In about a week, the Bush administration has done in Iraq what the Johnson administration took more than a year to do in Vietnam: opened a credibility gap. This one is about "the plan," which the Bush administration describes as both "brilliant" and on schedule. As anyone can see -- and as some field commanders keep saying -- it is neither. . . .

So if, as Don Rumsfeld and others say, the U.S. effort remains on schedule, then the question is why was this the schedule in the first place? In other words, wouldn't it have been better to keep the diplomatic effort going -- the additional month asked for by the six swing votes on the Security Council -- so when war came, it came swiftly? An additional month would have meant that all U.S. forces would have been in the region, ready to go. As it is, the 4th Infantry Division still is not in place.

Consumed by waging war, the Bush administration is increasingly giving the Republican-controlled Congress the back of its hand, acting as if the legislative branch were a constitutionally mandated annoyance.

Administration officials have abruptly canceled appearances before congressional committees and refused lawmakers' requests for information. Now President Bush wants to sidestep congressional oversight of how he spends nearly $75 billion that he is seeking for the war and homeland security.

"Nice try," scoffed Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R., Ill.), during a hearing on the spending plan. "There are a lot of precedents we don't want to accept here." . . .

To many lawmakers, Bush's request for flexibility is only the latest example of administration disdain, if not contempt, for Congress. Time and again, Republicans and Democrats say, the Bush administration has stiff-armed lawmakers or scorned their committees.

The residents of Basra have been described by the U.S. military as "human shields," being held in the city against their will by members of the Iraqi military and militia. But the soldiers here say that most of those leaving the city appear to be going out just for the day to the markets in Zubair, a town about 10 miles southwest of here, and returning voluntarily.

"They're not coming out to stay," said a soldier guarding the bridge. "They're not leaving with their household goods. A lot of them are going out to get tomatoes. It's not a great outflow of refugees."

Some reports from U.S. and British officials said Basra residents who did leave had family members held back as hostages to ensure their return. But the soldiers, and reporters who stood with them on the bridge, saw entire families leaving together -- men, women, children and infants -- and the flow was in both directions.

A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.

The government will take over Iraq city by city. Areas declared "liberated" by General Tommy Franks will be transferred to the temporary government under the overall control of Jay Garner, the former US general appointed to head a military occupation of Iraq.

In anticipation of the Baghdad regime's fall, members of this interim government have begun arriving in Kuwait.

Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government has had to accept a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

From top to bottom, Americans do believe democracy is good for everyone, even if some may have to wait for it longer than others. But here comes the crux of the American dilemma. Even if we're prepared to grant the existence, deep in American purposes, of more idealism than is usually admitted, its fulfilment has become unattainable. America's understanding of the world has become so self-centred, and its reputation so corrupted, that its ability to export liberal democracy either by example or by force now looks to be non-existent.

China 1945-46, 1950-53

Korea 1950-53

Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69

Indonesia 1958

Cuba 1959-61

Congo 1964

Peru 1965

Laos 1964-73

Vietnam 1961-73

Cambodia 1969-70

Lebanon 1983-84

Grenada 1983

Libya 1986

El Salvador 1980s

Nicaragua 1980s

Panama 1989

Bosnia 1995

Sudan 1998

Former Yugoslavia 1999

Iraq 1991-??

Afghanistan 1998, 2001-??

Considering the audacity of . . . [Iran-Contra's] challenge to Constitutional authority, its principals have done surprisingly well in the years since. Oliver North gave up his uniform to become what he always had been at heart: a right-wing political agitator. Elliot Abrams now manages Venezuelan revolution, counterrevolution, and counter-counterrevolution for the State Department. And, of course, John Poindexter is in charge of the Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness program.

But the real success story is the Contras, or rather their modern successor: al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's crew is a band of government-funded anticommunist counterrevolutionaries who grew up and cut the apron strings. These new-model Contras don't need state support from Washington, Moscow, or any Accessory of Evil. Like Project Democracy, they've got independent financing: oil money, charity money, arms money, and a collection plate wherever a junkie shoots up in an alley. Instead of merely ignoring and subverting governments for a higher cause, as Poindexter did, al Qaeda tries to destroy them outright. Suicide bombers blew the Chechnyan provisional puppet government sky high. Cars packed with explosives nearly leveled the Indian Parliament. We all know what happened to the Pentagon.

The next Iran-Contra is waiting, because the contradictions that created the first have never been resolved. Iran-Contra wasn't about eager American intelligence networks spreading dirty money in distant lands; it was about the gap between old, legitimate, land-based governments ruled by voters and the new, stateless, globalized predation. The next scandal will erupt when someone as molten, self-righteous, and frustrated as John Poindexter uses stateless power for domestic advantage. That's the breaking point in American politics: not when you call in the plumbers, but when you turn them loose on the opposition party. Then the Empire roils in a lather of sudden, indignant fury and strikes back against its own.

It was one of the White House's strongest arguments for war.

For months, administration officials had been touting a series of letters purporting to show Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. If the letters weren't exactly a smoking gun, Washington hawks contended, they were at least irrefutable proof that Iraq still had nuclear ambitions.

Then, two weeks ago, it all came crashing down. The letters, it was revealed, were hoaxes -- crude forgeries discredited by nuclear weapons experts and disowned by the Central Intelligence Agency. Further, the Agency asserted that it made its concerns known to administration officials in late 2001, shortly after telling the White House about the letters. For more than a year, Washington had used evidence repudiated by its own intelligence advisors to build a case for war.

The revelations could have delivered a damaging blow to the White House's political and diplomatic push for invasion. But the national media rapidly moved off the story, swept up in the administration's rush to war. And it all might have ended there, but for Congressman Henry Waxman. In a scathing letter sent to President Bush last week, the California Democrat demands an investigation into what Bush knew about the Niger forgeries and when he knew it. Waxman, who voted last year to give the administration authority to wage a war in Iraq, says there is reason to believe that he and other members of Congress have been misled.

"It is unfathomable how we could be in a situation where the CIA knew information was not reliable but yet it was cited by the President in the State of the Union and by other leading Administration officials," he says. "Either this is knowing deception or utter incompetence and an explanation is urgently needed."

Waxman, who says he signed on to Bush's war initiative in part because he was concerned about Iraq's nuclear aims, wonders how the forgeries could have been used as evidence of Iraqi malfeasance for so many months after they were officially debunked. At the very least, he writes, the recent revelations have created a perception that facts were withheld to bolster the President's case for war.

The chastening of America has begun and the likely outcome of the war is coming into view - one regime gone, in Baghdad, another humbled, in Washington. According to those who analyse Arab policy and follow Arab opinion from here, the hopes of Arab governments now centre on this prospect. . . .

Arab states wanted the quick war the US promised but also feared the triumphalist America which would have emerged from it. Now the least worst option for them would be the less confident US which a harder war might produce, one which would not contemplate further military adventures, would get out of Iraq quickly, and might redeem itself by a more even handed approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .

[W]hat the Arabs have almost certainly got right is that even if the war takes a sudden turn for the better, post-Saddam America will be a very different place from the country that existed only two weeks ago, perhaps weaker, certainly more cautious.

This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American.

But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.

Tony Blair is determined to show he has not lost control of the post-war agenda to hawks in the Bush administration by promoting the concept of a UN-sponsored conference for all groups in Iraq to start reshaping their country's future after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The conference would open during the period of American military rule that is expected when the fighting ends and would follow the model set by the Afghanistan conference in Bonn which preceded the formation of a post-Taliban government.

In a clear attempt to assert self-determination over quasi-colonial rule, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said yesterday that the goal would be "to place responsibility for decisions about Iraq's political and economic future firmly in the hands of the Iraqi people".

More than 200 people were arrested Thursday for blocking traffic in Manhattan during a day of civil disobedience called to protest the war in Iraq and the corporate media's reporting of the conflict. . . .

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another questioned. "Protesters or soldiers?"

Said a third: "How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them."

Still another read: "Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street" - a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

The protesters said Fox's sentiments only proved their point: that media coverage, in particular among the television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.

The messages from Capitol Hill are aimed at influencing what [Wisconsin Democratic representative Ron] Kind called "a raging debate" inside the Bush administration. The immediate question is whether postwar Iraq will be run by an American viceroy or a U.N. official. But the larger question is whether superpower America will seek to heal the breach with longtime allies that blocked U.N. action against Saddam Hussein, or walk away from the world body and seek to manage future conflicts with its own "coalition of the willing."

The Pentagon, which holds the upper hand in that debate because it is calling the shots in the war, already has designated a general to take over at least temporarily in Baghdad. [Delaware Democratic senator Joseph] Biden, who is blunt in his appraisal of the stakes, told me that he thinks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are "seeking a twofer. They want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and break the grip of the United Nations."

Kind is slightly more tactful in his description, but said that, judging from his sources in the State Department, "This is the issue of the day. It will affect our relations with the Arab nations and the rest of the world for decades to come. And it has a direct bearing on our security. As powerful as our military is, if we're seen as the occupying power in a Muslim country, it makes us more vulnerable to terrorism."

The actual war in Iraq has left the country's government-in-waiting still in rehearsal. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, with a Kuwait-based staff already numbering in "the low hundreds," had expected to move quickly into Iraq after a swift war that toppled President Saddam Hussein and won over Iraqis grateful to the United States for liberating them from more than three decades of authoritarian rule.

But with military commanders warning of a longer and more difficult war, Garner's team also has been reevaluating its strategy. Plans to send a large number of U.S. civilians into Iraq are being postponed, given concerns about security even in areas of southern Iraq nominally under U.S. control. . . .

In Washington, meanwhile, disagreement over control of the program surfaced as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vetoed the State Department's selection of eight current and former diplomats to join Garner's team. Some officials here complain that the Pentagon is seeking to dominate every aspect of Iraq's postwar reconstruction. . . .

"Some of us came out here thinking it would be a three- or four-month operation," one member of Garner's team said. "Now it's clear that we're going to be here, and eventually in Baghdad, for a lot longer than we expected." . . .

Garner's team is made up almost exclusively of Americans, many of them former or current officials. Aides come from the Pentagon, the State Department and other departments and agencies, including Treasury, Justice, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The only non-Americans are a handful of British and Australian diplomats, and a small group of Iraqi exiles. The United Nations is expected to "play some part in the equation," an official said, but U.S. officials have made clear it will be a subordinate role.

Iraqis I spoke to a few days after the start of the invasion were much quicker than the outside world to notice its slow pace and inability to crack President Saddam's real levers of power. Indeed, the whole US attack plan has played straight into the Iraqi leader's hands.

There is a curious symmetry between the Pentagon's plans and those of President Saddam. The US intention was to avoid the cities and head for Baghdad. President Saddam's plan, which was more or less public knowledge, was to retreat into the cities where the US could not use airpower and wouldn't know the terrain as well as the defenders.

President Saddam and Washington were also at one on another important issue. He was always frightened of internal uprisings among the Kurds and the Shia Muslims, who together make up three-quarters of the population. The great rebellions of 1991 had almost brought him down. Over the years he has taken minute precautions to make sure it would not happen again by sending an army Baath party members and security men into every village, town and city district.

In fact Washington was against any uprising, as it had been in 1991. It was frightened that a rebellion by the Kurds in Kirkuk and Mosul provinces would provoke Turkish intervention. In the south, the US was against an uprising among the Shia because it might benefit Iran, the supporter of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the most powerful Shia organisation in the country. The US also felt that to allow Iraqi political organisations to share in the expected easy victory would compel Washington to give them a share in power after the war. "It would have interfered with their plans to remake Iraq after their own vision," said one opposition leader.

There also seems to have been a misunderstanding about the nature of President Saddam's government. Though his ruling Baath party came to power through a military coup in 1968, it was never a classic military regime where the army holds power. President Saddam, despite his military uniforms, had no formal military training. He has always depended on his security services, the Baath party and a complex network of clan and tribal alliances to keep him in power.

These were the sinews of his rule, and by deliberately not capturing cities at the beginning of the invasion, the US and Britain ensured that he remained in control of the vast majority of the Iraqi population. The failure to take a city like Basra early in the campaign also meant, as one Kurdish commander put it, there were "no visible coalition gains to show the Iraqi people".

Washington's war has blurred the lines between mainstream, liberal and radical politics in the world of Islam, and with it squandered most of the empathy engendered after 9/11. A new realignment against the United States that brings together a broad spectrum of political forces is crystallising in Arab and Muslim lands. Distinguished Islamic institutions and renowned - and moderate - clerics have urged Muslims to join in jihad to resist the US-led onslaught.

Al-Azhar, the highest, oldest and most-respected institution of religious learning in the Muslim world, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad against invading American forces". Although Islam possesses no organised church, the significance of al-Azhar's call is comparable to a Papal call on Catholics to fight a just war to defend the faith. The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, a reformist who was one of the first clerics to condemn 9/11 and who dismissed bin Laden's jihadi credentials as fraudulent, ruled that attempts to resist the US attack ON IRAQ are a "binding Islamic duty."

Until now Tantawi has been attacked by conservative and reactionary clerics as a pro-Western reformer. His new stance shows the extent of the realignment of political opinion in the world of Islam.

Another widely-respected Egyptian-born cleric based in Qatar, Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradawi, accused the Bush administration of declaring war against Islam - and behaving like "a god". Qaradawi, who also denounced al-Qaeda terrorism after 9/11, said fighting US troops is "legal jihad" and "death while defending Iraq a kind of martyrdom."

Moderates and radicals now appear to be fully united in opposition to the American war. In an editorial in al-Hayat, a leading secular-liberal writer warned of the "new American tyranny . . . an empire that cannot be questioned." Similarly, a leader in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, a well-organised and mainstream Islamist organisation with millions of members in several Arab countries, called on his followers everywhere to join in jihad in defence of Iraq. The Muslim Brothers have not been considered a militant group since the 1970s when they forsook violence and agreed to play by the rules of the political game.

Bin Laden must be laughing in his grave - or cave, whichever the case may be. His apocalyptic nightmare of a clash of religions and cultures is finally resonating in both camps. What was unthinkable a year and a half ago has happened: two versions of a just war theory, one Western and the other Muslim, are clashing over Iraq.

What country could this president visit that wouldn't immediately erupt into massive civil unrest? A Bush visit to Western Europe would make 2001's violent anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa look like a tea party. . . .

Bush's quarantine involves almost all of the Middle East, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and even some Asian countries. Polls in some Eastern European nations suggest less intense opposition to America, but those countries are geographically close to Western Europe -- a presidential visit to Bucharest would likely attract hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from Germany and France. A trip to a less stable nation, such as Egypt or Pakistan, could severely weaken or even bring down the host government.

The world's citizens are so helpless in the face of America's military supremacy and unilateral foreign policy that the only way they can express their anger is through civil unrest and boycotts. Even a visit to America's neighbors, Mexico or Canada, would produce scenes of unprecedented anti-American demonstrations.

And those images would matter here at home. In 1960, Kennedy used the anti-Nixon demonstrations abroad to argue that the nation was losing stature in the world. A foreign trip by Bush now would reveal to the average American in pictures -- so vivid that even FOX News couldn't spin them away -- just how bitterly our policies are opposed around the globe.

Once the war is over and the occupation begins, reporters will start to ask why our president isn't traveling anymore. Karl Rove will have to think of a place to send him. Outside of Israel or Afghanistan, the choices will be slim. Of course, Bush could safely go to a country where the government uses brutality to stop demonstrations. Which means that it has come to this: The American president, who once symbolized the value of freedom to many people around the world, can now only visit countries where dissent is crushed.

Throughout the world, technology is allowing activists to stage spontaneous rallies in reaction to the war.

Prohibitively expensive only a few years ago, gadgets ranging from the cell phone to the mini digital video camera simplify protests from Brussels to Manila.

Instead of relying on posters taped to telephone poles or slapped onto university walls, activists have crafted sophisticated Web sites with maps, weather and traffic updates and news on police crackdowns.

Before the invasion of Iraq began, the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center solicited volunteers to stage sit-ins in particular intersections. When sit-ins sparked police confrontations, the group published live video on its Web site.

Such tactics enabled the activists to shut down much of downtown San Francisco -- proof that new technologies have revolutionized civil disobedience, said Pam Fielding, co-author of The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape.

President Bush's latest bid for a Middle East peace deal is running into unexpected resistance from key allies in Congress. Republicans and Democrats are pressing the White House to adopt a more staunchly pro-Israel stance, even if it feeds the perception the United States is too closely aligned with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government. . . .

Sharon's government, and many in Congress, object to the non-negotiable nature of the document and to its demand that Israel and the Palestinian take parallel steps to move toward peace. Israel's position is that the Palestinians must prove they have stopped all terrorism, and activities that Israel believes promote terrorist activities, before it is required to take any steps, including the withdrawal of troops and stopping the expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. . . .

Several Republican and Democratic leaders plan to send Bush a letter this month signed by dozens of members, imploring him to adopt a position more clearly backing the Sharon government. "There are concerns about Bush's" recent comments, said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq and co-author of the letter. "We think this is not the direction he ought to go."

The Army dislikes Rumsfeld because the "revolution in military affairs" faction, of which he is grand vizier, wants to cut the Army's divisions and budget, while boosting funding for Air Force and Navy aviation. Making Rumsfeld, a former Navy pilot, look like he doesn't understand land warfare issues is essential to the Army counterattack. . . .

The Army wants to survive the budget wars, wants its share of advanced hardware, and wants respect; the "revolution" crowd coos over pilots and scientists while treating grunts as the hired help. Given that Rumsfeld's reputation rests on the fast, agile assaults the Army is now conducting, keep looking for leaks on multiple fronts.

Iraq's most senior religious leader issued a fatwa yesterday urging the country's majority Shia community not to hinder the US and British armies. It could prove as significant a development for the invading forces as any of the military victories of the past few days.

The ruling, from Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani -- the foremost Shia authority in Iraq -- called on Muslims to keep calm, stay at home, not put themselves in danger and not to fight. It could add the decisive weight to the scales of war.

Certainly the fatwa provoked great optimism among the coalition's political and military leaders. Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, of Allied Central Command in Qatar, said: "We believe this is a very significant turning point and another indicator that the Iraqi regime is approaching its end."

The Ayatollah, who is 73, has been under house imprisonment at his home in the holy city of Najaf by Saddam Hussein's secret police for almost a decade. He was freed two days ago when his guards fled as US forces advanced on the city.

Of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, at least nine have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four members are registered lobbyists, one of whom represents two of the three largest defense contractors.

The board's chairman, Richard Perle, resigned yesterday, March 27, 2003, amid allegations of conflicts of interest for his representation of companies with business before the Defense Department, although he will remain a member of the board. Eight of Perle's colleagues on the board have ties to companies with significant contracts from the Pentagon.

Members of the board disclose their business interests annually to the Pentagon, but the disclosures are not available to the public. "The forms are filed with the Standards of Conduct Office which review the filings to make sure they are in compliance with government ethics," Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ted Wadsworth told the Center for Public Integrity.

The companies with ties to Defense Policy Board members include prominent firms like Boeing, TRW, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton and smaller players like Symantec Corp., Technology Strategies and Alliance Corp., and Polycom Inc.

Before the war few senior officers believed they would face such strong resistance from the paramilitaries ahead of the final battle for Baghdad. In fact, three groups, the Saddam Fedayeen, the Special Security Organisation and the Ba'ath party militia, emerged immediately, even in the very south of the country, as a significant fighting force. Militia groups are still holed up in the southern city of Basra, as well as other towns on the route north, including Nassiriya, Najaf and Kerbala.

The resilience of the militias has surprised commanders. Officers say they are more secular than insurgents in countries like Afghanistan and Chechnya, which are largely inspired by extreme interpretations of Islam. "They are not driven by ideology or religious fervour but recruited by the regime, armed and very highly paid," the British officer said.

The structure of the resistance appears to be much closer to an anti-western, hardline nationalist force. In the months after the war, they could emerge as a guerrilla vanguard for the growing anti-western feeling across the Arab world.

To prevent militia fighters from representing a future threat, coalition forces will have to arrange a much deeper purge of the Iraqi apparatus of power, and in particular the Ba'ath party, than was at first thought. That is likely to make the business of post-Saddam government considerably harder than imagined.

Let's run down a list of incidents that I've heard about in the last month alone: A French woman in Houston, who's lived in her neighborhood for 20 years, wakes up on a Saturday morning to find graffiti on her garage door telling her to go back to France. A guy from Seattle arrives in San Diego and finds a threatening note from airport security because he's packed two "No Iraq War" signs in his bag. In Austin, the French owner of an antique shop hears on a radio call-in show that people want to blow up the miniature Eiffel Tower in front of his store. Radio stations in Kansas City and Louisiana stage Dixie Chicks bonfires and monster-truck CD stomps. At a rodeo in Houston, a guy starts a brawl because a kid and his friends don't want to stand while Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." plays over the loudspeaker. The guy tells the kid, who's half Mexican and half Italian, to "go back to Iraq."

Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that a full-blown war, now underway, will lead to an increase in "hate crimes." Arab Americans were already cowering before the war started. An 18-year-old Lebanese kid in Yorba Linda, California, had his jaw broken on February 22 by a mob of 20 teenagers who shouted "white power" as they beat him with baseball bats. A few days later, a Muslim woman in Santa Clara, California, was attacked in the laundry room of her apartment building. The FBI also reported that a Muslim father of six was assaulted February 21 in Irvington, New Jersey, by two men who accused him of being a terrorist. . . .

Welcome to insanity. The insanity of war. When President Bush referred to the Americans as a "peaceful people" in his 48-hour-showdown speech, I had to wonder: What "people" was he talking about?

[W]hy does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations' territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.

And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we.

The Bush administration has devised a strategy to declare victory in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein or key lieutenants remain at large and fighting continues in parts of the country, officials said yesterday.

The concept of a "rolling" victory contemplates a time -- not yet determined -- when U.S. forces control significant territory and have eliminated a critical mass of Iraqi resistance. U.S. military commanders would establish a base of operations, perhaps outside Baghdad, and assert that a new era has begun. Even then, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers would remain to help maintain order and provide humanitarian assistance.

The path through domestic events to this same destination arguably begins with the impeachment attempt against President Bill Clinton, in which the Republican Party abused its majority power in Congress to try to knock a President of the other party out of the executive branch. The attempt failed, but the institutional siege on the presidency continued in the resolution of the freakishly close vote in Florida in 2000. In a further abuse of government power -- in this case the judicial branch -- the President was chosen by a vote not of the people of the United States but of the Supreme Court. The message of Republicans at the time in Congress and the Florida legislature was that if judges did not produce the result they demanded, they would bring on a constitutional crisis in the House of Representatives. A new conception of democracy was born: Freedom is your right to support what we want. Otherwise, you are 'irrelevant.' You can vote, but you do not decide. 'Unilateralism' was born in Florida.

The tragedy of America in the post-cold war era is that we have proved unequal to the responsibility that our own power placed upon us. Some of us became intoxicated with it, imagining that we could rule the world. Others of us -- the Democratic Party, Congress, the judiciary, the news media -- abdicated our obligation to challenge, to check and to oppose, letting the power-hungry have their way. The government of the United States went into opposition against its own founding principles, leaving it to the rest of the world to take up our cause. The French have been better Americans than we have. Because the Constitution, though battered, is still intact, we may still have time and opportunity to recoup. But for now, we will have to pay the price of our weakness. The costs will be heavy, first of all for the people of Iraq but also for others, including ourselves. The international order on which the common welfare, including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe damage. The fight for 'freedom' abroad is crippling freedom at home. The war to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or foes. The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the world.