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Having lived through 9/11, and believe me, there is nothing like seeing an F-15 fly over Central Park at 3,000 feet armed , I'm mystified at the sense of fear which has gripped this country. The whole freedom fries debacle and the boycott of French food is not a rational reaction.

Americans have simply refused to come to grips with two things: one, the intense hatred for our policies around the world, only made more intense by the Iraq war, two, the paranoia which has swept across suburban America.

The more I hear members of the Bush administration tell us that they have no plans to invade Syria, the more they sound like they are planning to invade Syria.

"The bombing was terrible for sure, but it is not ruining our city like these looters are," growled Sherko Jaf, a dentist, as he watched a band of young men hauling rolls of carpet out of the 10-story Foreign Ministry building and placing them inside a yellow dump truck. "How will this ministry ever work again? You know, even if we don't have Saddam Hussein, we will still need a foreign ministry."

U.S. military commanders contend they are doing as much as they can to stem the thievery. But they acknowledge they do not have enough troops to patrol every looting-prone part of the city while also focusing on stamping out lingering pockets of resistance and guarding against suicide attacks.

Some Iraqis, however, question the allocation of U.S. forces around the capital. They note a whole company of Marines, along with at least a half-dozen amphibious assault vehicles, has been assigned to guard the Oil Ministry, while many other ministries -- including trade, information, planning, health and education -- remain unprotected.

"Why just the oil ministry?" Jaf asked. "Is it because they just want our oil?"...

Many Iraqis and some of the few Western aid workers in the capital expressed wonder that the U.S. military was not more prepared to handle civil disturbances stemming from Hussein's downfall and evaporation of his once-pervasive security forces. "It was predicted," said Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. "Everyone knew it was coming."

The USA Patriot Act, swiftly approved by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, gives federal investigators greater authority to examine all book and computer records at libraries. The law requires investigators to get a search warrant from a federal court before seizing library records, but those proceedings are secret and not subject to appeal. It also forbids libraries from informing patrons that their reading or computer habits are being monitored by the government.

Under the shroud of war, meanwhile, the last remaining hope that someone - anyone - would declare that the president's tax-cut policies are just the tonic to liven things up has died. For years, adherents of "supply-side" economics, the president and vice president among them, argued that tax cuts spark such a boom that caution about paying for them - say, with offsetting spending reductions - is silly old-think. Congressional Republicans insisted that budget bureaucrats who persist in bean-counting the deficit without factoring in a burst of economic growth and fresh revenues from tax-cutting are flat wrong. So, recently, they installed as head of the Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former White House economist who adheres to the view that "dynamic" budget analysis must be used to measure the effects of economic growth from tax cutting.

The result?

"The overall macroeconomic effect of the proposals in the president's budget is not obvious," the budget office said. Translation: Don't count on the Bush tax cuts to do much for the economy.

Using nine separate models, the CBO found no significant economic boost from the proposed tax cuts, no gush of revenue to close gaping budget deficits - and long-term negative effects on interest rates and investment from the resulting big deficits.

Faced with hard data from a team led by his own former economist, what's a president to do? Dig in his heels.