Pentagon groupies, Pentagon has-beens and obsequious journalists straight-facedly called a war -- was little more than a slaying of sandpiles. Like Napoleon's "invasion" of Moscow, we rolled into enemy territory only to find the enemy had checked out, thank you very much.

The locals must have boned up on their Sun Tzu. While we applauded the conquering Bushies and busied ourselves with planting inscrutable "Support Out Troops" yard signs, the ill-equipped, outnumbered foe and neighboring Islamist brothers laid back and sucked us into the real war: a gruesome, unwinnable guerilla war.

The Bushies wanted us to get over Vietnam. Well, we're over it. Indeed, we've gone full circle and again stand at a crossroad. It is the early 1960s and militaristic brains mostly hold the floor, having mopped it up with diplomatic ones.

Then, as now, the militarists held sway over the president. Yet their sway over John Kennedy was perhaps tenuous at best. Unlike George W. Bush, Kennedy possessed an independent and curious mind, one that questioned the use of brute force as a preferred option. True, he escalated American involvement in South Vietnam, but he also rejected the stronger urgings of his Maxwell Taylors and Walt Rostows to introduce U.S. ground troops into the mix. What he might have done ultimately we cannot know; we do know, however, that he died hesitant, if not resistant.

In other words, out of a sense of learned trepidation, if nothing else, Kennedy exerted a presidential independence of mind in refusing to unleash the ravenous dogs of war.

Different circumstances occupy the present Oval Office. Lacking altogether the 35th president's abilities, 43 has assumed the palpable aura of a puppet regime. The Boy King has neither the backbone nor background to stand up to adult voices of impetuousness. There is no informed and authoritative there, there, so the puppeteers -- Bush's own Taylors and Rostows -- are free to run amok. They are free to play with American lives as though these are mere pieces of some inconsequential, big-strategy board game. They are free to rewrite American principles. Allowed to test short-term hypotheses, they are free to condemn America's long-term interests.

The presumed mice are having a field day, since the cat is not just away, but permanently out to lunch.

That presidential-candidate George W. Bush hadn't a clue as to complex domestic issues, let alone complex international ones, became more evident after his tawdry ascension. To watch the man struggle through a rare presidential press conference is to cringe. His answers, of a sort, are so manifestly programmed they only highlight his stature as a yes-man to subordinates. But Bush's political puppeteers have managed to turn ignorance into a virtue.

George isn't a fussbudgety micromanager, they swoon. That would be bad. Instead, he delegates. That is good. They don't mention that George delegates only because he knows not what he himself should do.

At least one grave consequence of 43's forced management style is clear. Bureaucratic strategists are in sole charge of America's future. And what that future looks like can be glimpsed overseas, in rapidly deteriorating Iraq.

The left wingers, parlor pinks, bleeding hearts, tree huggers, the peaceniks and the realists -- in short, the everything-the-Bushies-ain't crowd -- knew better all along. Unfortunately, that doesn't help increasingly endangered Americans abroad and at home.

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© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.