corrente

Of course, Bush knows his enemies—the Democrats (and the Consitution). And he's been superb at decapitating the one and subverting the other. Would that He could know his enemy in war, as well as in politics! From, once again, the essential New Yorker, where reporter Dan Baum has actually talked to the troops instead of sitting at his desk, fluffing unnamed administration officials by giving them good phone:

Then came Iraq. Every war is different from the last, with its own special learning curve, but there is a growing sense within the Army that Iraq signals something more significant. In the American Civil War, Army manuals taught Napoleonic tactics, like close-order formations, even though they were suicidal against rifled muskets that could kill accurately at three hundred yards. In the First World War, the French, British, and German troops persisted in attempting to storm trenches before recognizing the defensive supremacy of the machine gun. In Iraq, the Army’s marquee high-tech weapons are often sidelined while the enemy kills and maims Americans with bombs wired to garage-door openers or doorbells. Even more important, the Army is facing an enemy whose motivation it doesn’t understand. “I don’t think there’s one single person in the Army or the intelligence community that can break down the demographics of the enemy we’re facing,” an Airborne captain named Daniel Morgan told me. “You can’t tell whether you’re dealing with a former Baathist, a common criminal, a foreign terrorist, or devout believers.”
(via The New Yorker)

Yep. One of the many surreal aspects of Inerrant Boy's Most Excellent adventure is that the enemy the troops are fighting is never clearly defined. I guess they're "evil" or "hate freedom" but that's a little short of operational intelligence, eh? This truth has been hidden in plain sight, and it takes a New York weekly to reveal it. Sigh.