Let’s see what the government might have chosen in its effort to protect American lives from ruthless, technologically sophisticated terrorists:

1. UNIX, Linux

   • Inexpensive or free.

   • Requires some user knowledge.

   • Practically invulnerable to attack.

2. Mac OS

   • Costs money.

   • Easy to use.

   • Practically invulnerable to attack.

3. Windows

   • Costs money.

   • Easy to use.

   • Can be hacked by a squirrel monkey, thus is wide open to attack.

   • Produced by a company the Department of Justice found guilty of criminally abusing its monopoly power – a finding that is supposed to result in punishment, not in fat contracts bankrolled by taxpayers.

To the bureaucratic mind, the choice was obvious. Sweden is looking better all the time.

It is more than painfully apparent that the Pentagon did somewhere between inadequate to zero planning for the occupation, despite the equally apparent fact that this war was settled on more than a year in advance and then intelligence was bent to support it.

Hugh Parmer (formerly of Fort Worth), head of the American Refugee Committee (ARC), was in Iran and Iraq at the beginning of the summer, the first NGO (non-governmental organization) to go in because ARC had privately funded relief supplies. He was fairly shaken by what he found.

Among other things, the crack disaster-relief team he had created while he was with USAID under President Clinton was sitting around filing their fingernails because the military was rejecting all advice from civilians in favor of doing it their way. Since the military is in this mess precisely because it is not well-trained at peacekeeping, you'd think it'd have enough sense to ask people who've been there and done that. That would include the United Nations and NATO.

I'm beginning to think that it is the very significance of Bush's lies -- the fact that he is lying about things that are genuinely important, that are matters of state, that involve our livelihoods and our servicepeople's lives -- that protects him. There is no taint of tawdriness to Bush's lies, the way there were to Clinton's, with their prurient scent, or to Nixon's, with their late-night skulduggery. Bush's lies -- like those of his predecessor Ronald Reagan -- live in the rarefied realm of macroeconomics and global strategy rather than in the gutter of personal misbehavior, and that seems to place them in a kind of realpolitik "get out of jail free" zone. Whatever forbearance Bush fails to earn on these grounds, he wins -- again, as Reagan did -- on the basis of our assumption of his incompetence, his out-of-the-loopiness. (Is there any other way to explain the way Bush has gotten away with claiming, absurdly, contrary to all fact, that Saddam Hussein didn't allow the arms inspectors back in ?)

"It's hard on the families, it's hard on the soldiers, and it's especially hard to know that you put your faith and trust into a president, and they continue to lie to you, they break promises, and it's hard to fight for somebody like that."