Quote/Unquote 2005 Dec.

This is part of his macho image. Obviously this is nothing Bush has to do. He's the son of a rich man who doesn't have to spend his time cutting underbrush.

Start with Bush. Never at ease before the cameras, he now has the hunted blink and compulsive nasolabial twitch of the mad dictator, a cornered rat with nowhere left to run. Nixon looked the same in his last White House days, and so did Hitler, according to those present in the Führerbunker. As Hitler did before him, Bush raves on about imagined victories. Spare a thought for the First Lady, who has to endure his demented and possibly drunken harangues over supper. The word around Washington is that he's drinking again. At this rate he'll be shooting the dog and ordering the First Lady to take poison, which I'm sure she'll have great pleasure in forwarding to her mother-in-law.

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship. The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form.

As Bush approval rises, historians will begin to equate his era with that of: (a) Truman; (b) Eisenhower; (c) L.B.J.; (d) Reagan; (e) Clinton. [Safire's Answer: a]

Look, if you think there were greener pastures in another era, I have one word for you: dentistry. The crucial role of history is to remind us that our times are not uniquely oppressive.

[I]f we truly believe in freedom of speech, then we must defend Irving as vigorously as we defend Pamuk....

If we were to have freedom of speech in Europe for novelists we admire but not for historians we despise, then we would not have freedom of speech at all. We would only have privileged speech, officially sanctioned speech, the right to say and hear certain things but not others. If free speech is to mean anything in modern Europe, then Irving must have it as well as Pamuk....

This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not Shaka Zulu.

al-Zaman/ AFP say that the US embassy in Baghdad has advised the incoming government to privatize the hundreds of companies and factories owned by the state (the Baath Party was actually the Baath Socialist Party), selling them to investors. The US administration of Iraq attempted to move toward privatization under Paul Bremer, but the issue was rendered moot by the poor security in the country, which makes investing in it at the moment unattractive.

One of the least attractive aspects of the US government is its fanaticism about privatization. I mean, is this really the time? The good Lord knows how many of those companies or factories are actually operating. And who is going to buy them? Wouldn't it be better at this juncture for the government to use them in a way analogous to FDR public works projects, to put people to work? Al-Zaman estimates that 1/4 of Iraqis live in dire proverty, and the real unemployment rate is still probably 50 percent. Corporations are far less efficient than Washington believes (see: Enron), and some state-owned enterprises have prospered (ask Californians if privatized electricity worked out well for them; and see: Enron). It is no doubt better in the long run to move away from bloated state-owned industries in Iraq, but I just wouldn't have made that a priority.

WEEK of December 19, 2005

THOUGH polls show President George W. Bush's popularity no longer dropping precipitously, he may be envying his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, whom the voters did not give a second term as US president. ... Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld risk being remembered in 2050 along with Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

He's like Yosemite Sam. You can see the steam coming out of his ears.

Can a president be both Lincolnesque and Nixonian in the same speech? That's the question I had watching Bush last night.

Al-Hayat says that Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and current president, is calling for a government of national unity that will include Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. Al-Sharq al-Awsat is franker about Talabani's rationale here, since he said that the Shiite-Kurdish alliance between him and prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari had not been successful. Talabani never got along with Jaafari, and was uncomfortable with being merely a ceremonial president, as is called for in the Iraqi constitution. Whatever its rationale, the national unity government is a very good idea. It does have the drawback that such a government would seldom be able actually to take a decision, since the three groups disagree with one another vehemently on most issues. On the other hand, since the government has almost no power or authority, and is mainly symbolic, it probably doesn't matter if it can't take many decisions. On the other hand, it is hard to see why the Shiite majority should give away all the advantages of its majority.

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power. The problem is expressed in the title of a brilliant book,"Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power," by Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's conservative.

Particularly in time of war or the threat of it, government needs concentrated decisiveness -- a capacity for swift and nimble action that legislatures normally cannot manage. But the inescapable corollary of this need is the danger of arbitrary power.

As Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck -- de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War -- that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.

There are two things that will always be difficult for a democratic people to do: to start a war and to finish it.

If there ever was a crisis, it is over. Life is good, dangers are remote, security appears adequate … sleep beckons.

There are a lot of credible complaints coming in about fraud in the recent Iraqi elections. A lot of the complaints concern the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist list, which had won the Jan. 30 elections in many provinces and was therefore able to erect a Chicago-style party machine. As in the old days in Chicago, the election was so democratic that even some of the dead got to vote.

WEEK of December 12, 2005

Even in a town where 12-figure numbers are routinely tossed around over morning coffee, half a trillion bucks is a hefty chunk of change.

It is half the Canadian Gross Domestic Product, 20 times what a Stephen Harper-led government would be spending on the Canadian military in 2010 and it is what the George W. Bush-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will have cost Americans some time in 2006.

The Pentagon is drafting a wartime request to the U.S. Congress for another $80 billion to $100 billion (U.S.) early next year, members of both parties say, in addition to the $50 billion Congress will hand over in supplemental funding before it leaves on its Christmas break.

That would put the military outlay to $450 billion and counting, pocket change from the half a trillion mark.

The LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks that. The Iraqi"government" is a failed state. Virtually no order it gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are unlikely to change any of this.

The only way in which these elections may lead to a US withdrawal is that they will ensconce parliamentarians who want the US out on a short timetable. Virtually all the Sunnis who come in will push for that result (which is why the US Right is silly to be all agog about Fallujans voting), and so with the members of the Sadr Movement, now a key component of the Shiite religious United Iraqi Alliance. That is, these elections lead to a US withdrawal on terms unfavorable to the Bush administration. Nor is there much hope that a parliament that kicked the US out could turn around and restore order in the country.

HOLD THE PRESSES. I've discovered that the use of torture by the U.S. government is far more pervasive than previously believed. There are major facilities all over the country where thousands of men and women who have not committed any crime are held for prolonged periods while subjected to physical and psychological coercion that violates every tenet of the Geneva Convention.

They are routinely made to stand for long periods in uncomfortable positions. They are made to walk for hours while wearing heavy loads on their backs. They are bullied by martinets who get in their faces and yell insults at them. They are hit and often knocked down with clubs known as pugil sticks. They are denied sleep for more than a day at a time. They are forced to inhale tear gas. They are prevented from seeing friends or family. Some are traumatized by this treatment. Others are injured. A few even die.

Should Amnesty International or the International Committee of the Red Cross want to investigate these human-rights abuses, they could visit Parris Island, S.C., Camp Pendleton, Calif., Ft. Benning, Ga., Ft. Jackson, S.C., and other bases where the Army and Marines train recruits. It's worth keeping in mind how roughly the U.S. government treats its own defenders before we get too worked up over the treatment of captured terrorists.

WEEK of December 5, 2005

In the Republic, there is no official history. It is not up to the law to write history. The writing of history is the business of historians.

I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)

Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying,"I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.

In two generations. Two.

What a country.

Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance? A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military ... The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have ... Why do you think they nominated you? ... Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

Andrew Natsios, who announced his resignation as administrator of the Agency for International Development (AID) on December 2, played a memorable role in misinforming the American public about the costs of post-war reconstruction in Iraq.

The cost to the American taxpayer of rebuilding Iraq will be $1.7 billion, Mr. Natsios confidently told ABC Nightline on April 23, 2003. The actual number, which continues to grow, is at least an order of magnitude higher.

"You're not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is gonna be done for $1.7 billion?" asked ABC's Ted Koppel incredulously.

"Well, in terms of the American taxpayers contribution, I do, this is it for the US," Mr. Natsios said.

WITH Osama bin Laden topping the world's most wanted man list, a bunch of upper-class Poms have called a special meeting tomorrow to decide if he should be allowed to remain a member of London's oldest and most exclusive gentlemen's club. Apparently Bin Laden, then known as dashing Saudi Arabian playboy Harry Laden, was made a member of the very exclusive White's Club more than 20 years ago. He was proposed by the Duke of Marlborough and one of his banking mates. Members, understandably, feel a tad uncomfortable that the al-Qa'ida leader is still a member of their establishment, which was founded in 1736. But Strewth understands the rules state a gentleman can only be asked to resign if he becomes a bankrupt or a convicted felon -- neither of which applies to Harry Laden. We'll know on Saturday morning if he has to settle his bar tab and find a new hiding place.

Al Thagher's Class of 1976 had a recent reunion at a Red Sea resort. About 50 alumni turned up. No word from class member Osama bin Laden.

Harper's editor Lewis Lapham tells Kurt Andersen he's been itching to step down for years in order to"leave at the top of the game," but he stuck around because George W. Bush was too appealing a target."I saw the worst elements of the Establishment and not the best elements rising to the surface. I felt I knew these people, my family having been in the oil business. Bush is a figure I can recognize."