I detest the Iraq war as much as anyone, but I think it's unrealistic to believe that one election, wherein the Democrats attained only a small majority, is going to fundamentally change the dynamics in Washington. I hear many of my fellow liberal/leftists constantly repeating the idea that "the public spoke in 2006" as if that were the only vote that actually counted. But didn't the public speak in 2002 and 2004 as well, and didn't they essentially vote for war? And isn't two-thirds of the Senate still represented by those elections?

Despite the failures of the media and the mendacity of the Bush administration, there were plenty of reasons for skepticism on Iraq back then for people willing to think. People voted for war out of fear, ignorance and xenophobia.

Individual elections can be the beginning of a trend (1932) or they can be an aberration (1976); it's difficult to argue that a single off-year election is anything but a point-in-time reflection of the public's mood.

Will the public still be soured on Iraq next year? I'm betting yes, but only time will tell. Even without the entrenched special interests that Glenn describes so thoughtfully, the U.S. government contains a number of constraints against reacting too strongly or too immediately to popular will.

I would argue that it's simply impermissible in much of American society to bring up the following:

- Our role in deposing the Iranian reformer Mossadegh and installing the Shah, thereby brilliantly solving our problems with that country;

- Our role in subverting a democratically-elected government in Chile in 1973, and then being complicit in the assassination of its president;

- Our role in making Saddam what he was by giving our approval and assistance in his war with Iran in the 1980s.

This is just a short list, of course, but any one of these is almost guaranteed to be a conversation stopper at any gathering that does consist exclusively of liberals. That, or right-wingers will start spouting insults, lies and misinformation - anything to preserve their fantasy of America's unblemished history.

The mass of Americans simply cannot or will not believe that their country has been involved in grave, and even counter-productive, misconduct over the years. Therefore, anything we do must necessarily be right. This is a deep-seated problem in our culture (probably most cultures), and frankly, I don't really know how to begin to change it.

Fascinating how a privileged white woman from Connecticut became so tough. It must have been the suffering she endured as a youth (you know - the occasional slow service at the country club, shopping trips to Manhattan only once a month or so) that made her such a badass. I bet even now she has to countenance the indignity of bad cell phone signal at times.

Glenn, I've been admiring your gutsy, articulate posts for some time now, and can only say they're fantastic and far more intelligent than practically anything else I read about our grave national predicament.

My question for you and other readers regarding nuclear hysteria is: whatever happened to the old Cold War doctrine of mutually-assured destruction (MAD)? I haven't heard what I would consider a sufficient explanation for why this doctrine - stating that any nuclear attack would be futile because the aggressor would itself be destroyed by a counterattack - is completely useless in this day and age.

Yes, I understand the argument that non-state actors, like Al-Qaida, can use dirty bombs and any number of other devices designed to induce terror on a population.

But Iran - and Iraq before it - are by definition not non-state actors. I never understood why people would believe that Saddam Hussein or the Iranian regime would want to commit suicide by participating or assisting in (even indirectly) some sort of nuclear attack on the U.S. Is there any doubt that the American public wouldn't demand in-kind retaliation for a nuclear attack?

MAD, of course, did work better conceptually in the old bi-polar world, but - to your broader point about journalistic sloppiness, ignorance, corruption, etc. - I never heard or read a single analysis along these lines before the Iraq war. We were only told that we must go to war in Iraq because they might have nuclear weapons, as if no further explanation were required in light of the fact that we lived under the threat of Soviet attack for decades (and still do, of course). So far I haven't encountered any of this analysis regarding what appears to be a run-up to war with Iran.

MAD obviously carries risk and is no guarantee against nuclear war. (I would argue such a thing does not exist short of universal disarmament.) But I would be interested in reading an analysis of how or why U.S. military policy evolved in the post-Soviet era to dismiss MAD in favor of... what exactly? Trying to conquer, micromanage and police the entire world unilaterally? How does that actually make sense to anyone?

I'm afraid the only conclusion I can reach on my own is that the administration doesn't want to risk making a big part of the world's oil supply radioactive. This is a defensible goal, but of course we're not supposed to believe that the wars are about oil either.

Not Too bad Stanley Kubrick isn't alive to document our current insanity, which seems so much more irrational than the goings-on in "Dr. Strangelove".