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 stunted about all this. He and his top officials seem almost completely 
 divorced from any sense of the actual consequences of their various acts 
 and decisions. They live in some kind of dream world offshore of reality, 
 which would perhaps not be so disturbing if they didn't also control the 
 levers of power in what, not so long ago, was regularly referred to as the 
 "lone" or "last superpower" or the globe's only "hyperpower." (Even in 
 their own terms, it's a sign of their failed stewardship that almost no 
 one uses such phrases any more or, say, Pax Americana, another commonplace 
 of 2002 and 2003.) 
  
 It may be that nations deserve the leaders they get and perhaps it's no 
 mistake that George Bush ended up as our leader -- twice no less -- in a 
 period that otherwise seemed to cry out for having your basic set of 
 grown-ups in power, or that his Secretary of Defense likes to play 
 stand-up comic at his news conferences, or that his first Attorney General 
 just loved to sing songs of his own creation to his staff, or that none of 
 them can get it through their heads that it's not just the terrorists who, 
 in our world, have been taking "the lives of the innocent." 
  
 I keep thinking: Who let these children out in the world on their own? 
 Obviously the American people, in some state of global denial, did. It's 
 strange, but I can't get out of my mind an image that Bush administration 
 officials, from the President on down, were using regularly back in 
 2003-2004. They often quite publicly compared the Iraqis to a child taking 
 his first wobbly bike ride (assumedly on a democratic path) under the 
 administration's tutelage. There was Washington, the kindly adult, stooped 
 over, helping balance that ungainly kid, or trying to decide whether this 
 was the moment to take off those training wheels and let the child take an 
 initial spin on his own, chancing of course a spill. 
  
 In May of 2004, for instance, the President, according to a CBS News 
 report, "sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan..., 
 saying Iraqis are ready to take the training wheels off' by assuming some 
 political power." Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke similarly in March 
 of that year: "Getting Iraq straightened out, he said, was like teaching a 
 kid to ride a bike: They're learning, and you're running down the street 
 holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand 
 off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and 
 pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're 
 running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We 
 can't know that, but we're off to a good start.'" And from Undersecretary 
 of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition 
 Provisional Authority in Baghdad, others chimed in similarly. 
  
 Of course, all of this was a lie of an image and not just because it was 
 classically patronizing and colonial. After all, if you wanted to extend 
 the image, you would have to say that the American parent helping that 
 sweet child learn how to bike was also plundering the child's future 
 college fund, looting his future patrimony, and turning his life into a 
 swirl of deadly chaos. Take off those wheels and let him wobble around 
 that first corner and he was likely to be knocked off his bike by an RPG 
 round and find himself in a hospital without supplies run by doctors who 
 were either being assassinated or fleeing the country. 
  
 Perhaps this image, now retired by the administration, came back to me as 
 the President spoke because, only the day before, on a wet and slippery 
 Scottish road, riding his own special sports bike, George had crashed into 
 a policeman guarding him, scraping his hands and arms, and sending that 
 policeman briefly to the hospital. 
  
 Now, anyone can fall off a bike, but I had to wonder who had taken those 
 training wheels off the Bush administration bike -- al-Qaeda by its 9/11 
 attacks, would assumedly be the answer -- and let its officials careen off 
 on their first wild rides, all of which have left them skidding off the 
 road and someone else in the hospital. I wondered what the inhabitants of 
 Baghdad, the capital of our failed state of Iraq, might have been thinking 
 about the President's statement on the London bombings or all the media 
 attention that was given over to them. After all, 7 to 8 car bombings a 
 week now take place in Baghdad alone -- and this figure is held up proudly 
 by the American military as an accomplishment of the moment (being down 
 from 14 to 21 before a recent offensive in that city). And yet in our 
 press there are never stories about how Baghdadis keep stiff upper lips or 
 carry on with life amid the carnage, though somehow they evidently do. 
  
 If you'll excuse another image, it was as if our child leaders had taken 
 off, ridden directly into someone else's neighborhood, seen a wasp's nest, 
 promptly stomped on it, and then stood around praising themselves and 
 waiting to be stung. If you judge a war by its results, then our 
 president's war on terror has led only to ever more terror and ever more 
 war. Just the other day, the Bush administration did some new figuring and 
 reported that terrorist incidents globally in 2004 had increased five-fold 
 over the previous figures it had released to the public. For that year, 
 the National Counterterrorism Center now counts up 3,192 attacks 
 worldwide, with 28,433 people killed, wounded, or kidnapped -- and Iraq 
 led the list by a mile even though attacks on the U.S. military were not 
 counted in the tally. 
  
 In the meantime, as Dilip Hiro points out, bombing attacks -- Bali, 
 Turkey, Madrid, London -- are moving ever closer to the heartland of our 
 particular world, of George Bush's imperium. Once upon a time it was a 
 trope of American presidents to claim that we were fighting there, 
 wherever there might be -- in the case of Lyndon Johnson Vietnam, in the 
 case of Ronald Reagan Central America -- so that we might not fight on the 
 beaches of San Diego or in the fields of Texas. When a president said such 
 a thing, It sounded fierce and threatening -- and it was inconceivable. 
 Armed Nicaraguans were never going to punch through Texas, nor were 
 Vietnamese guerrillas going to slip ashore in Southern California, nor 
 Panamanians in Atlanta; nor Grenadians in Key West; nor, for that matter, 
 Iraqis of the First Gulf War era in Boston. 
  
 George Bush now uses the same punch lines as those former presidents, just 
 as he did recently in his national television address to the nation on 
 Iraq. But for the first time, they have an actual meaning. They have 
 perhaps even more meaning over "there." Riverbend, the eloquent, young 
 Baghdad Blogger, recently put the matter this way from the perspective of 
 a resident of the Iraqi capital: 
  
 "Bush said: 'Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. The commander in 
 charge of coalition operations in Iraq, who is also senior commander at 
 this base, General John Vines, put it well the other day. He said, "We 
 either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it 
 when it comes to us."' 
  
 "He speaks of abroad' as if it is a vague desert-land filled with 
 heavily-bearded men and possibly camels. Abroad' in his speech seems to 
 indicate a land of inferior people -- less deserving of peace, prosperity 
 and even life. Don't Americans know that this vast wasteland of terror and 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)