corrente

In another laugh-out-loud column, David Brooks takes us on a fact-free tour of his papier mache version of American history to demonstrate that the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq is actually going according to, if not a plan, then at least an ultimately happy American pattern:

The guides who aided and fleeced the pioneers who moved West were struck by how clueless many of them were about the wilderness they were entering. Their diaries show that many thought they could establish genteel New England-style villages in short order. They leapt before they looked, faced the shock of reality, adapted and cobbled together something unexpected.

And it is that way today.

Now I really don't know who Brooks imagines the contemporary versions of thse unscrupulous guides are, but I think most people would think of the very Administration that lied, schemed, and bullied us into this disaster, and who now disavow any responsibility for its unfolding consequences. (Does Brooks think before he commits his nitwit ideas to paper?) Some might even think of the story of the Donner Party, whose horrific ordeal began with a decision to trust some of those very hucksters with an untried, and largely invented "shortcut" through the high Sierras. Even before their fateful ascent to the verdant hell that now bears their name, the party had been decimated by Indian attacks and the punishing heat of the Great Basin Desert, but showing Brooks' virtues, they persevered. "They looked, faced the shock of reality, adapted and cobbled together something unexpected." That is to say, they wound up eating each other.

Happily, unlike the other Donner Party, the hucksters behind this one find themselves trapped as well, in a sort of meteorologically inverted version of that party's snowy tomb, but with similar cannibalistic dynamics. Fred Kaplan writes:

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh's story states that Rumsfeld's secret operation stemmed from his "longstanding desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA." Hersh's sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld's secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

It would be nice if, just once, the hucksters upon whom the babbling Brooks unblinkingly gazes paid the price for their chicanery. For thousands of their victims, it is of course too late to matter. Still, some measure of justice for the perpetrators of this outrage would indeed be "the start of a new beginning now," if not the one that a witless shill like Brooks has in mind.