Isaac Rosenberg's self portrait:
http://www.arlindo-correia.com/rosenberg1.jpg

Isaac Rosenberg was a poor working class Englishman, the son of a Lithuanian peddler, but the spiritual son of Blake.

He was a common enlisted footsoldier. He enlisted because he needed the money. He had been too poor to be a college scholar or a college athlete, and he was too short to be a soldier, but they took him, anyway.

He wrote "Break of Day in the Trenches" in 1916, which also the year when my grandmother's brother in the English army was shot and killed by the Germans, and which was also the year when by other grandmother's brother, in the German army, was shot and killed by the English. I guess that makes me a cosmopolitan critter, myself.

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away —
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand —
A queer sardonic rat —
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German —
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver - - what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe —
Just a little white with the dust.

- - Isaac Rosenberg, born 1890, died 1918.

Click through to Tony Blair's op-ed and you'll see that he favors a sort of balance of trade.

Along with exporting some British values and traditions, and partially remaking some foreign dictatorships, he takes a balanced view, and values some of the traditional values of dictatorship, which he wants to import into Britain.

"We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong . . . Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism. Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first.
I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment. This extremism, operating the world over, is not like anything we have faced before."

It's not like anything we have faced before, so it justifies an endless war, and of course an endless war must be accompanied by an endless police state.

What would the response be if -- now that he's not Bush's pal anymore -- Vladimir Putin made a statement about how, because of dangers "not like anything that we have faced before", Russia was suspending some civil liberties?

What would the American and British response be, if Hugo Chavez said that he was streamlining due process so that Venezuelan police would no longer need to waste so much scarce and precious time on paper work?

One of the bumper sticker slogans used to support the use of military force is that "freedom isn't free" but some of the people who love to use that slogan complain that freedom -- if it entails police paperwork and due process, or if it entails worrying about concepts like "probable cause" -- is too expensive, and not worth paying for.

Richard Cohen says so, in today's Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801053.html

. . . listen to Bush talk about the virtues of immigration -- another liberal sentiment -- or his frequent mention of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" to appreciate that the president is a sentimental softie, what was once dismissively called a "mushy-headed liberal." Allow me to make the case that this is also true when it comes to Iraq.

I acknowledge that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed. But if you don't think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good -- rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region. This "liberal" intent may have left Dick Cheney cold and found Don Rumsfeld indifferent, but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language . . .
- - Richard Cohen

The body language. The body language! We just didn't see it! Man o man we've been ignoring the body language that proves the mysterious bulge under Bush's jacket is really an iPod playing "Bread and Roses" and "This Land is your Land" and "We shall overcome" into the President's liberal ears.