For some time now, I've take to calling the Beltway/political elite as "Versailles." This points up their insularity, isolation, cluelessness and shared delusion that they speak for and deeply understand a nation which is actually entirely strange to them, and close to wanting them all dead.

An exaggeration? Surely. But not by all that much. It also suggests that we can learn important lessons about those who currently rule over us by looking back at the court politics of Versailles. Instructively, those politics did not end with the fall of the court. They are with us to this very day.

One of their most enduring and pernicious legacies was the dogged refusal to let go of their delusional belief that they and they alone represented the "true France." By necessity, this belief meant that the Revolution did not express the true will of the French people, and was not the result of decades of misrule and neglect, but was instead the product of a malicious, hidden, secretive, secular "liberal elite"--the Bavarian Illuminati (who had actually been disbanded over a decade before the Revolution, and were located [as their name indicated] in far-off Bavaria).

When the Federalists were driven from power in 1800, in a backlash against their authoritarian ways (the Alien and Sedition Acts, etc.), they glommed on to the myth of the Bavarian Illuminati to explain their woes. (Again, the utter lack of Illuminati, Bavarian or otherwise, was not a problem for them. Even then, the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.) Over time, a series of other secret society myths modelled on the myth of the Illumaniti has joined together with age-old anti-Semitism to form a crucial part of populist rightwing ideology--a vital link between conservative elites and the masses who love them.

With this pattern in mind, it seems virtually certain that the current Versailles crowd will continue circulating its litany of lies long after our troops have withdrawn from Iraq. Truth will never penetrate their temple of faith--in themselves. Indeed, we should expect those lies to be handed down from generation to generation, as further proof of how evil, insidious and traitorous liberals really are. That will be the sole historical lesson that Versailles draws from their ignominous end.

But, then, they already knew that. Didn't they?

When you tend to "over-estimate" (exaggerate) threats (internal or external) for political reasons rather than assessing them realistically, maybe everything tends to look bigger than it really is through that lens...

-- L.W.M.

The Democrats appear headed for a major political dilema once the withdrawal from Iraq begins - namely - what next?

I think it can be safely assumed that an Iraq withdrawal will occur within the next 2+ years; if not during the current administration, shortly into the following one. Yet it will clearly be evident that the withdrawal will not have resolved the United States' security and foreign relations challenges in the middle east, or those worldwide which are influenced by middle eastern events. Republicans will obviously try to capitalize on this by arguing that the Democrats lost Iraq. Conclusive rebuttal is impossible, because one can never prove the surety of a historical alternate. Democrats have to be prepared for the return of the pendulum that argues that withdrawal was wrong when it does not solve the larger challenges. In other words, Democrats will be subject to the old Republican argument that Democrats have no stomach for using the military when needed.

This is a problem primarily for the Democratic presidential candidates - yet presents an opportunity for each. The candidate who finds the best foreign policy paradigm understandable to a majority of presidential voters will have a tremendous advantage going into the 2008 elections.

The candidate must place Iraq in a larger foreign policy "frame". There needs to be more education by candidates of the specific American foreign policy interests and objectives, and how continued war in Iraq harms those interests, and how withdrawal can advance them. This is the "vision thing" that I think that Americans are longing for, and the Democrat best able to argue that convincingly will have a mighty advantage as 2008 approaches.

I don't dismiss everthing you say as moronic but I do have one bit of advice. Everything you believe about Valerie Plame and Global Warming is factually incorrect. Every time you bring either subject up you automatically become the idiot the others here accuse you of being.

President Bush has occasionally and reluctantly acknowledged the fact of public opposition to the war. When he has, the acknowledgment has been dishonestly stated as disappointment in the pace of progress rather than a broader rejection of his decision to initiate the invasion. At the same time, the major media has been more willing to describe the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "unpopular" but have failed to describe the current situation in the most obvious but potentially painful way given their complicity in shaping early support for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The simple truth is that, leaving aside the representative function of Congress, the President and the consistent majority of Americans are now in opposition to each other over our presence in Iraq. He has named himself "the decider" and has also consistently described himself as having "the job" of "protecting the American people." What he is unwilling to state plainly is that he has decided that the majority of Americans don't know how to protect themselves and that he must therefore paternalistically substitute his judgment for ours for our own good.

If it is stipulated that a primary function of the presidency of the United States is to protect the American people, then it is true that at any given time a president's judgment may correctly override the public judgment. A president has access to secret information and analysis that is not available to those who answer opinion polls or cast ballots in Congressional elections. In fact, President Bush has alluded to future historians who will describe his decisions as being correct, presumably when the knowledge he has access to is no longer secret. However, at some point, this substitution of presidential will for the public will must be honestly and openly stated or the decision to not do so must be acknowledged as being a limited form of dictatorship.

The office of President of the United States is not one of representation. Knowing this, and knowing the potential threat of an unchecked executive to fight wars abroad, the Constitution vested the decision to initiate and fund wars within the Congress as the representative body. Congress' war function has been allowed to erode over the last few decades as presidents have wanted to use American military power for conflicts that didn't clearly involve the United States fighting another nation-state. Experts predict this kind of conflict will be the norm for the foreseeable future and this has caused much confusion as a parade of Congresses have attempted to cope with this reality. President Bush is currently exploiting this confusion over Constitutional roles in his public relations efforts over the pending emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, during these decades of confusion, the consistent limiting factor has been time. If a less-than-war has continued past some period of time when American public opinion was willing to accept it, then Congresses have acted in their capacity as the funding mechanism to check the Presidential will. This has become the custom and practice and President Bush and his supporters have openly acknowledged it while using it as a rhetorical cudgel against the current Congress. The fighting in Iraq has gone on in time and expense such that American public opinion is now firmly against it. If the Congress follows what has become custom and practice, it will place limits on funding or cut it altogether. Despite President Bush's rhetoric, this will not be unusual. Rather, it is his insistence on funding at his discretion that constitutes an attempt to create a new norm. The honest characterization for this norm would be dictatorship.

There is substantial evidence that this is explicitly what his supporters wish to institutionalize. A fundamental premise for their movement is that the world contains "threats" that the American public will not or cannot understand and that a powerful President must therefore be free to to address those threats unchecked by anything other than the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. This means that a President will set the terms for what constitutes America, what constitutes a threat to his or her idea of America and the required, usually military, response. This specific abdication of responsibility for national security decision-making to a President has gone on ad-hoc for decades, but, in each case, has been checked by time. With the usefully vague and essentially unending threat of global terrorism, American authoritarians have seized upon a device to expand upon and institutionalize an extra-Constitutional role which has been rarely addressed in the herky-jerky reporting of our involvement in Iraq.

An important "umpire" function resisted so far by the press is to paint the current conflict over Iraq funding in a true light. Rather than being a political baseball game with a see-sawing score between the White House and Capitol Hill, President Bush and his supporters want to fundamentally and permanently alter the office of President of the United States. In the New Presidency, part of the job description will be to make unilateral judgments about national security, dispatch American forces essentially at will and demand and receive funds for those committments. It is at least theoretically possible that this is what Americans could be persuaded is the best course of action for the country, however, taking such a course without a full and open debate would mean that the Constitution is no longer what defines the American experiment.