About halfway through his Monday afternoon radio broadcast Rush Limbaugh turned to a short essay written by blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds two days before. Calling his work "A GOP Pre-Mortem," Reynolds gave his etiology of what would happen when, as he believed likely, "the GOP fares badly next month." Testily, Limbaugh depreciated the argument as soon as he introduced it, rejecting Reynolds' thesis — "Republicans deserve to lose"— as "a fool reason," and then asking, rhetorically, if the congressional alternative was just as deserved. He enumerated some of what Democrats had themselves promised to bring, as a majority, to the 110th Congress: arbitrary military withdrawal from Iraq, higher taxes, dudgeon and public inquiries and indictments over the White House's war conduct. The list was accurate, surely compelling in an exchange other than this one, where it was something of a red herring.

Would that Limbaugh have directly addressed Reynolds' own numbered sequence, "unforced errors" of the Republican Party, six of them in all. Step back. Reynolds' critique is strongest as a personal statement; not as a recounting of congressional events over the last twenty months, or an appraisal of Republican fidelity to rightist convictions. Applied broadly as Reynolds intends it to be, the argument, under omissions and inconsistencies, falters.

What is not immediately, or ever, apparent in the "pre-mortem" is which part or parts of the electorate — on whose support majorities have depended for the last two elections — will abandon Republicans this time, or why. That adjoining constituencies must accept some interests to be advanced in mutual exclusion of others ought not need mention, yet Reynolds concludes that "Republicans have managed to leave every segment of the base unhappy." Not quite so, or else candidates would be polling around zero.

Of the six transgressions: one is posited to have angered libertarians; another, judicial ideologues; two more, national security voters; and the last pair, the scrupulous. Over what? "Things that weren't even all that important." Leave aside the matter of withholding support where exculpation would be more appropriate, and consider the elections themselves. These are midterms, the House and a third of the Senate in contention. But in only three of the "unforced errors" did Congress affront public opinion. Where the White House was responsible for unpopular and inadvisable policy, why turn on the legislature? And if Republicans on Capitol Hill defied the Bush administration to assume politically favorable positions, as they did in force during the events on the other half of Reynolds' list, how and whom did they betray?

Limbaugh might have expounded on the left's escape from Reynolds' scrutiny. Reynolds qualified his essay only with the empty remark "Democrats don't really deserve to win, either." So — what, a two-year recess? The phrase "unforced error" has a very specific connotation, and Republicans made the decisions they did in response to certain counteractions — political circumstances, the Democratic Party and George Bush.

For the 2005 court-ordered privation of Terry Schiavo, the first "error," Reynolds does note Ralph Nader, one of the strange bedfellows made during the final legal dispute. Ten more bedfellows constituted one-fifth of the Democrats voting with Republicans for federal review of Schiavo's case, and nearly one quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the religious are an electoral pillar of the right's, the monophonic American black vote is such of the left's — and there, as part of the bifurcated Democratic vote on the House floor, proportionally three times that of all Republicans voting against, was a wing of the Caucus.

Reynolds refers to the Supreme Court nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers as an eponymous "debacle," which is curious, since the compromise nomination a) produced very little negative mainstream press; b) polled with only slightly less popularity than the previous nominee, John Roberts; was c) retracted amid ululations from some rightists; and finally d) followed by the successful appointment of Samuel Alito. "The damage was done," writes Reynolds. OK, but why would restitution consist of replacing Republican senators, who didn't like Miers, with a selection to ensure another benign jurist like the counsel?

The White House was also at odds with Capitol Hill on a rescinded Emirati bid for a British port company operating in the United States, and various sutural measures for the border shared with Mexico. Congress, President Bush protested, "ought to listen to what I have to say to this." Congress answered him by anathematizing Dubai Ports World in committee. Not one week ago, there were rumors that the president would lose a border-fence bill, passed by an adjourned congress, in his pocket. Reynolds argues that all of this diminished the president's standing in national security. Maybe — but opposite Bush each time was an unsympathetic Republican congress. And the president isn't on the ballot.

Back in May, House Speaker Dennis Hastert rebuked the Justice Department for having collected evidence for graft charges against Democrat William Jefferson through a raid on the Rayburn House Office Building. He was one of a few representatives to call the action unconstitutional and demand the forfeiture of materials seized — a recondite position that made for bad politics. Hastert was not one of several congressmen who insinuated that Jefferson's troubles were the work of precipitate bigots. The speaker was, however, joined in his demurral by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Who threatened to bring down the San Francisco Democrat's party this November? Exactly one person to date, an anonymous staffer from the Congressional Black Caucus who was quoted by The Hill.

Reynolds' justification for the last "error" is inchoate — whatever the details, he writes, exiled lecher Mark Foley was "probably enough" to make the majority party irredeemable. So the impression of Republican obscurantism shall lead the right to elect a legislature that will, where Republicans simply failed, promulgate disappointments as a matter of ideological course, perhaps save for a sex outrage — unless, say, an elder stateswoman has been chasing after somebody's granddaughter? Reynolds is supported by polls, certainly. But the worst criticisms of Republicans come from judging the party in isolation. To the sense of rightist voters waiting until a general election to express displeasure — there are reasons, other than Republican vapidity, why statist ennui overshadows the Gingrich spirit. Two hundred twenty-something, if the right's avengers have their way.

On Monday, a Central Intelligence Agency report, insofar selectively and illegally divulged to the New York Times, stated that the deposition of Saddam Hussein and multinational occupation of Iraq engendered Near East terrorism. On Tuesday, when President Bush ordered partial content of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate revealed for people's consumption, the report stated that, indeed, a foreign presence in Iraq fulfilled a certain propagandistic prophecy — but Iraq's salience was also the threat to Islamic fascism posed by counterterrorist and democratist successes.

On Wednesday, the United States Military Academy published an al Qaeda epistle from December of last year, its topic familiar: Islamist impuissance and failure. The same day, the Program on International Policy Attitudes released a poll of Iraqi attitudes that, rough as the survey was, showed no ambivalence towards the prospect of American forces leaving so Iraqis could turn their attention to hated al Qaeda operatives as soon as possible. Brought to mind was a year-old Pew study in which respondents in six Muslim countries spurned the same Islamist call to jihad we were told on Monday they wanted to answer.

Now, polls are inductive and their implications can only be made by projecting the tiny part onto the very large whole. Still, there are constants in Near Eastern opinion, such as the broad dislike of Jews expressed in every country Pew visited. Yet as the Middle East Media Research Institute proves, sympathy for messianic fascism is as prevalent in discourse conducted and constrained by most states in that region as traducement for male-pattern baldness on Madison Avenue — and the poll numbers evince public contravention.

Nobody has taken a census of active or prospective terrorists, so we don't know precisely who they are. The nineteen 2001 al Qaeda hijackers made clear that affluence was no inoculation. Abnormalities can be extrapolated from the defining accomplishments of someone like Mohammed Atta. Guantanamo Bay detainees remain a danger to their wardens. Beyond that, what is drawn from interviews with terrorists but literal transmissions of what a terrorist believes, with just a hint as to the subject's criminality? This has been asked before but must be again: what drives a man to invest his time or even his life in the preferential, not incidental or accidental, murder of innocents? Better, what other than psychopathy?

This distinction matters quite a bit when the debate is over a quantifiable number of people committing terrorism who would not have otherwise, as based on an impression of cultural indignation — one that is often instigated by Near Eastern tyrants, encouraged by conformist cultures and framed in telephoto lenses of Reuters and the Associated Press. The Monday version of the National Intelligence Estimate reinforced the position held by opponents of intervention, mostly on the left but on the isolationist right, too: that the intrusive removal of a dictator so offended people that they decided to respond with wanton killing, mainly under the direction of al Qaeda or Ba'athists.

Now, the military layman knows that strategies may initially exacerbate adverse conditions, such as mobilization of the enemy before its eventual defeat. National Review's Jonah Goldberg accepted, for the sake of argument, the proposition that Operation Iraqi Freedom "stirred up a hornet's nest." Yes but, opined Goldberg, "If my backyard is festooned with hornet nests, I will likely be safer from a sting on any given day if I do nothing than I will be on the day or days I begin destroying them." A reader responded within the day: "The only problem with your analogy is that you don't create more hornets when you destroy the hornets' nest," and the speculation ended there.

In non-state authoritarianism is something both primal and unprecedented. The men who are al Qaeda — those who are willing, not imbeciles or captives strapped to bombs — are not conscripts. Recruits of a democracy's army learn to observe the laws of war, engage military targets with precision and, increasingly, moonlight as civil infrastructure administrators. Terrorists flaunt military conduct, make sport of civilian butchery and raise standards of living of others only to extract dependency. With, say, the Wehrmacht, an American in theater could always find some distant comfort in knowing that the soldiers oppugning him might not have if it weren't for their "Fuhrer" — Stephen Ambrose once wrote that GIs found the strongest propinquity, next to the Dutch, with the Germans. For a country, one could be caught up by nationalism — in the terror cell, the shared trait is slavering aggression.

For al Qaeda and its affiliates, there is the assumption that the enemy is not comprised of the insane. On how sound a basis? If the foregoing analogy is apt: What is to say the hornets weren't hornets that were simply quiescent, not a terrorist reserve so much as a vein of disturbed or malign men who disgust most of their countrymen as much as they do us. Iraq is the war's affirmed central battlefield and it may divert men from their courses in life to terrorism. Unconfirmed is whether the men get mad or were mad to begin with, and which use of antonomasia applies. Would the terrorist have been a Perry Como, or a Jack the Ripper?

Any Republican running for Governor of Ohio this year would expect to labor under the burden of legislative disappointment and gubernatorial disgrace but Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell should have been, as one who is heterodox, spared some aggregate blame. He hasn't been, it seems, and against Democratic opponent Ted Strickland polls at a deficit of anywhere between twelve and twenty points. If prevailing analyses are correct, affiliation is enough to include Blackwell in the circuit channeling public discontent.

Ohio is known nationally for four attributes, two historical and two contemporary. It is the American political median and presidential bellwether, its economy has gone torpid and its capital executive would if it were possible be evicted from his Columbus mansion.

Governor Bob Taft, who over the last four years walked stepwise into ignominy, figures as the most popular reason for Ohioans to disencumber themselves of the Republican Party in at least one elected office. He wasn't always. The man views private assets in terms of confiscation but inasmuch as he does, he settles comfortably with Ohio Republicans and would appeal to the typical Democrat. He is prosaic, but Taft resides in the state that exalted George Voinovich. What spent the public's good will was Taft's being disingenuous (his 2002 opponent was accused of wishing to impose the kinds of taxes Taft himself levied once re-elected), then venal (gifts and favors were illegally traded) and then obtuse (the impeachable Taft abides an approval rating below 20 percent).

Of course, inordinate taxation works just the same no matter who is responsible — Ohio nearly leads the Union as the state to where one relocates not to succeed in business but fill state coffers. One study placed it at unflattering ends of rankings, third-highest in taxes and third-slowest in growth. On this matter particularly Blackwell has distinguished — estranged — himself from Taft and much of the rest of the party. In 2003 Blackwell steered a statewide petition to repeal a tax increase approved by a bicameral Republican majority and signed by Taft. The petition collapsed and the secretary was publicly chastised by the state party chairman and a majority leader, but Blackwell was quoted as saying something not likely uttered in Senate or House chambers: "Spending drives our tax policy and our tax policy feeds our spending sprees," he said, reminding taxpayers that services and entitlements are always leveraged against an individual's earnings and prospects.

Blackwell's platform for governor, at the cost of broad appeal, has the same arresting pellucidity. What has he in store for state finances? Holding state spending at an incline parallel to growth of the tax base, requiring a two-thirds legislative majority for the passage of new taxes, telescoping marginal rates. "Government does not create wealth" is the introductory statement, one that most American politicians slip up and blurt out before they wake up from their nightmare. Abortion? Two victims per instance, Blackwell says, the mother and her child. Marriage? If it isn't a man and a woman, it — isn't. Second Amendment? The secretary is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association, thank you. Blackwell's website reads like the written statement of a scrupulous debater, not a candidate for public office.

Compare this to Ted Strickland, looking to Columbus from his place on Capitol Hill, who appears to consider himself incidental to the race — as if a buckling Taft will catch Blackwell at the shins so Strickland can step over the heap of the two of them and into office. Last month two Ohio newspapers reported Strickland to be vague — each paper's word — on policy. The leftward Columbus Dispatch politely noted that for school funding — a regime serially ruled unconstitutional by the state's supreme court — Strickland promised to present an alternative to Blackwell's "65-Cent Solution" at some point after November 7th.

Strickland's policy abstracts reflect this. The candidate is interested in "Promoting Economic Inclusion," "Establishing New Micro-Incubators" and "Creating an Ohio Development and Redevelopment Plan." While Ohio's business environment is barren enough for one to think of hydroponics, the phrases imply the market as seen from a bureaucracy, not as it actually is. If profit needs risk, what happens when a state agency sees to it that risk is removed? Columbus favors these kinds of programs already, but if this set doesn't already exist, how will it be funded? And if Columbus has done nothing for the entrepreneur under Taft, why will a "statewide process" work any differently under Strickland? Indirectly related: was jazz a spontaneous blessing from an American subculture or was it the multi-annual yield of something like Strickland's "community arts projects that will achieve the most productive results for the public," whatever the hell that means? Though obscurantist, Strickland as governor is certainly deducible, all the emphasis on words like "give," "build" and "provide" what Republican Statehouse hopeful Ed Herman drily paraphrased as "For Ohio to grow we must push more state dollars towards state-controlled economic development authorities."

It is justified that Ohioans would want an upright governor, and, too, one that will effect — force, if the legislature isn't amenable — a change in state policies. Both candidates meet the first standard. The second? Ted Strickland was perhaps too accurate in his observation that "sixteen years of Republican rule have driven Ohio to the bottom among key indicators of economic health," as his administration would be, so tendered, just as managerial and ponderous as Bob Taft's. This year, for governor, "change" will come from the Republicans.

The evening of the second Monday in June I accompanied my parents to the local veterinarian's office. In my mother's arms was Rascal, one of a pair of cats my family adopted in 1990, who had over the last twenty-four hours exhibited every moribund quality of an animal fit for barbiturate mercy. What the vet had diagnosed as a minor stroke the week before deprived the russet tabby of mobility and lucidity. Rascal was drawn, unsteady and capable of little more than sleep, and the vet's standing rule for "a pet no longer acting like a pet" applied.

I took — have taken — the death rationally. Rascal enjoyed both longevity and affection, her declension so gradual it was graceful. But there are moments, crystalline in memory, that evoke on account of man's dignity toward those creatures over which he has dominion: my mother letting Rascal crawl on the front porch to where the cat had many times in her youth scrambled, disobediently, out the door; Rascal craning her neck to peek out the car window; in the lobby of the animal hospital, one last look from the old cat, cognizant or otherwise; and the doctor's aide, with a laconic condolence, carrying Rascal down a short hall to a scrubbed, off-white room from which the dying animal would be released.

My mother and father and I drove to a restaurant where we toasted the memory of our beloved family pet and spoke of questions of ownership made relevant with Rascal's passing. How would Rascal's surviving littermate Buddy, punctilious and fussy in his own right, fare without his companion? How soon to adopt? The questions were for my parents, since I had long since moved out and had not considered owning cats for myself. Even so I advocated the continued presence of the animals at the house in which I grew up — my father was willing to adopt more within reason, while my mother took on a number of reservations. None of her extenuations seemed justified enough to deprive either my mother or a cat of warm companionship so I counseled and cajoled freely. I assumed the discussion would remain academic for some time; at least until we learned of a respectably owned dame bearing a litter.

Before the end of the month my mother was informed by a friend that the friend's acquaintance had brought home, for caretaking, a pair of litters from the shelter at which she worked. Would my mother like to go see them? She accepted the invitation and returned with a story of ninety minutes spent with a dozen tumbling, mewling kittens. One litter was a week older than the other, unanimously white with broken tabby stripes. The second litter was a mix: the mother was thin from indigence but lithe and sleek by design, of Oriental lineage. Three of her brood reflected this, two pitch males and a tortoiseshell female. The fourth and fifth kittens, a boy and a girl, were sired from a father of very different blood, notably larger than their siblings, striped silver and brown, and hirsute. My mother remarked on one of these last two, dubbed "Harry" by the shelter caretaker — he was the largest, and gregarious and unwieldy, scampering for my mother and tripping over his own feet.

My father and I were invited to accompany my mother on a second viewing and it was shortly after the three of us were led into the worker's basement nursery that I reversed my position on ownership. The first litter was evanescent, hardly to be seen. Led by the clumsy greyish champion, however, the second litter met our group and played. Before the visit was half over I had silently chosen the big tabby and the tortoiseshell. The black pair attracted my parents. These selections were made known to the worker within a week, and after another visit — between the caretaker's subtle appeal for the fifth, who proceeded to steal my mother's heart during a third visit with adoring gazes that were almost sentient — all five kittens of the second litter were reserved, three for my parents and two for myself. On the first Friday in August, the kittens were taken to their respective adoptive homes.

Shelters christen animals for clerical purposes, so it was with no compunction that — once in my custody — the girl, as homage to the Japanese keiretsu, became "Mitsubishi" and the boy, in a tribute to American colloquialisms, became "Mac." The latter is irreducible, the former abbreviated in practice to "Mitsi." After puzzling over Mac's size and length of hair I determined with some confidence that he and his sister counterpart are part Maine Coon — the Maine Coon being an American breed whose more memorable specimens possess the size, appearance and genial temperament of small collies. Mac is enormous for a kitten, stocky and sturdy. Head-on, he looks like a fuzzy rectangle. Mitsubishi is svelte, her thin frame clothed in silky, short fur. Two months ago she showed the signs of a tortoiseshell pattern; since then the coat has progressed from black with faint, butterscotch smudges to a black that dissolves, hindward, into a neutral opalescence, save for two patches of stark white — one on her jaw and the other running down her belly.

Mac and Mitsubishi are intelligent and sociable. Both come when called, following fast success with associating a verbal command with a treat; though it appears as if both believe their name to be "Mac." The two are fascinated, for some reason, with my excavation of their litter; upon hearing the shuffle of clay they regularly approach and insist upon helping. Opening the refridgerator similarly draws them into the kitchen and, were they to have their own way, into the vegetable crisper. When I am seated and working, the kittens find a nearby perch and look on.

The kittens acclimated themselves to my apartment quickly — three weeks from the day I opened an animal carrier on the floor of my bedroom to let the pair out, Mac and Mitsubishi are calm and content, and very much at home. Even so, the day they arrived, the two kittens were judicious when they weren't overwhelmed in consternation, squealing out the moment neither one could see where I had gone. Their world consisted of a triangle: litter in a half-bathroom on one arc and food and water in the kitchen on the other, the space under my bed equidistant. Sovereignty was established over the next several days in what was a sort of feline colonialism, generally consisting of two steps: one, discovery of an object; two, all the scandent possibilities. First the kittens found the balcony's sliding doors, then the curtains. They found the top of my bed, then my endtable and everything on it. The kittens encountered my pair of powder-blue wingback chairs and then the wings themselves.

Although sixteen years is time enough for entropy, I do not particularly remember Rascal or Buddy nearly as athletic or excitable and Mac and Mitsubishi. The kittens tussle and chase each other incessantly; it was with some encouragement and discouragement that I taught them not to mistake my hands as valid targets, and it will require more work to secure the same exemption for my pantlegs and shoestrings. Both kittens are eager to pretend to hunt, and so Mac and Mitsubishi are each the other's favorite plaything. I have hesitated to invest too much in cat toys; kittens and cats are pragmatists in leisure. Intention means nothing next to design, and anything with reasonable ballistic properties that can be dislodged will be dislodged — I consider myself lucky to have eschewed tchotchkes. In just one storebought item have they have not lost interest: fluorescent, crown-shaped pieces of plastic. Sold as "Cat Crazies," these are reverse Klein bottles in the sense that they cannot not exist in the cat universe.

Tireless activity has its foibles, as humans do in fact tire. Buddy and Rascal were kept in the basement of the family house, at all times and then at night, for nearly a year; and age had likely becalmed them by the time they were given unrestricted range of the house. "Lights out," to my dismay, has been interpreted by Mac and Mitsubishi as license to do whatever they want with the benefit of not being seen. My bed was designated for midnight battles and, worse, after keeping me past reasonable hours the kittens would make one clatter or another between half-past five and six o'clock in the morning. Simply closing the door carried with it risks, principally because the litter box was most effectively located in the bath off the master bedroom and a disruption of continuity, even with a second box outside, could bring confusion and attendant coprological mishaps. Even when I was ready to shut the door, I was defied on the first try. Within thirty seconds, two pairs of paws curled between the bottom rail and sill, pushing and tugging and undermining the door like sappers would a wall; then one cat apparently used the other as a battering ram and Bang! the door swung open. I tried again; the kittens obliged and I have since slept soundly.

Tomorrow I will bring Mac and Mitsubishi to the veterinarian for standard tests and other confirmations of well-being. That cost will be added to that of apartment security deposits, adoption fees, food, litter, amenities, time and sleep. What is returned? Unconditional affection; more memories, vitrescent and edifying, not so bittersweet as June's.

If the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol had not been agitating for the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since the summer of 2001, there could be something to a Bush cabinet office reserved for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman — yesterday challenged and bereft of Democratic endorsement for his incumbency. Presently Joe's choices are a retreat from politics and an independent candidacy: Joe as apostate, Joe as mugwump.

Should Joe run, the state electorate will have three choices: Joe Lieberman, primary victor Ned Lamont and a Republican whose name — perhaps like all Republican senatorial contestants from Connecticut since Lowell Weicker and James Buckley — dwells in obscurity. Assuming that this last one, a dark horse, is so dark that nobody can find him through November 7th, contention will really be between Joe and Ned.

Why no Joe? He is steadfast — those Democrats against him would say pertinacious — in his arguments for militarily engaging the non-state predation of terrorism, especially by weakening or deposing dictatorships directly or indirectly abetting authoritarian culture, and in their place introducing liberal reforms. The senator was memorably booed by the audience of a 2004 presidential primary debate when he did not apologize for holding a position on the Iraqi campaign largely indistinguishable from George W. Bush's.

Ned Lamont, accepted regionally as a party preference and depicted nationally as a party correction, congratulated himself last night on a very clear distinction between him and both Lieberman and Bush. As solidly as the latter pair, Lamont spoke of foreign policy — well, just Iraq, twice — with axiomatic conviction. Granting Lamont some latitude, one can string the Senate hopeful's statements together and conclude that he believes: a) helping Iraqis create a liberally democratic nation out of their country is not worth American lives and resources; b) American soldiers are hapless supernumeraries in, Lamont's words, a "civil war"; and c) what amounts to a full retreat deserves, again, Lamont's words, "the hero's welcome."

United States senators answer to a constituency and also represent the interests of the country. Still, it is a little remarkable to have Lamont, in his victory speech, repeat the sentiments coming from his narrowly focused backers — Connecticut had the most to do with his elevation as an intercessor, America to the White House. Military retraction and bureaucratic expansion, Lamont said, was "the America Connecticut voted for."

Of course, Senator Lieberman swears up and down that he taxes and spends, and decries muscular capitalism, just as much as Lamont could ever manage if he got to Washington. Check Joe's record: he's not lying. So Connecticut's substitution is over the fine point of war and reconstruction. The state's Democrats have what they want right now, and in November might have what they will want then. Is the vaguely isolationist message of Lamont what the country wants?

Polls and anecdotes show that otherwise dispirited majorities can be found to agree that Iraqis can do better than Saddam Hussein, that Hussein colluded with al Qaeda and that there is a reward in posterity for present company having at least tried to democratize Iraq. Salient here is that roughly half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Leftist media and intellectuals subtly title this one a mark of American credulity. But the broad left has been very subjective on the matter since 2003, forgetting what was written about what was experienced from 1979 onward; and ignoring a lot more. What to make of Saddam Hussein's obsession with armament that, according to the yet-definitive 2004 WMD compendium from Charles Duelfer, could only have ended inexplicably; complicated by Duelfer's conclusion that Hussein would have resumed development once free from sanctions; and, from a fraction of classified Defense Department reports, the collection of five hundred chemical rounds, confuting all the headlines declaring "no stockpiles."

Ideologues suffer from projection. Missed by Lamont and his supporters is that Americans view operations in Iraq with pessimism but the dismay, though the consistency of certain survey responses, is motivated not by a fundamental difference with intervention or antipathy for George Bush but an impatience with protracted warfare. Democrats, at least those in Georgia who voted yesterday, are not so inclined to anti-pro-Bush-whatever that they will support anything conducive to it, like Cynthia McKinney and her perfervid anti-Semitism, at least one of which voters rejected for a place in Congress. A third-party candidacy by Lieberman might open an interstice through which the GOP can get to the Senate for six years, amusing lagniappe for something so unlikely in New England. Party integrity is instead in question, as it has been for years. Splits in general elections do not make for a strong party, and Bush-protest tickets have so far proven weak. If the Democratic Party faces hostile takeover, the left should know that the state of Connecticut is only one of fifty.

Skepticism is what the rational man can't go without. It is his vade mecum, and when three locations which he has been told are moving towards democracy — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — can be determined in respective cases hindered, waylaid and usurped by sedition and terrorism, he responds by taking the nearest democratist by the ear to explain just what in hell is happening.

Each of the three situations deserves attention to its circumstances, as well as misperceptions driving criticism. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in his speech to Congress, offers reminders of the imparted stewardship of his country, the obdurate and numerically select natures of Baghdad's enemy, and — by way of his condemnation of Israel's defense against terrorists of Hezbollah — the autonomy already present in Iraqi polity. Lebanon, the site of open and oblique hostilities between Israel, Syria and Iran, exposes the insolubility of Hezbollah's base violence in the liberalism to which a plurality of Lebanese currently aspire.

It is the Palestinian territories' election early in the year, however, that has been adopted as a precedent and portent by skeptics of democratism and its White House exponents. Skeptics argue that the ascension of terrorists shows the folly of democratization. This is wrongheaded, as it confuses transnationalism and its contrived balloting for democratism and its vision of elemental change in societies. Conservatives on the right are especially liable to this indiscrimination.

In February terrorist group Hamas, after years of aggrandizing inside the territories, rose to power through a process President Bush proudly called "democracy." William F. Buckley, Jr. swiftly wrote two thoughtful disapprobations of what he contended bore Hamas triumphal. In the first article he repudiated the inherent values, as purported, of government by consent; in the second he advised geopolitical progressives to know when to except or abstain. Whither democracy? Mr. Buckley equably approaches the question from the perception, indeed the suspicion, that a democratist pursues liberal reformation in statecraft with concupiscence. It was for Happy Days Were Here Again, a 1993 collection of Mr. Buckley's published work, that three articles were bundled in the subchapter "Three Critical Views on Democratic Fetishism."

One point of Mr. Buckley's is inarguable: what goes on in Gaza and the West Bank is not at all conducive to civil and liberal society. Palestinian rule is not and has never been a democracy. It is an abominable simulacrum, a diplomatic construct whose leaders have, since the Oslo Accords, received international monies and absolution in gross inordinacy to their plain nature and conduct. Mr. Buckley shouldn't trace this back to plans of those who advocate liberalization. Whatever the president thought he could call the process that ended up enabling Hamas, this place is the failure not of the democratists' labors but the transnationalists'.

Moral relativity is the basis for everything a transnationalist does — all countries, governments and leaders are coequal — and so it guided Oslo in 1993. One of the world's most decorated terrorists, Yasser Arafat, was offered the resources, the cachet, of an incipient state. Justification for this went along the lines that a wolf will appreciate the difference between a lamb that is being formally introduced to it and one that is being fed to it. A democratist, if anyone had asked his opinion at the time, would have balked at this and demanded a) the marginalization of anyone like Arafat from politics, and b) the martial nullification of those who intend to overbear free expression in both print and poll. This would have made impossible Arafat's handshake with the late Yitzhak Rabin and necessitated concentration, not withdrawal, of Israeli troops — one reason why, on the face of things, democratists are accused of being unrealistic.

So the Palestinian Authority was created. And? A gangland society prevails. The signal difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is that Hamas doesn't bother with a lot of pretense. Children are brought up on poisonous fiction and aspire to Lead Thug, Supporting Thug, Suicide Bomber; and always Jew-Killer. The transnationalists here have had ten more years than the democratists in Iraq, and yet Mesopotamia, with all its troubles, is set to overtake the territories in civil and political liberties.

Here is where conservatives like Mr. Buckley and transnationalists together part ways with democratists. They will consider, conservatives bitterly and transnationalists blithely, an election of thugs unfortunate but incontestable popular affirmation. This is faulty etiology. Given a choice, people do not knowingly subordinate themselves — never has a nation canted into tyranny without directive repression and violence. For those who would reference Adolf Hitler: at their height of electoral manipulation, the Nazis could only entrap 44 percent of the German ballot. Nor are authoritarian parties exercising sovereignty; rather, they are liable to moral estoppel in pais. Like suicide, the idea of a liberal society approving of its own termination is a freakish variable of logic. If citizens wanted to abolish their individual rights, beginning with that to vote, they wouldn't wait for a majority opinion.

The transnationalists' solution is to try again in the same environment and the conservatives' is to leave the wretched thing alone. But even though conservatives may see the intentions behind Oslo to be as notional as the democratists do, their alternative to democratization is little more than tolerance of dictatorships — which puts conservatives back with transnationalists, who believe that men who gain and keep power through force can be trusted. Saladin's politesse at the siege of Kerak in 1183, through which the wedding party of Humphrey of Tolon and Isabella of Jerusalem was left unmolested, is not found in the conduct of modern authoritarians. The challenge to conservatives is exactly how — in concrete terms, not rhetorical legerdemain — the United States is supposed to succeed in defeating, for a start, Islamist terrorism, when the Near Eastern and South Asian countries to be left politically intact incubate and breed rapacious movements as a function of their remaining dictatorial.

From the conservative argument can be drawn nostalgia for the years before the Second World War, when the Third World was as strange as it was remote, all manner of savage men razing distant wildernesses to be emperor of a hill; while the West got on with its workday. That liberty is never to return but post-apocalypse.

Amy Brady, a professional gamer better known as Valkyrie of Ubisoft Entertainment's team Frag Dolls, planned as of the first week of June to play competitively at the World Series of Video Games event in Louisville, Kentucky. As of the second week of June she planned to compete and protest: as part of WSVG festivities would be the selection of a Miss World Series of Video Games. Brady's first recorded reaction was an expletive. That was "all I have to say," she wrote, "what the heck is this crap?" Brady went further, however, castigating the event's organizers after confirming that Miss World Series of Video Games was model search, and declaiming to young women who would be present in Louisville the moral imperative to boycott. Once in Kentucky, Brady took part in a parody, Mister World Series of Video Games, and as the next WSVG event — one to be held in Dallas — approached, it was rumored that models booked for flights to Texas might have to settle for becoming Miss Something Else.

The weakness of Brady's argument was the unfathomable cause for indignation. Brady cited three offenses the WSVG organizers committed by hosting a beauty contest, on premises, the winner of which would receive a title derived from that of the gaming event itself: first, a thematic departure from gaming; second, a damaging association with women in professional and semi-professional gaming; and third, the high valuation of physical beauty. One week after Louisville, it's still unclear what got Brady so animated as to foment a boycott of the pageant. The first two purported crimes proved non-applicable, while the third remains one in which Brady and her fellows are partially complicit, if only to demonstrate that it isn’t much of a crime after all.

Brady wrote that in Louisville "all the other 'festival' activities" were "gaming related." Presumably her difference stemmed mostly from the event's elevation of "the hottest chick." The WSVG Dallas agenda heralds such "extra-gaming" activities as a tug-of-war, a paper-airplane contest, poker and something called Duct Tape Wars. Not yet forthcoming from Brady has been a warning that an unassuming public will mistakenly and indelibly believe the competitive gaming circuit to be riddled with musclemen, delinquents, gambling addicts and adhesive fetishists.

If Miss WSVG had supplanted the gaming competition one might move to call the "world series" a farce. It didn't. As Brady noted, the pageant was indeed marketed to regular women, those involved in an industry older and eminently more respected than gaming — modeling — and if headlines are any indication, Miss WSVG was crowned in Louisville without having been recognized as heir apparent of electronic entertainment. Brady appealed to WSVG organizers to arrange "a real contest for girl gamers based on all things: a complete package that includes gaming skill and knowledge." There was such a contest, titled Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter: Double Elimination.

There were no entrance restrictions for the double-elimination event but that entrants a) register a two-man team and b) come up with fifteen dollars each. Girls could enter, right off the street and, ugly or not, win the Ghost Recon tournament. Now it so happens that three of the teams were pairs of girls, two of them from Brady's Ubisoft-sponsored Frag Dolls team. The Frag Dolls, for anyone who cares to look closely, are as faithful to the concept of the pitchman as Lucille Ball when she was hawking Philip Morris between skits of home-life burlesque with Desi Arnaz: talent sells. Members are contracted by Ubisoft to be equal parts gamer, editorialist and good looker; which is to say none of them is awkward or thoughtless or unattractive.

One of them acknowledged, when asked, that cause for her hire rested partly on her prior triumph in a contest whose superlative was "sexiest," from scoring that weighed beauty over gaming ability. The contest was "superficial," she remarked, but hardly a reflection of her authenticity since her vocation and avocation alike are gaming. Would she have come as far as she did without the contest? No reason why not, though she wouldn't have gained much had she refused to enter. In addition to a Frag Dolls contract she works in the video gaming industry — despite having once sashayed up and down a catwalk to win one of those contests that are, as Brady put it, "based on looks but appear to be based on gaming."

Girls are not boys. They giggle and groom, and like to be pretty. Occasionally, they try, in public, to be prettier than the next. Brady celebrated this immutable law of biology and culture in her first paragraph. She should have stopped there.

Take a celebrated video game tournament champion with lordly self-regard and a game he can't win, and you get "World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things" by Street Fighter virtuoso David Sirlin. World of Warcraft is game developer Blizzard Entertainment's popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG, inviting players to lead their own fantasy characters through an expansive online realm on open-ended adventures with thousands of other players simultaneously — a costumed scavenger hunt of a video game whose seductive nature has been compared to that of the casino slot machine.

Sirlin had better revise his article lest too many readers decide that it should in fact be titled "World of Warcraft Not Conducive to David Sirlin's Personal Achievement, and Reasons Therefor." In quoting Justice Potter Stewart and Raph Koster to place "fun" in relative terms, Sirlin would deprive himself of his primary argument insofar as "fun," not "work," is subjective. If it is legal and ethical and not meant to be serious, whose business is anyone's frivolity? Yet that is not what Sirlin does: he tells us that "fun" cannot be had without efficiency or purpose — and not just for him, but everyone.

Sirlin identifies himself as an "introvert." Fine. But by his own description he is in fact one particular kind of introvert, a directive and exclusory introvert who is driven by efficiency, competence and achievement — and susceptible, when theorizing on sociology, to projection.

That lack of perception directs Sirlin's principal criticism of World of Warcraft: Blizzard's apparent value of participation, especially commitment of time, over that of singular accomplishments. Sirlin calls it "absurd," which he can, and claims that it "has no connection to anything [he] does in real life," which is probably true. Now, what about everybody else? What does Sirlin think of volunteer organizations, where time and energy is invested not for the sake of dividend or profile, but philanthropy? Or fraternal orders, or congregations, or parishes; wherein older members, when they pass on, are revealed to have quietly attended for fifty, sixty, seventy years? What does Sirlin make of seniority, tenure, or pension? Meritocracy is good; but it is an ideal, and it must contend with the tangible social values of loyalty and commitment.

Sirlin derogates inefficient use of time through the example of a commercial artist who boasts a fast turnaround. The artist generates "ten times more value than an artist of average skill" no matter how long the lesser artist works, he says; and that is true. But Sirlin implies that skill equals speed, prima facie — and that is baloney. Most crafts require periods of abeyance. Oil paint glazing is applied in successive coats, clay dries, plants mature, meat marinates. While the "grind" process of MMORPG leveling may be onerous Sirlin doesn't acknowledge the absence of meritocratic shortcuts in a five-lap race or a marathon. Nor does he seem to know what often constitutes a day of fishing.

World of Warcraft encourages cooperation between groups of players, institutionalizing it with associative guilds — and Sirlin condemns all this with the kind of weird absolutism of Ayn Rand and her (patently ironic) sycophants. His defense is introversion — but it is not so much that as it is pertinacious individualism. And worse still is his insistence on playing a team sport alone. "This game is marginalizing my entire personality type," he pleads. For Heaven's sake, Sirlin, don't play the game. Ah, but what about the great many "brainwashed"? Sirlin's determinism can't save them — yet if that were realistic, all gamers would always play MMORPGs. And they don't. Sirlin's Little Johnny will stay away from World of Warcraft's crowds if he doesn't care for them.

There are some curious errors in definition and contradictions in logic. Sirlin applies the words "tactics" and "strategy" to explanations interchangeably, further softening his argument. They are not synonyms. Tactics is the use of immediate surroundings through methods that suit the moment to meet short-term objectives; strategy is precise, detailed, sagacious and logically coherent planning to meet a long-term objective. Street Fighter is purely tactical; the essence of strategy is a turn-based game. World of Warcraft is probably somewhere in between, but Sirlin hardly helps us with that. Sirlin decries Blizzard's terms of service which proscribe certain activities and expressions, even though "there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech" — when in fact it is the First Amendment that constitutionally guarantees a private entity like Blizzard to regulate its commercial affairs as it wishes. And, finally, we are reminded that World of Warcraft only contravenes Raph Koster's definition of "fun," at the same time Sirlin promises to personally take action and efface alternate definitions of "fun," at the same time Sirlin evangelizes self-reliance.

There is nothing universally appealing about MMORPGs. I find them boring and consumptive. But I haven't a bone to pick, like Sirlin, who typed up a fustian screed when he should have been extruding his frustration in an off-broadway game of Street Fighter. Mr. Sirlin: smash buttons, not paradigms.

I recently made the fruitful acquaintance of the member of Ubisoft Entertainment's video gaming team Frag Dolls whose sobriquet is Jinx. For about a year, ending in December, I was active on the forums constituting the Frag Dolls' online community. Three weeks ago, a fellow in that community was one of several recipients to whom I sent the latest mix of a song by my old band, the Concord. As was reported to me, he had the song both in possession and in mind when Jinx advertised her need for a musician. He told her about my hobby and work; she asked to hear evidence of it; he gave her the mix. Jinx thought enough of it to commission me, for a plenary submission of thanks and an undisclosed material reward that will arrive by post, to compose a short, thematic musical track and a few sound effects for the podcasting — or online broadcasting — that she has taken up as part of her work with Ubisoft.

The track I composed is here. When the request was first made, I thought of contacting Jonn and Gabe, two friends of mine, members of the Concord and writers of music both (Jonn nearing a master's in composition at the New England Conservatory). They compose more freely, extemporaneously, penning original tunes with ease. My labors in music are, like those in all other creative pursuits, amenable to purpose — profiting from inspiration but born of necessity. Musicmaking has always been intimate and especial to me; I am wary of the incidental melody striking another as frivolous. After regular work with a band ended in early 2003 I limited my efforts at new material to scribbling titles, concepts and descriptions of melodies and sounds on scraps of paper. And then, two weeks ago, a fine offer to compose. Well, OK — propensity won out. I did not wish to score The Frag Dolls Theme (Opening Titles). What I completed was received well, its method of construction worth explaining in this space.

Over ten years I have accumulated hundreds and hundreds of sound samples and effects that resulted from digital editing, the balance from five or more years ago in the salad days of recording — swept up by the exhilaration of actually recording on a higher order than a boombox. In the latter Nineties I eschewed, for a time, most proper musical instruments, instead swinging a homemade mallet at whatever object up to which I could sneak a microphone; separating and splicing, culling hiss or noise or the dullest sounds, then using digital effects to make whatever was left otherworldly. A few of them I inserted apropos for this song or that. Most of them I hoarded, waiting for precisely the correct application, as if a sound would be spent upon its placement in multitrack.

Listening to the two-minute piece, one can hear a single synthesizer progression that, as a motif, predominates. It topped a list I made of sounds that should have been titled "What Have I Got?" Nearly a dozen samples in all, they were selected from the list and assembled as a collage — the resulting style atypical for me. My accustomed writing is discursively chromatic and formally compact (such as this piece). The podcast track is succinct, even, but for the odd meter, simple.

The progression is called "Curesque," redolent of something Briton rocker Robert Smith's band might have played in the late 1980s, which Gabe created during a collaborative project he and I began in 1997. He played a simple melody on a keyboard with what might have been a harmonica module. Then, innocently enough, Gabe reversed the recording — instant ethereality. Then he left it alone, intriguing as it was, in favor of more productive material. Months later I adopted the sample with the rest of Gabe's library, and promptly lavished it with effect after effect. De-tuning chorus? Why not. Tremolo phasing? Can't go without. Reverb? Yes, two helpings, if you please. The summer afternoon "Curesque" assumed the form it would hold for six years I remember well, as my repeated playing back of the sample accompanied the approach and passage of a dark, brooding electrical storm. Infatuated with the transmogrification, I clasped the flush harmonies to the end of a song whose writing credit was Gabe's, where they really didn't belong. Now "Curesque" rests comfortably at the center of its very own opus; even in music production are there such things as reflection, contrition and reconciliation. That is, unless Gabe is outraged at the recasting, in which case I shall plead: Ha ha — too late!

The drum track's fundament is one measure from a session recorded five years ago. Eric, the musician behind the kit, was playing an early variation of a Concord song; an A-Major-in-five-four denunciation of the Irish Republican Army that came about when, two years before, I served coffee to a young man who identified himself as a stateside fundraiser for Sinn Fein. A virtuosic drummer, Eric expounded on the basic rhythm in several takes; one of which provided the key measure and another supplying the drum roll used at the ends of phrases. Cadences were played for subdivisions of five quarter notes; yet while the accents are strongest in that signature a given measure is suitable for, with respective elisions, four or three or two. Here I needed one drum loop, and in toto Eric's performance yielded an entire library.

Added to that loop were several close-miked drum samples. A kick, a snare; another kick and snare, suitably altered, for the piece's middle section; and a heavily distorted fill that is both phased and panned in stereo. A third snare drum strike came from a recording session in Athens, Ohio at the end of August, 2001. A dulcet colleague of a friend of mine attending Ohio University had thrown together a band and the band needed a sample disc for entrance to local venues. Intended for jazz, the kit on site sported a husky snare. I enjoyed the session — a generous offer given my inexperience — and that drummer could wield a stick.

The next sound is, if you can believe it, the classical group Anonymous 4. Rather, it was. Such alchemy would only occur to a recordist, as aforementioned, in this case that four women's voices performing sacred medieval polyphony are splendid when played forwards — so they must be sublime when reversed. Done. But, you see, I needed a rhythm complement to an old track of Gabe playing the electric guitar. Using a tool called an "envelope follower," which molds the dynamics of a signal around those of a second signal — my choice was the drum track — I broke the quartet into staccato sixteenths, then arranged it to play in syncopation.

Nomenclature fails the sound entering with the bass. Wary of mimetics, if I am to call it anything I call it the "Violator sound," an eponym drawn from British synth-pop band Depeche Mode's 1990 album — dotted, as you would expect, with a noise similar to this one. When a sine wave makes a glissando from a frequency near the highest reaches of human hearing (20 kilohertz) to one approaching the lowest (20 hertz) in less than 200 milliseconds, it creates a sound appropriate for electronic music when played singly; ineffably conducive to the appeal of same when played in multiples, like two succeeding 32nd notes.

There was an opportunity for humor in an inhale-exhale sequence of anacrusis and downbeat, and I took it. A college friend, one Sergeant Daniel Kissane of the United States Army as last I heard, volunteered his services when I began to toy around with electronic music in the fall of 1998. Those who know Danny will find the "exhale" downbeat sound's original recording characteristic.

I would say, in the words of a bawdily enterprising proprietor, I do not play but rather operate a guitar. Chords, melodies, and singing while strumming and plucking are techniques of which I am capable — you want finesse? May I please introduce you to someone who is not me. With my acoustic guitar in an open D-tuning, the B-string tuned downward to an A, leaving only tonic and dominant, I added to the music two pairs of phosphor bronze accoutrements: jangly rhythm parts, a capo set at the sixth fret and eleventh fret; and a couple scrapes with a brass slide, one musical and the other, well, expressive.

The terms of contract for this undertaking were loose; it is implicit that the original work is mine but that it may be used indefinitely to introduce Jinx's podcasts. What more to indite between yourself and one whom you esteem in person and profession? Were I to be chided over the impracticality of working for nothing I would refer to what I told Jinx: In the spirit of generosity (pro bono work is edifying) and self-interest (I now have for myself an infectious tune made of odds and ends that once lay useless) I composed the music and sounds happily expecting appreciation in return. That and satisfaction, each of which I now have in munificence.

ON APPRECIATING APPRECIATION: Thank you, Jinx.

In terms of politics, Freedom House's December announcement that the year of 2005 was "one of the most successful for freedom" in three decades kicked off a holiday for democratists who usually promote their argument in apology. Dictatorships down in number, stable democracies up; in-between nations mostly edging towards liberalism. The Near East was signally visited by reform, moving Freedom House director Thomas Melia to frame the events as a sign "that men and women in this region share the universal desire to live in free societies."

Inherent self-determination was the condition for an adjuvant occupation in Iraq, running as it did counter to several traditionalist doctrines whose advocates disparaged the campaign as a bungle if it wasn't hooey in the first. So the democratist turns around with the Freedom House report to argue how ideation was wed with practice, consummation serving to affirm both. There is a retort: The Near East's tilt forward was tangential to or even in spite of American-led efforts. But it comes from the same corner that augured Judgment in 2003 when most of the West had had enough of what was said desert peoples take pride in — enslavement, benightment, aggrandizement and quotidian brutality carried out by sovereign cliques — and deposed Saddam Hussein. The Arab street did rise; only, what do you know, it peacefully assembled and petitioned for equity and filed into polling places.

Every act of democratic spontaneity in 2005 proceeded on grounds set by some measure of Washington's influence. The Lebanese would still be quartering Syrian fascists if Bashar Assad lacked the punitive reference of a nearby Ba'athist; unless prodded, Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's regimes would not have so much as begrudged citizens nominal elections; Kuwaitis might not be celebrating women's suffrage quite as they did had they remained Iraq's nineteenth province for longer than six months.

And as for Iraq, ongoing document forensics reveal the free world's decade-long toleration of the Arab autocracy not to have been the custody of a regional balance of power but an unsound constriction of fulminate. The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes titles his mid-January report "Saddam's Terror Training Camps" for good reason: eleven government officials, he writes, confirm that the Iraqi Intelligence Service founded an ambitious internship program for terrorists, including those from al Qaeda, totaling eight thousand at least. So, again, it has been found that philosophies are procured by authoritarians as means to power — remember that Adolf Hitler was the Nazi least interested in national socialism — and that there was a manifest threat of Arab Socialist Baghdad handing off something to an Islamist subcontractor. Something like what? A chemical or biological weapon that, as Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraqi Survey Group determined, Hussein would assemble as soon as his Gulf War probation and sanctions could be pardoned.

Hayes interviewed defense and intelligence officials involved with the slow translation of over 2 million Iraqi Ba'athist government files; Duelfer got his best information from Saddam's advisors. Neither the question of Saddam Hussein's weaponry nor that of his terrorist malefaction could be answered with finality until each was made safely moot — and Hayes reports that Washington has examined less than 3 percent of captured evidence. From that is a truth countervailing any usefulness in biding time with a man like Saddam: Dictatorships, where the lie is prime currency, cannot be compromised by human intelligence operations while they stand. Saddam Hussein in his twilight grew insular and mercurial, ensconced himself in tribal elite and issued progressively opaque commands, often orally. How could that have been penetrated — Marlon Brando sent over to impersonate Tariq Aziz? We value George Orwell's decryption of Newspeak because a good author ought to be exegete of his own book; Orwell invented Oceania, not industrial totalitarianism.

As a replacement for the fulsome Mohammed Khatami, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a curiously insolent man, choosing international speaking engagements to impart the kind of mephitis most despots save for closed rallies. The theocratic state behind him is less candid. What is known about Tehran's Khomeinist mullahs? They are a) impresarios of global terrorism, b) despised by most Iranians, c) going to build an atomic bomb, and d) shrewder than Saddam Hussein, whose French-built nuclear reactor made for an easy pustule to lance in 1981. Western governments publicly estimate the Islamists will have a weapon in a few years, leaving Iran expert Michael Ledeen to recommend fitting Iranian revolutionaries with American dollars, if not materiel; and the US Army War College to conclude that if Iran must be a nuclear power, it should be the seat of a democratic government.

A European trio has led diplomacy with Tehran but it is President Bush who commands a military of any consequence. Speaking about the war to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the president set forgotten struggles and the underappreciated denouement of postwar Japan alongside Iraq. "President Harry Truman stuck to his guns. He believed, as I do, in freedom's power to transform an adversary into an ally." That would also apply to Iran. Appease Tehran, try to slow its unstoppable bomb program or — ? The democratist's argument was always strongest; now it is stronger.