Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 8

"We are talking about people who had a basis for thinking they were smarter than just about anyone else they met. So, sure, if we're going to manipulate an issue like the weapons thing, or even distort things about the terrorist connections, if it helps bring about a result I believe with all my intellectual firepower is right for the country, then so be it. If there are a few misrepresentations along the line, that doesn't matter."

"THE fact is," Carl Ford, Jr., says, leaning across a round, cluttered table in an office in another part of Washington, "there were all kinds of opportunities to speak up. The fact was that-those people in CIA and in the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]? I didn't hear them, and there were plenty of opportunities for my a.n.a.lysts who were out there among them, just among the leaders like I was, and they didn't hear [the CIA and DIA people speak up], either. The fact was we felt like we were just spitting into the wind. fact is," Carl Ford, Jr., says, leaning across a round, cluttered table in an office in another part of Washington, "there were all kinds of opportunities to speak up. The fact was that-those people in CIA and in the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]? I didn't hear them, and there were plenty of opportunities for my a.n.a.lysts who were out there among them, just among the leaders like I was, and they didn't hear [the CIA and DIA people speak up], either. The fact was we felt like we were just spitting into the wind.

"There were those like Paul Pillar who, if he talks about weapons of ma.s.s destruction, I said, 'Paul, where were you?' Because he was in a position where he could have spoken up. It's not a case in which the intelligence community has a significant impact and they want to cry about the fact that policymakers don't listen to them. They want to say, 'Well, I tried and they wouldn't let me do it.' Bulls.h.i.t. The fact is that they couldn't convince anyone that they were right simply because they were smart. Because that's not the way the world works."

Ford is an intelligence lifer. He'd worked at CIA and in the Pentagon. He was a good friend and a longtime admirer of Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney. As events moved toward war, Ford was working at the State Department as the director of its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). A short and fiery ex-Marine who served in Vietnam, Ford had a reputation of being a very hard sell, the kind of person who flourished in cold-shower briefings like the ones Richard Clarke recalled from his time at State, in which people who brought in badly researched reports or half-baked proposals found themselves leaving the meeting room through a meat grinder. Ford felt this intellectual rigor reverse itself when it came to Iraq. The facts were whatever was malleable enough to fit into a salable narrative. The truth was sent through the meat grinder.

"On the case of the internal Iraq issues," recalls Ford, "the policymakers really didn't listen at all. My point is that, if we had said, 'There are no weapons of ma.s.s destruction,' it might have slowed them down, but I don't think it would have had any impact on most of the people who were deciding on the war. I think that it would have made it more difficult for them to sell that war. In fact, one of the things that disturbed me the most, that eventually led to my leaving, was the sort of view that, 'Well, okay, but if we tell the people that, if we don't focus on weapons of ma.s.s destruction, we might not be able to sell the war.'

"That's what a democracy is all about. You haven't got the evidence, even if you pa.s.sionately believe that they [the Iraqis] have them [WMDs], then it's up to you to make that case. But there was a sense that they were so certain that it didn't really matter."

In his job at INR, Ford was intimately involved with one of the crucial elided details in the narrative that was concocted to justify the invasion of Iraq. And because this detail fit so perfectly into the story that was being developed, all the people developing the story believed it-or so effectively pretended they did that the difference hardly mattered. It became the source of a series of the noisiest subplots of the ongoing narrative, and it was a moment of utter fiction, a pa.s.sage of the purest novelization.

A little more than a month after the September 11 attacks, the Italian intelligence service handed over to the CIA's station in Rome a sheaf of doc.u.ments that had been kicking around intelligence circles for a couple of years. They involved a visit by Iraqi officials to the African country of Niger, an impoverished nation planted atop some of the finest uranium in the world. The Italians pa.s.sed the same doc.u.ments to British and French intelligence, as well.

One of the doc.u.ments was a letter, written in French, in which the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, offered to sell Saddam Hussein five hundred tons a year of uranium "yellowcake," suitable, if enriched, for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This letter was why the CIA dispatched a former diplomat named Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002. Wilson reported back that there seemed to be no basis for the story. Nevertheless, the letter later became the basis of the famous "sixteen words"-"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quant.i.ties of uranium in Africa"-in George W. Bush's prewar 2003 State of the Union speech. Watching the speech today, it is striking how Bush reads the last two of those sixteen words. He drops his voice to a lower register. He speaks ... very ... slowly. All that's missing are some ominous minor chords from a movie-house pipe organ. There seem to be bats hanging on every syllable. The war was launched three months later.

"Remember," Ford says, "the argument for years was whether or not they had reconst.i.tuted their nuclear program. That was the single most important issue and, when that changed, the time line changed. All of a sudden, you say they've reconst.i.tuted their nuclear weapons program, not only do they have chemical and biological weapons, but the clock has started on when they're going to have nuclear weapons and, if we don't do something, they are going to build one. But, before that, if they're not reconst.i.tuting their nuclear program, you can't argue that you need to go in there and kick their a.s.s."

In July 2002 Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times New York Times reiterating what he'd earlier told the CIA-that, as far as he could determine, the transaction between Niger and Iraq was the purest moonshine. In retaliation, the White House political apparatus leaked the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who was a covert CIA operative working on issues of nuclear proliferation, to a series of Washington journalists. A lengthy investigation ensued, concluding with the conviction of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for perjury. His sentence was then commuted by President Bush. His trial opened a window into the novelization of the process by which Idiot America had taken itself to war. reiterating what he'd earlier told the CIA-that, as far as he could determine, the transaction between Niger and Iraq was the purest moonshine. In retaliation, the White House political apparatus leaked the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who was a covert CIA operative working on issues of nuclear proliferation, to a series of Washington journalists. A lengthy investigation ensued, concluding with the conviction of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for perjury. His sentence was then commuted by President Bush. His trial opened a window into the novelization of the process by which Idiot America had taken itself to war.

And the letter that helped start the war was a clumsy, obvious fake. Skeptics with a firsthand knowledge of Niger-such as Wilson-found the whole transaction as described in the letter implausible. An international consortium strictly monitored Niger's uranium production. There was simply no way to move five hundred tons of uranium a year around the country discreetly. It would tie up the entire nation's trucking capacity, and shipping these loads down the rudimentary roadways from the mines to the port cities would paralyze the country's traffic. It was probably the most consequential forgery since the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and people all over the United States government, like Carl Ford, knew it.

"This one was not a hard one," Ford explains. "This was one of those easy cases. You have a fragment of information that is accompanied by a couple of older fragments, and all it suggests is that somebody from Iraq may have talked to the Nigerien government about buying some yellowcake. The reports don't say they did. They don't say exactly when or how, and that, alone, for a long time, at least through the NIE [in 2002], became the basis for people-everybody; CIA, DIA-saying they are in fact buying yellowcake from Africa."

The narrative had triumphed. Reality had been richly novelized with details that people made up to fill in the inconvenient gaps in the actual story. A forgery had been used to reinforce untruth and wishful thinking, and the people selling it had been able to do so with full confidence that the people they were taking to war by and large hadn't been paying attention to their government closely enough over the previous two years. Sh.e.l.l-shocked, the country had put itself on automatic pilot and hadn't remembered to turn the equipment off in time. The crash came, and it was b.l.o.o.d.y and ongoing.

"Remember," Ford muses, "this was a time in which people were doing and saying things in response to 9/11 that not only seemed to me at the time to be outrageous, but were clearly the majority positions. My argument isn't that there weren't substantive issues. What bothered me was the rationale that we know better than Congress, that we know better than the American people. The problem is that it takes leaders who are willing to say, 'This is going to be painful, folks, but we got a crisis here between our Const.i.tution and the threat and we've got to work together to find a solution to it.' I have great faith that the American people can learn. They do believe in our Const.i.tution and they'll fight to keep it."

Carl Ford left government and now works in one of those Washington offices just out of the gravitational sphere of the official city. The same dynamic that enabled a clumsy forgery to remain part of a casus belli was at work throughout the war and everything that came after it. The endless occupation. Secret prisons. Torture. All of it came as reflex, unthinking and automatic.

IN Imperial Life in the Emerald City Imperial Life in the Emerald City, his account of the first two years of the American occupation of Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes the hiring process by which young Americans-undeniably brave and in many cases admirably idealistic-were hired to go to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the governing body cobbled together for the purpose of bringing some semblance of order to the postwar chaos. According to Chandrasekaran, applicants were vetted on, among other things, the fervor of their opposition to Roe v. Wade Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that had legalized abortion years before most of them had been born. Qualified people in fields like the production of electricity were pa.s.sed over in favor of the offspring of Republican campaign contributors. Prospective employees were treated during their interview process to lengthy grilling as to their opinions on capital punishment and the Bush domestic agenda-which is to say, the Bush domestic agenda for the United States, not for Iraq. When, in desperation, the CPA sent an actual headhunter back to Washington to get control of the process, the civilian leadership tried to have the man thrown out of the Pentagon. Thus was the essential dynamic of the Hardball Hardball green room grafted onto a ma.s.sive foreign policy experiment in the most volatile part of the world, the Marx Brothers working from a script by Graham Greene. green room grafted onto a ma.s.sive foreign policy experiment in the most volatile part of the world, the Marx Brothers working from a script by Graham Greene.

In retrospect, some of what was said during the run-up to the war about the postwar period in Iraq sounds fantastical. Paul Wolfowitz was "reasonably certain" that the U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators," and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction. Richard Cheney expected "candy and flowers" to be tossed from every balcony from Mosul to Basra. The looting of priceless antiquities from the Baghdad museum was greeted with "Stuff happens" by Donald Rumsfeld, channeling every teenager who ever cracked up the family sedan. The looting of tons of ammunition, which would have more serious immediate consequences, was greeted in much the same way. The liberation of Iraq by force, it was said, would set off a wildfire of democratization that would remake the Middle East as it had Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was as though the people in charge of the enterprise went into Iraq expecting to be rescued from the consequences of their own decisions by the sword of Gilgamesh, or the timely intervention of Baal.

And, just as was the case with the intelligence that led to the war in the first place, experts within the government who were dubious about the prospects of a short, easy occupation were ignored, marginalized, or, in several cases, attacked and forced to resign. One of those people was David Phillips, a consultant who once headed up what was called the Future of Iraq Project for the State Department, a program that involved seventeen federal agencies. It spent $5 million and it developed plans for everything from rural electrification to political reconciliation.

Perhaps its most important element was the Democratic Principles Working Group, which took upon itself the considerable task of devising a workable plan for democratic reforms on a country that had been cobbled together in the aftermath of World War I to include various ethnic and religious sects, most of whom did not like one another. Phillips was deeply involved in that particular element of the project.

Phillips was not a softhearted bureaucrat. He was a hard-headed realist who earlier had helped reconstruct the Balkans after that region had spent a decade tearing itself apart in a spasm of genocidal lunacy. Phillips was a partisan of the Kurds, in the northern part of Iraq. The United States had sold this embattled people down the river at least twice over the past thirty years; their history is the living definition of being only a p.a.w.n in the game. Phillips believed in regime change in Iraq and, if military action was absolutely necessary to achieve it, he would support that, too.

Phillips's project was torn apart largely through infighting between the State Department and those elements elsewhere in the government-particularly in the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Vice President-who were trying to sell the country on the war.

"I had an evolving sense that we were being set aside," Phillips says. "It was clear that they were approaching this work from a different ideological perspective than were the professionals at State that I was in touch with, and that they were much more interested in lining up Iraqis so they could present a united front to American public opinion as opposed to working substantively through the kind of problems that had to be addressed." Gradually, but inexorably, Phillips says, the center of gravity for the reconstruction of Iraq shifted away from the State Department and toward a group of people engaged in what seemed to Phillips to be magical thinking.

"They were engaged in a discussion, actively engaged," he says. "But they wanted the discussion to reach conclusions that were consistent with their prejudgment, which was that the Iraqis were desperate to be liberated, the Iraqi exiles could be parachuted in, that the U.S. could decapitate the Ba'athist hierarchy, install the exiles, and be out of Iraq in ninety days. Because the administration was dominated by ideologues, ideology trumped pragmatism."

Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what the ideologues believed. "You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy," he says. "You start with the presumption that you already know the answer prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the inst.i.tution that brought you the information.

"We went in blindfolded and believed our own propaganda. We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil was going to pay for the rest. Now we're deep in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there. It's delusional, allowing delusions to be the basis of policymaking. Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't believe that it's broken."

Frustrated that all his work had been ignored-in April 2003, when American amba.s.sador L. Paul Bremer III suspended the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, the members of Phillips's Democratic Principles Working Group were infuriated at what they saw as a betrayal-Phillips resigned in protest on September 11, 2003. He did not, however, go quietly. He gave speeches and appeared on television. He wrote a book, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco. Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco. He found himself tangled in the thickets of deception that still surrounded the war and its aftermath, and in the complete inadequacy of those inst.i.tutions whose job it was to cut through them. Once, when he was consulting for NBC News, a young producer asked him to come on television to comment on something Hans Blix was going to say to the UN Security Council. Blix was speaking at five He found himself tangled in the thickets of deception that still surrounded the war and its aftermath, and in the complete inadequacy of those inst.i.tutions whose job it was to cut through them. Once, when he was consulting for NBC News, a young producer asked him to come on television to comment on something Hans Blix was going to say to the UN Security Council. Blix was speaking at five P.M. P.M. They wanted Phillips on the air at four. They wanted Phillips on the air at four.

"They said, 'Just a.s.sume, guess what he'll say, and comment upon it,'" Phillips reports. "I told him that I couldn't comment on a statement that hadn't been made yet."

IN Falls Church, deep in the Virginia countryside outside Washington, parkways wind gently between the gleaming offices set back among the trees. Consultants work here, ex-military types who wear their expensive suits like uniforms. Other people still in uniform come out to meet with them, jamming the food court of a Marriott hotel. One man in fatigues eats a salad holding a fork in his prosthetic hand. A soft rain mottles the gla.s.s of the windows. Falls Church, deep in the Virginia countryside outside Washington, parkways wind gently between the gleaming offices set back among the trees. Consultants work here, ex-military types who wear their expensive suits like uniforms. Other people still in uniform come out to meet with them, jamming the food court of a Marriott hotel. One man in fatigues eats a salad holding a fork in his prosthetic hand. A soft rain mottles the gla.s.s of the windows.

Anthony Zinni works in one of the quiet office towers. He is a security consultant, one of the non-uniformed men with whom the uniformed men come to do business. But he is still a soldier, a Marine, built like a bullet, with the unwavering gaze that makes it look as though he sees everything through a gun-sight. For ten years, Zinni was the general in charge of keeping Saddam Hussein in a box. He is now an outcast in the circles within which he once worked. He's an outcast because the strategy that he helped create was abandoned and Zinni objected, forcefully. He objected to the war and he objected to what he believed was the meretricious grounds on which the war was launched. He is an outcast mostly because he was right.

"We value theory over experience," he says. "We've come to that. That's relatively new. This town is full of bright young twenty- to thirty-something Ph.D.s who all have a new strategy, a new theory that fits over a page and a half about how the world should be run. There's no balance between theorist and pract.i.tioner anymore. We like short, snappy, quick answers to things, and the world is much more complex.

"You know, the most boring thing you could imagine is a politician standing up and giving a complex, strategic view of the world. Which is necessary, but it's soon put off. We judge the political debates by who has the snappiest little phrase that can be put out there. We live in a world of spin. So we don't look at reality and truth."

Zinni got smacked in the face with this revelation one day in August 2002. He was in Nashville, attending the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at which he was to be given an award. He'd recently retired after thirty-five years in the Marines, in no small part because his expertise had been marginalized in the new administration, which he'd supported during the 2000 campaign.

The keynote speaker at the VFW convention was Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney. In his speech, Cheney said, flatly, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of ma.s.s destruction.... There is no doubt that he is ama.s.sing them to use them against our friends, against our allies, and against us." It was a call for war. Sitting behind Cheney on the platform, Zinni was gobsmacked.

"I said, 'You have to be kidding me. Where is that coming from?'" he says. "The situation wasn't even anything remotely like that. I'm listening to this case for war based on faulty or-and I'm being kind-embellished intelligence.

"I couldn't believe they were doing this. And it became clear to me that the neocons were selling this idea that had been from the mid-nineties-some of them even called it 'creative destabilization'-that you go in and do something like this and Iraq's the right place, and you're going to light the fire of democracy in the Middle East and change the equation. All of us who knew that area and had been out there said, 'You're going to light a fire, all right, but it's not going to be one of democracy and stabilization. It's going to be destabilizing and destructive. You do not understand the forces you were about to unleash.'"

Zinni's opposition was not simply geopolitical. He saw with a grunt's eye view what the American soldiers were going to face in Iraq. "We don't appreciate the lessons of history," Zinni says. "There's a difference between failures based on arrogance and incompetence and ignorance, and mistakes that everybody makes in the course of very involved and complex undertakings like this one."

Zinni had one last chance to make his case. He was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2003. Four months earlier, Congress had given the president the authority to use military force against Iraq, and Bush had made it quite plain that he planned to do so. Having already surrendered its war powers, Congress was putting on something of a bipartisan dumb show. Administration officials were stupefyingly vague about plans for dealing with the problems of postwar Iraq, and Zinni knew why: They didn't have any plans, because some of them didn't really care. He saw in these officials not merely a lack of expertise, but a contempt for those who had it.

Zinni's expertise was in devising ways to keep as many soldiers as possible from getting killed in pursuit of a specific objective. He gently chided the committee for its lack of curiosity and its pa.s.sive acceptance of the gruel it was being fed. He continued to oppose the war in public appearances, but the war came anyway, because n.o.body who could have stopped it stood up and tried.

That was what stayed with Anthony Zinni as the war was launched, and Saddam fell, and Iraq exploded, as more than three thousand Americans died over four years during which everything he thought would happen did happen, over and over again. The country had wandered into this war, eyes half closed, stunned and shocked and too willingly sold. The people had left the country on automatic pilot too long to pull out of the crash.

"The problem comes on this sort of ideological notion that's presented, and it discounts all those with experience in the region, despite what they're saying. There's no hearing for the other side. As a matter of fact, what it becomes is for those of us who voiced our concerns to be called traitors. You were losing this war from the day you crossed the line of departure.... Taking down the regime was not a difficult task. Doing it with too few troops, not having a plan for reconstruction, doomed you from the start.

"I was talking awhile back to a citizens group in Richmond and almost everybody in the audience was a conservative. There were a couple of Democrats there and, at the end of my spiel, a young man got up and he was really angry and he said, 'I'm a Republican and I'm very conservative and I support this war." Then he pointed at one of the Democrats, and he said, 'But, you, as the opposition party, you had the obligation to create the debate on this war and you failed.' I mean, we had the failure on one side to stand up and be counted and we had the failure on the other side of bullying and using patriotism to stamp out any debate and now both sides regret that more and more."

The rain falls more steadily on the trees outside. A low, wet fog rolls in along the parkway. The men in uniform shake hands outside the Marriott with the men who don't wear uniforms anymore. It is a loose summer's day in a nation at war, a country full of easy marks, blinking in the ruins and soggy now with futile buyer's remorse.

IF everything, even scientific discussion and even questions of an individual life and death, is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. The founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today, we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates exemplified by cable television, creating its own events to argue about. Every discussion, even discussion of who should be president, ends up in a bar fight. everything, even scientific discussion and even questions of an individual life and death, is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. The founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today, we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates exemplified by cable television, creating its own events to argue about. Every discussion, even discussion of who should be president, ends up in a bar fight.

(And even that standard is imprecise. If his two terms as president prove nothing else, it proves that George Bush was the kind of guy who comes with you to the bar, disappears into the gents' when it's his turn to buy, and ducks out the back door, after starting a fight with the defensive tackle of the football team that you have to finish.) A year after that famous Zogby poll was released concerning the nation's preference to toss back a brew with George W. Bush-August 19, 2005, to be precise-it was a beautiful day in Idiot America. In Washington, William Frist, the Harvard-educated physician and majority leader of the U.S. Senate who from the well of that chamber had recently diagnosed Terri Schiavo as fit to dance the merengue, endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in the nation's public schools. "I think today a pluralistic society," Frist explained, "should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor should it be, did not elude Dr. Frist. He simply wanted to be president, and he was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things, and he believed that those people would vote for him simply because he talked this rot, and that everyone else would understand him as an actor reciting his lines. In Idiot America, nonsense can be a no-lose proposition.

On that same day, across town, Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell, told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United Nations, in which the general described Iraq's vast array of deadly weapons, was little more than ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag. "It was," said Wilkerson, "the lowest point in my life." By August 19, 2005, it had proven to be an even worse moment for thousands of American families and G.o.d alone knew how many Iraqis. This apparently was trumped by Wilkerson's tender conscience.

Powell's speech was the final draft of the novelized Iraq saga. The war's proponents needed a narrator with gravitas, and they had found him. "You can afford to lose some points," d.i.c.k Cheney reportedly told Powell, sending him off to befuddle the UN and concluding with breathtaking cynicism that the sparkle of Powell's public image would be enough to dazzle the rubes out in the country. And on August 19, 2005, long after it could have made a difference, Larry Wilkerson looked into his hemorrhaging conscience and said that that was precisely what happened. The successful sale of the Iraq war was a pure product of Idiot America.

But Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the results of millions of decisions made and not made, to reduce everything to salesmanship. Debate becomes corrupted argument, in which every point of view is just another product, no better or worse than all the others, and informed citizenship is abandoned to the marketplace. Idiot America is the development of the collective Gut at the expense of the collective mind. It's what results when we abandon our duty to treat the ridiculous with ridicule. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and we not only surrender our right to punish them at the polls but also become too timid to punish their ideas with daily scorn-because the polls say those ideas are popular, and therefore they must hold some sort of truth, which we should respect.

Idiot America is what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people, and that's why, after Frist and Wilkerson had their moment in the spotlight, August 2005 went on to become a seminal month in Idiot America. With complete impunity, George W. Bush, the president of the United States, wandered the landscape and talked like a blithering nitwit.

First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu theocratic const.i.tution in Baghdad to the events surrounding the Const.i.tutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he later compared the war he'd launched in Iraq to World War II. And then he compared himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt. One more public appearance, and we might have learned that Custer was killed by the Hezbollah.

Then, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans drowned and then turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on television. As the city was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, the country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the calamity lay with a man who'd been dismissed as an incompetent from his previous job as the director of a luxury show-horse organization. And the president went on television and said that n.o.body could have antic.i.p.ated the collapse of the city's levees.

In G.o.d's sweet name, engineers antic.i.p.ated it. Politicians antic.i.p.ated it. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the Ninth Ward antic.i.p.ated it. h.e.l.l, four generations of folksingers antic.i.p.ated it. And the people who hated the president went crazy and the people who liked him defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible, staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, the people who realized that, whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot America, where it was still a beautiful day.

Oh, he paid for it. His poll ratings cratered and his party lost its congressional majority in 2006. He became the subject of tinny mockery. But the dynamic that created Idiot America remained in place. In 2007, on the question of habeas corpus for prisoners the U.S. military had detained, the Congress could muster only six Republicans to vote essentially in favor of the Great Writ, but twenty-two Democrats were willing to vote to condemn an antiwar newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nt. Habeas corpus had less of a const.i.tuency in 2007, in the Congress of the United States, than it had in the field at Runnymede in 1215. The disorder remains.

None of these episodes was inevitable. Terri Schiavo's death did not have to become a media circus. The country could have rejected, now and forever, the media culture that made it into one, and the people who even now are shining up the green room in antic.i.p.ation of the next. The facts and the science surrounding the global climate change that is slowly eating away at the lives of the people of Shishmaref could have been kept out of the cheap and tawdry disputation that pa.s.ses for political debate; it shouldn't matter that "liberals" are on one side of the issue while "conservatives" are on the other. The land is still being pulled away into the Chukchi Sea. There were opposing voices speaking out in the aftermath of September 11 and in the run-up to the war in Iraq that was devised from the shock of it, but those voices were marginalized and ignored, and the media that did so acted with the tacit approval of its audience. We leave ourselves on automatic pilot and realize, too late, what happens when we do.

"There was no plan except 'Defer to us,'" explained Andrew Bacevich, Sr., a retired Army colonel who teaches history and international relations at Boston University. He is a blade of a man with unsparing eyes. His is the last of the cluttered offices to visit, the ones where the people who knew work now. A CNN crew has just packed up and left. People are listening to Bacevich, seven years into the war, because the war has gone bad, and some important people are pretending that, glorioski, they can't imagine how it all happened.

"They said, 'We will cut your taxes and we will not have a draft. Don't worry. The U.S. military is unbeatable, so go to Disney World,'" Bacevich said. "And I think that's the inclination of the American people anyway, and we were all encouraged to do that. Had the president said at the time, 'This requires an all-out national effort. I'm going to increase your taxes. We're going to pay for this. Expand the Army'-in that moment, I think the Congress would have said, 'You got it, Mr. President.' As Americans, we would have said, 'Okay, if that's what it takes.' He said, 'Go to Disney World,' and the moment pa.s.sed.

"The guys who were so smart that thought they knew how to exploit the window of opportunity were, actually, stupid. I think that's where the historians will puzzle."

Real people get used up in the transactions of Idiot America. None of these people live in Idiot America. Their lives are hijacked there. Annie Santa-Maria finds doing G.o.d's work made infinitely harder by people who think they've divined G.o.d's thoughts. Faith is sold as science, and a town is torn apart. Spin is treated as fact, and Shishmaref comes apart. Propaganda is indistinguishable from truth, and thousands die. On June 4, 2008, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that stated, flatly, that the president and vice president had sold the Iraq war to the country on the basis of claims that they knew were false.

By then, more than four thousand Americans, and G.o.d alone knows how many Iraqis, had died. One of those people was First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., of the U.S. Army, who had been killed in Iraq on May 13, 2002. Six years after his death, his father wrote a book in which he quoted Reinhold Niebuhr: "Those who think there is little difference between a cold and hot war are either knaves or fools."

"Between 2002 and 2003," his father wrote, "the knaves and fools got their war."

The book you are reading was almost called Blinking from the Ruins. Blinking from the Ruins. But that would have been dishonest and wrong, because there's an innocence between the lines there that none of us deserve. Nothing happens in Idiot America by accident. It is a place that we will into being. But that would have been dishonest and wrong, because there's an innocence between the lines there that none of us deserve. Nothing happens in Idiot America by accident. It is a place that we will into being.

"I got to go meet a guy for lunch," Andrew Bacevich said.

He has not followed us all into the bar, where all opinions are of equal worth, where everyone's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. No voice is more authoritative than any other one; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that, sooner or later, some noisy b.a.s.t.a.r.d always picks a fight. The next day, in the cold light of the morning, everybody's too embarra.s.sed to remember how it all began.

Part IV *

MR. MADISON'S LIBRARY

CHAPTER TEN

Torture in New Hampshire

They weren't made of marble. Years after the Const.i.tutional Convention, William L. Pierce, a delegate from Georgia, published his impressions in a Savannah newspaper. Many of them detailed the work of the convention, but Pierce also took the time to write down his personal impressions of his colleagues which, owing to the enforced secrecy of the convention's deliberations, made the sketches something of a sensation. Reading them today is a blessed, gossipy relief from what has become the Founder of the Month Club on various best-seller lists. made of marble. Years after the Const.i.tutional Convention, William L. Pierce, a delegate from Georgia, published his impressions in a Savannah newspaper. Many of them detailed the work of the convention, but Pierce also took the time to write down his personal impressions of his colleagues which, owing to the enforced secrecy of the convention's deliberations, made the sketches something of a sensation. Reading them today is a blessed, gossipy relief from what has become the Founder of the Month Club on various best-seller lists.

Pierce found that William S. Johnson of Connecticut had "nothing in him that warrants the high reputation he has for public speaking." Johnson's colleague Roger Sherman was "the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with." Alexander Hamilton sometimes showed "a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable" and Benjamin Franklin "is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man and he tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard."

Pierce sized up "Mr. Maddison" as "always ... the best informed man of any point in debate.... Mr. Maddison is about 37 years of age, a Gentleman of great modesty-with a remarkable sweet temper. He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance and has a most agreeable style of conversation."

This is shrewd, intelligent gossip, but gossip nonetheless, and it serves as a deft counterpoint to what Mr. Madison was about, sitting in his chair closest to the front of the room, taking down with almost preposterous precision the specifics of the great debates going on around him. But the works are not interchangeable, and they ought not to be. Neither Madison's notes nor Pierce's sketches ought to define fully any of the people in them. But there seems little question that, had there been cable television news shows in 1787, Pierce would have been booked solid for a week, while you'd have had to scan CSPAN during whiskey hours of the poker game to catch a glimpse of James Madison.

For example, Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, was a ferocious defender of the rights of the smaller states. He threatened to pull all of them out of Philadelphia if his concerns were not addressed. He was not bluffing. (Thomas Jefferson said of him that Sherman had never said a foolish thing in his life.) Luckily for all concerned, Sherman's great gift was compromise. Without him, the Const.i.tution might not have pa.s.sed at all. That he also was odd-looking is both beyond question and beside the point. Define him by the latter, and everything is out of place, an eighteenth-century equivalent of John Edwards's hair, or of the many voices screaming lines from old movies that seem to echo in the head of Maureen Dowd.

Why not apply the most precisely loony of modern standards and ask with which of the founders you'd most like to have had a beer? Franklin's the obvious answer, although the ferocious dipsomaniac Luther Martin, from Maryland-"he never speaks without tiring the patience of all who hear him," according to Pierce-might have been entertaining for an hour or so. Pennsylvania's James Wilson would have been no fun at all. He was pedantic, and he was always talking about how much he knew. (Pierce admired how Wilson could run down all the stages of "the Greecian commonwealth down to the present time.") Sure, we might not have had a Bill of Rights without him, but how much fun would he have been?

It's good that there was gossip. There is a place in our understanding for Madison's meticulous note-taking on the great questions being decided, and for Pierce's loose-limbed a.s.sessment of the men who came to decide them. It's good that they were not made of marble. Reality demands that they not be cast as figures from Olympus. But reality also demands the acknowledgment that they were not the cast of My Man G.o.dfrey My Man G.o.dfrey, either.

FOR a brief moment in 2008, reality disappeared from American television because there was n.o.body around to write it. a brief moment in 2008, reality disappeared from American television because there was n.o.body around to write it.

A trend as deeply rooted in Idiot America as anything else is, reality television shakes out as little more than the creation of a context in which one set of connivers is set against another. The ur-program Survivor Survivor was meant to set a number of contestants against one another in an every-person-for-themselves free-for-all. Within a week, one set of contenders was conspiring against another. The "tribal council" became a venting of boundless suspicion, some justified and some not, but all with the essential integrity and suspense of a professional wrestling match. We had, after all, already seen the actual plotting as the series went along. was meant to set a number of contestants against one another in an every-person-for-themselves free-for-all. Within a week, one set of contenders was conspiring against another. The "tribal council" became a venting of boundless suspicion, some justified and some not, but all with the essential integrity and suspense of a professional wrestling match. We had, after all, already seen the actual plotting as the series went along.

Televised sports and the media attendant on them had already broken a lot of ground, and the creation of a television reality as an arena went back even further than that, all the way to the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s and to forgotten cla.s.sics like Queen for a Day Queen for a Day and and You Asked for It. You Asked for It. In the former, a woman with a terrible tale of sorrow and woe would share it with an adoring public and be rewarded with a new stove. In the latter, people wrote in asking to see a man break a board with his head, or to watch a Tahitian fertility rite, and the host would obligingly share it with a grateful, if baffled, nation. Sooner or later, a country that could so invest itself in Charles Van Doren, or in a housewife from Kansas with ulcers, or in dancing South Sea islanders was bound to start arguing about reality. In the former, a woman with a terrible tale of sorrow and woe would share it with an adoring public and be rewarded with a new stove. In the latter, people wrote in asking to see a man break a board with his head, or to watch a Tahitian fertility rite, and the host would obligingly share it with a grateful, if baffled, nation. Sooner or later, a country that could so invest itself in Charles Van Doren, or in a housewife from Kansas with ulcers, or in dancing South Sea islanders was bound to start arguing about reality.

The essential dynamic of reality programming is the creation of teams through which Americans can vicariously compete against one another, whether in rooting for the personal trainer in the loincloth on Survivor Survivor, the Shania Twain wannabe on American Idol American Idol, or the harried mom and dad trying to win the daily battle of getting the s.e.xtuplets off to school in the morning. It is the creation of profitable vessels in which to invest whatever we find unsatisfactory in our own lives. In every real sense, we buy the people and their problems. The essential truth of reality shows lies in how fervently we involve ourselves in them.

"All reality shows," Craig Plestis, an NBC executive, told Forbes.com, "should have a visceral reaction for the viewer. You need to feel something."

Even American Idol American Idol, Fox television's star-making phenomenon, is shot through with the notion that the panel of demi-celebrities doing the judging is conspiring against one contender and in favor of another. (The charges gained a little credibility early on, when a judge, Paula Abdul, was discovered to be dating one of the contestants.) Now, the cable dial is dotted with reality shows involving huge families, dangerous jobs, messy garages, and really big tumors. There are even reality shows about unreality, people going off in search of Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil. Ignatius Donnelly, alas, died much too soon.

After all, there is very little that's real about a reality show. In them, the imagination is tamed by a re-created reality, as in a zoo. These shows create what looks like an actual habitat for actual human beings, but, since the habitat is designed to be lived in by characters designed to prompt a vicarious involvement on the part of the audience, no less than were Rob Petrie's suburban home or the precinct house in The Wire The Wire, the whole thing might as well be a cage. n.o.body goes to a zoo to dream of dragons.

Today, though, the dynamic present in the reality shows also drives too much of the more serious business of how we govern ourselves as a country, and how we manage ourselves as a culture, and it pretty plainly can't stand the power of it. We've chosen up sides on everything, fashioning our public lives as though we were making up a fantasy baseball team. First, I'll draft a politician, then a couple of "experts," whose expertise can be defined by how deeply I agree with what they say, or by how well their books sell, or by how often I can see them on TV. Then, I'll draft a couple of blowhards to sell it back to me, to make me feel good about my team.

One of the remarkable things about fantasy baseball is that it provides a deeper level of vicariousness in that it enables its partic.i.p.ants to cheer for players who are in no way real people, simply columns of statistics and variables. There are no human beings playing in the games of fantasy baseball, only columns of figures. In our politics and our culture, there often seem to be no human beings running for office, or making art, or singing songs. There are only our opinions of them, crammed into the procrustean uniform of Our Side. Winners and losers are judged by which side sells the best.

The most revelatory moment of all came in 2008, when the reality shows had to go off the air because the Hollywood writers had gone on strike and there was n.o.body to write the reality. Deprived of their vicarious lives, the fans of the shows went into a funk not unlike that which afflicted baseball fans in 1997, when a labor dispute canceled the World Series. It seemed to strike very few people as odd that reality had to go off the air because n.o.body was left to write it. After all, if you've already made reality a show, what's the point in making a reality show at all?

THE rain came down in torrents, sluicing through the campus of St. Anselm College in Manchester, on a night in June 2007. Ten Republicans came with the rain, all of them seeking the presidency of the United States in what was supposed to be a transformative election, a chance to reorder the country, to separate fiction from nonfiction, faith from reason, that which sold from that which was true: a chance to put things back where they belonged. It was the first election to be held among the people who were blinking from the ruins. rain came down in torrents, sluicing through the campus of St. Anselm College in Manchester, on a night in June 2007. Ten Republicans came with the rain, all of them seeking the presidency of the United States in what was supposed to be a transformative election, a chance to reorder the country, to separate fiction from nonfiction, faith from reason, that which sold from that which was true: a chance to put things back where they belonged. It was the first election to be held among the people who were blinking from the ruins.

They were a remarkable bunch. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani was running against the nineteen hijackers in the September 11 attacks, while Congressman Tom Tancredo was running against ragged immigrants who were sneaking across the Rio Grande. Congressman Ron Paul plumped for pure libertarianism, while Congressman Duncan Hunter seemed to be trying to slice away the moderates among Paul's voters-the people who did not necessarily dive behind the couch after mistaking the sound of their blenders for approaching black helicopters. Paul was also the only one of the bunch firmly against the war in Iraq, which gave him some cachet among young voters who did not know that Paul also would like us to return to the gold standard.

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas was an out-and-out theocrat, albeit a charitable one. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas was just as amiably Jesus-loopy as Brownback was. Outside of Giuliani, the two most "serious" candidates seemed to be former governor Mitt Romney of Ma.s.sachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona. As it turned out, Romney spent tens of millions of dollars to prove that he was little more than the Piltdown Man of American politics. McCain would end up as the nominee almost by default, and by virtue of the fact that he was able to allay the fears of the Republican base while maintaining a grip on that dwindling element of his party that can fairly be described as Not Insane. That grip did not hold.

FOR a time, briefly, it seemed that the country was coming to realize that it had poisoned itself with bulls.h.i.t and nonsense for nearly a decade. It seemed ready to act upon that realization in its 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama's rise to the Democratic nomination on a nebulous concept of "change" seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that we would all stop conning ourselves. a time, briefly, it seemed that the country was coming to realize that it had poisoned itself with bulls.h.i.t and nonsense for nearly a decade. It seemed ready to act upon that realization in its 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama's rise to the Democratic nomination on a nebulous concept of "change" seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that we would all stop conning ourselves.

But no.

In August, in what was the first major event of the general election campaign, both Obama and John McCain went out to California to a "forum" organized by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church. The very notion that an affluent G.o.d-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates was in itself a sign that the opportunity that twinkled briefly in the election was largely lost. At one point, Warren turned to Obama and asked, "At what point does a baby get human rights?"

The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is "How in the h.e.l.l do I know? If that's what you want in a president, vote for Thomas Aquinas." Instead, Obama summoned up some faith-based flummery that convinced few people in a crowd that, anyway, had no more intention of voting for him than it did of erecting a statue of Baal in the parking lot. Subsequently, Warren gave an interview in which he compared an evangelical voting for a pro-choice candidate to a Jewish voter supporting a Holocaust denier. And the opportunity went a-glimmering.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there. Desperate to disa.s.sociate himself from the previous administration, which had spent seven years crafting policies that it could sell to Idiot America while the actual America was coming apart at every seam, McCain instead wandered deeply into Idiot America himself, perhaps never to return. He embraced the campaign tactics used to slander him in 2000, even hiring some of the people who had been responsible for them. He stated that he couldn't now vote for his own immigration reform bill. He spent a long stretch of the campaign in violation of the campaign finance reform bill that bore his name. He largely silenced himself on the issue of torture.

He really had no choice. The Republican party, and the brand of movement conservatism that had fueled its rise, had become the party of undigested charlatans. Some of them believed the supply-side voodoo that so unnerved Jonathan Chait. Some of them believed in dinosaurs with saddles. Movement conservatism swallowed them all whole, and it valued them only for the raw number of votes they could deliver. The cranks did not a.s.similate and the party using them did not really care whether the mainstream came to them. It simply hoped there were enough of them to win elections. The transaction failed the country because it did not free the imagination so much as bridle it with conventional politics. It niche-marketed the frontier of the mind so rigidly that, by 2008, you couldn't run for president as a Republican without transforming yourself into a preposterous figure.