The American Conservative

Rejecting pleas by homeowners fighting to keep their properties, the Supreme Court on Thursday said local governments could condemn a person’s home or business so the sites could be redeveloped for more lucrative uses.

In a 5-4 decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said the Constitution permits governments to condemn a person’s property, paying them a fair price for it, as part of a broader economic redevelopment plan to revitalize a distressed community.

The decision, one of the most anxiously awaited of the term, emphasized that governments have long relied on powers of eminent domain to condemn property for public uses, such as railways and utilities. The court has historically taken a “deferential approach to legislative judgments in this field,” the majority said.

The court recognized the “hardship” such condemnations may bring to property owners uprooted from homes and businesses in the name of economic development. But local governments should be given “broad latitude” to determine whether their citizens would be best served by condemning private property, especially where it is part of a broader scheme for redevelopment, the court said.

“Promoting economic development is a traditional and long-accepted function of government,” the court said, upholding efforts by the city of New London, Conn., to redevelop a parcel of land in a distressed part of town. ~Chicago Tribune

Kelo v. New London is a ruling that will enter the ranks of the most appalling, unjustifiable and unconstitutional Court rulings in history. Note the state capitalist claim for compelling government interest offered by Justice Stevens: economic development is a function of government. Sadly, in practice, Americans have allowed precedent after precedent to be set where the government is supposedly an agent for economic development, and from this state capitalist premise it would follow that property rights are only as secure as is most useful to the bottom line of the state and its corporate allies. This is to make our ownership of our own land entirely dependent on the pleasure of oligarchs and bureaucrats. Thomas Fleming has already laid out the consequences for property rights implied in this ruling in his excellent article this week.

To his incisive criticism I would also add that without secure property rights liberty simply becomes an empty word. If a man is not secure in his own possessions from the arbitrary attacks of state or private interests, he cannot be anything remotely like an independent citizen. He must inevitably become a lackey of either the government or a private master, forfeiting his personal legal, traditional rights as a citizen for the sake of economic or political protection. The road to serfdom has now effectively reached its end, and we have arrived at the destination by judicial fiat.

I would like to add a few notes from an historical parallel that occurred to me as I was working through my seemingly interminable reading list for oral exams. What the Court has allowed appears to me to be the full endorsement of the interests of what the Byzantine emperors generically termed dynatoi, the powerful, who were all those officials and landlords with sufficient influence and power in their local area to compel farmers to sell their land or be forced into dependent relationships with them. In the tenth century, as this new aristocracy of wealth began to emerge, a series of emperors attempted unsuccessfully to rein in the depredations of the dynatoi, both for the sake of moral justice (as the emperors themselves said at the time) and for the more obvious reasons of preserving the sources of state revenues and curtailing the political independence of the aristocracy. Those familiar with Byzantine history will know already that the efforts to curtail the dynatoi largely failed in the end, exacerbating structural instabilities, weaknesses and internal conflicts in the Byzantine state that hastened its collapse to the Crusaders in 1204, after which time the empire was never really in a position to recover or fend off even more aggressive invaders. The predatory habits and depredations of our modern dynatoi may not be having quite the same effects, but they are an acid dissolving the economic, political and social foundations of our country nonetheless.
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A key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors says today that claims the government made about Iraq’s weapons programme were “totally implausible”.
He tells the Guardian: “I’d read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there’s no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too”.

Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the UN in New York during the run-up to the invasion, resigned from the FO last year, after giving evidence to the Butler inquiry. ~The Guardian

Indeed, the entire life of the Church as the theanrthopic Body of Christ lies in this truth. It is in the Church that humanity is united to divinity, since it is the body of Christ that was raised to the right hand of the Father. It is in the Church that the Holy Spirit breathes His uncreated gifts, manifesting the Son and uniting man to Him, since it was Christ the Word that sent the Spirit which proceeds from the Father to His disciples. And it is to the Church that all of humanity is called, summoned to freely participate in the life of God as He partakes in humanity’s.

Thus, in Orthodoxy, the Church is not merely a socio-temporal community, since it is the unity of humanity; it is not merely an institution, since it is not limited to its administrative structures and hierarchies; it is not a cultural artifact, but a mode of life, a mode of thought, a mode of being that is ineffibly interpenetrated by the life uncreated Godhead. ~Leonidas Pittos, Orthodox Ecclesiology

I would like to introduce readers of Eunomia to a new blog that has been in the works for some time and which has been inaugurated with its first post. This is Orthodox Ecclesiology, operated by a good friend and colleague of mine here at the University of Chicago, Leonidas Pittos. Leonidas is a Ph.D. student in Byzantine history, specialising in late Byzantine religion and culture, and he is a staunch Orthodox Traditionalist from the Church of Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece. He is very engaging and thoughtful, he is especially well-versed in the writings of the Greek Fathers and has what I consider to be a profound understanding of liturgics and ecclesiology.

Anyone interested broadly in Church Tradition, ecclesiology, theology, the problems of ecumenism and questions of religious identity, among many other topics, would be well-served to start reading Orthodox Ecclesiology. Leonidas provides a particular and very intelligent perspective on the problems confronting the Orthodox Church today, and his blog is a very welcome addition to a sphere where educated and rational discourse is often lacking.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a measure that would require President George W. Bush to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq no later than October 2006.

Republican Representatives Walter Jones of North Carolina and Ron Paul of Texas joined Democratic Representatives Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii in sponsoring the resolution, said Doug Gordon, a Kucinich spokesman.

Jones voted for authorizing the war on Oct. 10, 2002; Paul, Kucinich and Abercrombie opposed it.

“Today is the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq,” Kucinich said at a news conference in Washington today. “It is time to thank our troops and say, `come home.”’

The bill is the first bipartisan measure on troop withdrawals since Congress gave Bush approval to invade the country to oust former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Gordon said.

The measure would require Bush to begin removing American troops from Iraq on or before Oct. 1, 2006, Gordon said. ~Bloomberg

This is an important next step in the push for withdrawal. Only a few weeks ago there was the much weaker resolution calling for the president to create a plan for withdrawal. This measure is much stronger, and how it fares in the House will be a test of how strong popular opposition to the war has become. It is a hopeful sign that Americans may be leaving Iraq within a year and a half. This measure should also be a test for all Congressmen, and those who fail to support specific withdrawal measures should be challenged in next spring’s primaries and targeted for defeat in the autumn.

The haggard patient heaves himself into a sitting position and, with painful slowness, takes a little gruel, swallowing the disgusting pap with difficulty. He who until recently was consuming rare beef and good red wine smiles wanly at this minor, toothless triumph. The relatives around the bed exclaim with forced delight how well he has done and how good it is to see him eating heartily again. They make weak jokes and excessively cheerful remarks about how he will soon be home again. The whole scene is a ghastly, flesh-crawling deception. Everyone present knows that death is hovering a few beds away and there is no hope. Yet nobody will say it. Such is the position of the Conservative and Unionist party.

Now, if the Tory party were a person and we were its family, there would be a good excuse for this polite fraud. But the Tory party is not a person and we are not its wife and children, or even its friends. There is no point in pretending that the Tory party is going to recover. This pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.

The Tories’ position is hopeless. No man living could conceivably unify the party’s contradictory wings. Europhile or Eurosceptic, pro- or anti-marriage, market enthusiast or moralist — each of these quarrels is fundamental and cannot be settled by compromise. To refuse to resolve them is to ask to be dragged, by events beyond our control, into places we never decided to go. ~Peter Hitchens, The Spectator (subscription required)

Mr. Hitchens’ pained denunciation of the pathetic Tories is entirely correct. Of course, it would have been correct five years ago, or even five years before that when they were still in power, and I think Mr. Hitchens knows that. The same lame arguments he decries today have dominated the internal politics of the Tories for eight years. But Mr. Hitchens’ dissection of the rotting corpse of British Conservatism is more incisive and informative than that.

“And here is the core of it. The Tory party does not know what it is supposed to be opposing. In fact, in general, it has either supported or failed to oppose all the most important actions of New Labour. These are constitutional, moral and cultural, and they are the real issue. The admirable Peter Oborne, a brave and original conservative critic of the government, insisted a fortnight ago in this magazine that the Tory party had ‘won all the great intellectual and political battles of the last quarter-century’. Regrettably, this is not so. Margaret Thatcher certainly did not win the culture wars. She did not even fight them.”

One might apply the same criticism to the Reagan administration and the Republican majority in Congress since ’94. That the GOP has learned how to be successfully two-faced and hypocritical while still managing to motivate voters and win elections masks the same core confusion and loss of principle. Everything that Mr. Hitchens has to say about the Tories could be said, more or less, about the Republicans here, except that the GOP has answered the question of whether to copy New Labour or not with an affirmative.

Hitchens reserves a more damning indictment for later: “They cannot even understand patriotism properly. It was clearly never in British interests to join the American invasion of Iraq. The bitterest opponents of this adventure have been traditional conservative types. Yet, precisely because it is not instinctively patriotic, the Tory party grasped at the war as an attempt to prove that it still loves the country it sold to Brussels in 1972.” Likewise, faux conservatives in this country embrace war as a patriotic supplement. Having little or no family or historical connection to America, or losing it after having had such a connection, they can nourish their emaciated sense of loyalty only through enthusiasm for the deaths of others in wars waged for the interests of other nations.

There is one telling difference, and this rests in the difference between political parties here and in Britain. The Tories are losing party members to the Grim Reaper, and unlike here their membership numbers are very small, while the GOP is flush with a new generation of imbeciles and half-baked nationalists weaned on the nonsense that passes for political discourse on talk radio and cable television. It is conceivable that enough of the Conservatives could simply vanish and no party organisation would remain. Let us hope, however, for whatever little there is worth left saving in Britain that the Tories end with a bang rather than a whimper. A quiet death will probably mean that no one will bother to pick up the now-extinguished torch of Conservatism.

Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing about the Schiavo case is that her parents have done everything in their power to prevent her death, with the result that Schiavo has received much more process and much more publicity than others to whom the same thing has happened. One commentator described the Schiavo case as the “crime of the century.” In fact it is a banal, run-of-the-mill crime of a kind that happens every day in the United States.

And for this, we cannot blame the courts. The fault lies not in our judges but in ourselves, for we have created a society in which the law allows the strong and healthy to determine that some of the weak and infirm have lives not worth living and then to kill them. ~Robert T. Miller, First Things (courtesy of Orthodoxy Today)

Nothing—not a Mickey Mouse balloon, not even a mother’s soothing voice—would have gotten a response from Terri Schiavo, the comatose Florida woman whose right-to-die case entangled the courts and mesmerized America for months. That’s according to an autopsy report released today. Any message from the world would have had to travel the neural pathway to her neocortex, where it would then have been processed and a response generated. That first step, the initial incoming route, was destroyed some 15 years ago when, with her brain deprived of oxygen, she slipped into a persistent vegetative state.

The medical examiners found no evidence of strangulation or abuse—another question raised in the legal proceedings. “They did an extremely thorough job of ruling that out,” says Karen Weidenheim, chief of neuropathology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. And the autopsy concluded that the vision centers of her brain were dead, rendering her blind.

Her death on March 31 ended a familial, legal, and political struggle over removing her feeding tube. The autopsy showed that her brain was half the size of normal, and examiner Jon Thogmartin said at a press conference: “No amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.” ~U.S. News and World Report

Initially, I had not intended to discuss the autopsy of the unfortunate Mrs. Schiavo. What the report told us spoke for itself, and the pro-existence enthusiasts, who lost all sense of perspective and proportion during the controversy earlier this year, could read the facts themselves if they were so inclined. Short of a fideism or spiritualism that mocks the understanding of the integral unity of body and soul in the Christian faith, no Christian can seriously believe that Mrs. Schiavo was meaningfully alive as a human person during the last many years. St. Gregory of Nyssa made the common-sense observation that the brain has a unique and important role in the unity of body and soul, which he deduced from the obviously deliterious consequences to human life resulting from serious brain trauma.
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According to Americans United’s well-documented 14-page report [.pdf], the problem is not that evangelicals haven’t been able to speak about their religious beliefs; the problem is that cadets who aren’t evangelical Christians, and have no interest in converting, were dive-bombed by religious propaganda intended to convert them to the faith.

In 2004, when Mel Gibson’s controversial movie The Passion of the Christ was about to be released, Cadet First Class Casey Weinstein, a Jewish graduate of the Air Force Academy, discovered that Gibson-backers had placed promotional leaflets advertising the film on the breakfast plates of the school’s nearly 4,000 cadets.

“As the cadets ate, images from the film were flashed on cafeteria screens used for official academy messages,” the Charlotte Observer recently reported. In the next few days, more flyers would appear at breakfast and in addition, “mass e-mail messages” were sent recommending that cadets “attend special screenings of the film.”

Weinstein is the son of Mikey Weinstein, an attorney and academy graduate who over the years had expressed his consternation over the Academy’s religious practices.

In an opinion piece published by the Colorado Springs Gazette, John J. Michels Jr., an Academy graduate and former military attorney who now works in the corporate world, suggested that the incidents of bias could not have happened with the knowledge of Academy officials.

“Large crucifixes being erected in the cadet area outside of the chapel, fliers placed under doors on Easter morning celebrating the reincarnation of Jesus, and video projections of Bible verses on screens in the dining hall during mandatory meal formations do not occur without the blessing (figuratively, and perhaps literally) of the commander,” he wrote. ~Bill Berkowitz, Antiwar.com

As I read this, I wondered: what exactly is the problem? Even though the Academy is a government educational institution by definition, this is a perfect example of what the fantastic, chimerical beast “separation of church and state” does not include. There are probably institutional regulations on the books forbidding this sort of thing, no doubt adopted in the flurry of non-discrimination fever that has beset our country since the 1970s. But what we should ask is: what coercion has been taking place?

As I read the report, I could see that there was no institutional coercion. That is, no one suffered academically or received any official penalty for responding negatively to the efforts at proselytism. No cadets were unfairly disciplined by the Academy, nor were they expelled. It would be at such a point that a reasonable person could conclude that religious fervour had trumped the proper running of a military educational institution by undermining the integrity of enforcing a code of conduct through arbitrary or summary treatment on the basis of religion. That is not happening in Colorado Springs.
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To conclude: Democracy has two faces—one is the face of Aristotle and Jefferson, a completely decentralized system in which power is exercised at the lowest possible level and is subject to law and tradition. As Aristotle noted, any democracy in which the will of the people takes precedence over law and tradition is only another kind of tyranny.

The other face, the false face, is that of the demagogues of the Athenian Assembly, and also of Robespierre and Abraham Lincoln and both political parties today. This is a system based on the principle of untrammeled majority rule, subject to neither law nor tradition. If the people want to overturn any clause in the Constitution, they are free to do so. This explains why the Bill of Rights, which were designed to protect the states and the people from the federal government are now used to reinforce the power of the federal government against the people and the states.

In reality, of course, the the people has no power, since we are all under the control of tiny oligarchic cliques and pressure groups that monopolize wealth, power, and prestige. How false democracy devoured Jefferson’s true democracy is a long sad story, punctuated by wars and revolutionary legislation. But if Americans ever wish to be free, they shall not only have to go back to the thinking of Adams and Jefferson but also to the ancient writers and ancient languages that formed their minds and inspired their imaginations. And even we if cannot recover our political freedom as a nation, we can liberate our minds from the propaganda of civics books and discpline our free minds on the classical curriculum. ~Thomas Fleming, The Autodidact

Aristotle and Jefferson’s visions of local, lawful democracy are very good and welcome antidotes to what most people think of as democracy. I recommend Dr. Fleming’s article in its entirety. When I have denounced democracy here and elsewhere, it has always been aimed at the distortions of these visions and the false democracy that most Europeans since at least 1789 have seen as the only sort of democracy they have ever encountered. The Swiss were, and still are to some extent, a sterling example of true, locally-based democracy as it should be practiced if it must be. But today even the Swiss endure a relatively centralised and consolidated state, and this is due to the influence of modern, European democracy on the respectable burgher self-government that grew up naturally in Switzerland.

The democracy of historical Athens degenerated and became the debased form that gave democracy such a bad name for the next 2,000 years. Athenian democracy was corrupted through the expansion of its commercial and political empire. That observation has become a commonplace, but what usually does not follow that observation is the additional observation that regimes premised on the rule of the many are often more prone to territorially expansionist policies than more narrowly-based regimes. Increased territory is most in the interest of the many, as it makes practicable the ancient popular demand for the distribution of land.

In the modern case, populist and nationalist enthusiasms have replaced the drive for land with ideological drives for advancing this or that national ideal and affirming the power of the nation. This has, if anything, made the many in any given state even more prone to expansionism and conflict than they were before. This is a short way of saying that warfare states have not been foisted on “the people,” but they have willingly embraced the small band of oligarchs who proposed to create warfare states. The many want expansion and hegemony, always and in every culture, and war is the demagogue’s best resource.

In the Roman Republic, providing land for veterans was one of the continual pressures for expansionist warfare, and thus plebeians had as much, if not more, of a vested interest in that warfare as the aristocracy. The military demands of the expanded state required the building up of permanent armies that came to identify with their commanders, which almost immediately militarised the factional conflicts of the city to the ultimate destruction of the old Republic and the establishment of the moderate, restrained dictatorship of the Principate.

The American Republic was infected by the same corrupted form of democracy as Athens, most of whose advocates were constantly urging an expansion fundamentally injurious to the stability of the Republic. (The fatal flaw in the early republican endeavour was connected to its central principle of self-government, as self-government and expanded participation in that self-government came to be regarded as one and the same thing, even though they are contradictory.) This was the perverse realisation of the greater decentralisation Jefferson imagined would result from continuing westward expansion. In practical terms, there was greater decentralisation, but with territorial expansion came a need to find bonds uniting the disparate communities, and thus there was all the greater impulse to identify with the interests of larger regions or with the Union in abstract. Instead of the distance between far-flung communities in the West inoculating whole regions against political enthusiasms originating in the cities, these communities were no less prone to embracing these enthusiasms, and perhaps more so given their lesser experience of them. Partisan attachments and popular participation in elections at the national level strengthened these tendencies to identify with interests other than those of one’s own community.

American democracy, the sort Jefferson codified and idealised, fell prey to large-scale and rather ideological democracy. It remains debatable whether this was avoidable once self-government and expanded franchise were linked in practice and the new democratic state constitutions of the 1820s and 1830s began muddling the understanding of self-government held by the Founders.

By late afternoon May 13, talks had stalled between Uzbekistan authorities and armed demonstrators inside a government building in Andijan. Speaking by phone to the gunmen, a top law-enforcement official used an Uzbek proverb to foretell the government’s next move:

“Your eyes will soon see what befalls you.”

Shortly afterward, gun-mounted armored personnel carriers raced up to Babur Square outside the building, where thousands more demonstrators were rallying against the trial of 23 local businessmen on Islamic extremism charges. Without warning, Uzbek soldiers opened fire on the crowd, survivors said.

Every other street leading from the square already had been blocked by military vehicles and soldiers. Uzbek authorities left only one way out: Chulpon Prospekt, Andijan’s main thoroughfare.

Several thousand Uzbeks, almost all of them unarmed, jammed into the broad, tree-lined street. Fifteen minutes later, the ambush began. Uzbek soldiers on rooftops, in apartment windows and treetops fired down on protesters huddled together, many with arms linked.

“The bullets rained down,” said Abdulsalam Karimov, 50. “There were soldiers everywhere with one aim–to kill everybody.” ~The Chicago Tribune

Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government’s shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.

British and other European officials had pushed to include language calling for an independent investigation in a communique issued by defense ministers of NATO countries and Russia after a daylong meeting in Brussels on Thursday. But the joint communique merely stated that “issues of security and stability in Central Asia, including Uzbekistan,” had been discussed.

The outcome obscured an internal U.S. dispute over whether NATO ministers should raise the May 13 shootings in Andijan at the risk of provoking Uzbekistan to cut off U.S. access to a military air base on its territory.

The communique’s wording was worked out after what several knowledgeable sources called a vigorous debate in Brussels between U.S. defense officials, who emphasized the importance of the base, and others, including State Department representatives at NATO headquarters, who favored language calling for a transparent, independent and international probe into the killings of Uzbekistan civilians by police and soldiers. ~The Washington Post

As more accounts of the Andijan massacre have been forthcoming in the press, it is clear that the Uzbek government has been lying about and suppressing inquiries into an unusually blatant and heinous act of repression. The Uzbek military, which wrought the slaughtering of protesters, receives millions in U.S. aid. That connects Washington and the American tax-payer, unfortunately but inextricably, to these terrible events. It is the military of a state allied in the so-called War on Terror, and therefore its actions, even those within Uzbekistan’s borders, reflect on America in central Asia and beyond and further sully our reputation. Islam Karimov is our poster boy for the sort of regime we actually endorse in the region, whatever silly and irresponsible chatter we have heard to the contrary. Wiser statesmen in every age have known how valuable reputation is for the influence of one’s state in the world, and how impossible it is to retrieve once it has been lost. Why are we letting our reputation be ruined still more by the likes of a Karimov?

Unlike the much greater massacre at Hama in 1982 by Syrian forces, the Uzbek government cannot even attempt to claim that the people being slaughtered in the streets were dangerous Islamists or that they were even associated with Islamists. The already tenuous connections between the 23 accused businessmen and militant Islamist groups already strains credulity. Here the full schizophrenia of American policy in the Islamic world is revealed. Mr. Bush has declared support for secular, authoritarian regimes in Muslim countries to be acceptable no longer, and thus goes out of his way to encourage and strengthen Islamist forces in these countries. At the same time is not willing to follow through on this supposedly high-minded principle, even when the Islamist threat is minimal and the regime in question has committed atrocities against civilians, because doing so would threaten U.S. hegemony and a sought-after central Asian military base.

From a realist perspective, Uzbekistan is now as much of an embarrassment and political liability as it ever was a strategic asset, and it should be cut loose from all connections to America. From an America First perspective, of course, there should never have been a base in Uzbekistan, or at least it should not have lasted beyond 2002, and the sooner Americans end their military and financial relationship with Tashkent the better. We will wait in vain for Washington to impose any penalties on Uzbekistan for what its army did in Andijan, but there is no doubt that we ought to cut off diplomatic relations with any country that deliberately slaughters peaceful protesters. We did so after the Tiananmen massacre, and even if the body count is not as high in this case the principle is the same.

Nearly six in 10 Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, a new Gallup Poll finds, the most downbeat view of the war since it began in 2003.

Patience for the war has dropped sharply as optimism about the Iraqi elections in January has ebbed and violence against U.S. troops hasn’t abated. For the first time, a majority would be “upset” if President Bush sent more troops. A new low, 36%, say troop levels should be maintained or increased.

In the Gallup Poll, 56% say the Iraq war wasn’t “worth it,” essentially matching the high-water mark of 57% a month ago.

• Of those who say the war wasn’t worth it, the top reasons cited are fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found; the number of people killed and wounded; and the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States.

• Of the 42% who say the war was worth it, the top reasons cited are the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the need to stop terrorism and a desire to end the oppression of the Iraqi people. ~USA Today

The popular weariness with this war was as inevitable as the fatuous enthusiasm for it in the beginning. Because it was always an unnecessary and unjustifiable war launched in aggression and supported by deceit, the “buyer’s remorse,” if you will, was always going to come more quickly and be more intense than in previous American conflicts. The plodding, uninformed American public, as usual, goes along with most anything for a short time if its leaders claim it is patriotic and high-minded, but like a mule it reaches a point beyond which it doesn’t want to go and simply stops.

The stunning thing about these figures is that, even as uncommitted people have gradually drifted to the antiwar position and attached themselves to the roughly 30% core that has opposed the invasion from the beginning, the numbers steadfastly in support of the war have remained constant for over a year. There is a roughly 40% foundation of support for this war that seems impervious to evidence, reason, common sense and all signs that point to a colossal waste of lives, military resources and wealth. This is not surprising when we look at the reasons this bloc gives for its support: 9/11, anti-terrorism and liberating Iraqis. At least relatively few are still claiming that Iraq was on the verge of attacking us with WMDs!

9/11 obviously has no connection to the war in Iraq (that it requires saying at all is troubling), but for this crowd such a common sense view is tantamount to siding with bin Laden. In spite of Mr. Bush’s deceit about al-Qaeda connections to Baghdad, Iraq never had anything to do with anti-American terrorism (and scarcely had anything to do with terrorism at all), which makes the second point irrelevant. It is already a cliche, so obvious is it, that all terrorism in Iraq today is a result of our invasion. That leaves liberating the Iraqis as the last remotely reasonable justification for the war, and from an American perspective this has nothing to recommend it. How perfectly ironic it is that the worst of the American chauvinists and the millions of well-meaning, but apparently easily duped patriots of the heartland have been reduced to defending a policy that has no specific, pro-American reasons to be in this war. Withdrawal has clearly become the patriotic course of action. The GOP majorities would be wise to notice the changing attitude of the public on this and hasten to end the war through their power of the purse.