War is certainly unpredictable, Mr. Kamiya; but the US has been in a state of permanent war since, what, 1950? We've been in the war business so long, it's our normal mode of operating. It's embedded in our language, like when we're supposedly serious, we call it a "war" -- the Cold War, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and so on.

The only time I saw a hiccup in the culture was right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for about two weeks, they nervously talked about "the peace dividend." But then the talk of reinvesting the war money spent abruptly stopped, and the war machine kept rolling, relying on inertia for awhile.

That's when I knew we were seriously screwed as a country -- the money would continue to be spent, whether or not there was an enemy for it; better if there was an enemy, but the enemy was almost incidental to the process. I've seen numbers showing anywhere from $5 to $8 trillion dollars spent on the Cold War from the 40s to the mid-90s -- that's money that could've been invested at home (which is, at heart, the worst nightmare of the neocons and reactionaries).

I think the Bush League rolled the dice and hoped for the best outcome, if only to improve their chances at the permanent majority they wanted. The actual outcome of the War on Terror is incidental to the (in their eyes) necessity of its permanence.

It's bad enough to see this trotted out in the mainstream, but then you wrote...

The Saud dynasty could lose its grip on power, with devastating consequences for the global economy. And if Musharraf falls in Pakistan, the prospect of an unstable nuclear regime could suddenly become a reality.

...and it shows the peril both left and right face in the permanent war economy, how it poisons everybody's minds, blinkers us as a people.

Why do we support the ruthless Saud monarchy? Why do we support the Musharraf military dictatorship in Pakistan? What do dictatorships and monarchies have to do with democracy? Nothing. And yet we've been militarily supporting regimes like these for over 60 years. More money, more war, more insurgencies. More strange bedfellows for our country, more bad choices.

Liberals paint themselves into a corner on this -- support the blatantly human rights-violating Saudis or else...support the Musharraf dictatorship or... what?

If we didn't support them, would those regimes still stand? Should they still stand? Musharraf came to power in a coup; that's our favorite form of political expression in the Third World -- not elections, but juntas and coups. That divorce between our rhetoric and the reality of our policy is what fatally undermines our credibility in the world -- we talk self-determination, but we don't practice it; we talk peace, and we fund war.

Truth is the first casualty of war, right? And in a society at permanent war, how can we even hope to get at any truth? People talk about the Bush League misleading the nation, but we've been misled for generations; people aren't going to suddenly wake up now, because all Americans know is endless war, in one form or another.

The only innovation of the War on Terror is that it's a war without possible victory, so the satisfaction of victory is taken from us, in the face of some existential dread. But that's an even better guarantee of its permanence. I don't think the Bush League are too bent out of shape about what's going on, except for the short-term political consequences -- we'll have this war with us as long as we can afford it, with the Democrats busy trying to appear tough on terror. But I'm reminded of a quote from Ike Eisenhower...

"The problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."

The most frustrating thing about it (and kudos to Mr. Greenwald for drawing attention to this in his tireless way) is how the "realist/pragmatist" position, as portrayed in the media, is anything BUT realistic or pragmatic: 1) Support permanent war at expense of needed domestic spending; 2) Endlessly increase military budget; 3) Back untenable, undemocratic, autocratic Third World regimes; 4) Undermine international institutions in favor of unilateralism; 5) Engage in wars of opportunity around the globe, as required/desired; 6) Continue our dependence on fossil fuels; 7) Pursue foreign policies that further erode American credibility.

And this is after it's already been demonstrated that the standard neocon/reactionary Cold Warrior Big Army(tm) approach doesn't work as a deterrent to or as a defense from terrorism (see 9/11 for example).

But the media considers that the realist position, and anything outside of that is not even considered -- even among mainstream liberal pundits, who are too busy trying to establish "realist" bona fides. There is a wafer-thin continuum of acceptable public opinion -- and this serves defense contractors just fine, but doesn't help our country much at all in the long run.

Just as Bush's War in Iraq created the very menace in Iraq he was claiming to be protecting us from, so I see the "realist" stance doing much the same with the country at large.