A world where force and destruction are unquestionably accepted as reasonable solutions to problems is a world that thoughtful people must resist at all costs. Unfortunately, complexity and subtlety - the stuff of thoughtfulness - are not the strong suit of our current leaders, or of their advisors or of those who follow blindly. There is a seductive appeal to the arrogant decisiveness of a Donald Rumsfeld or of a George Bush, but leadership based on simplistic assumptions is a very dangerous one. The behavior shown by these leaders is the essence of hubris - a sin for which the jealous gods of Greek mythology punished ordinary mortals. The least of our punishments as a nation following headstrong leaders will be to continue being clueless in an increasingly loutish and violent world.

To examine every instance of national conceit uncritically accepted by a vast number of people would indeed be tedious. Many wise if far less publicized voices have already covered the ground we will examine here briefly.

 # The Conceit that We Will Bring Democracy to a Benighted Land

Do we even have a democracy to export? Today, the United States has more the trappings of a democracy than an actual one. To have a truly free electorate, a genuinely free press is essential. Currently, our "free" press is an illusion. Instead of government sensors dictating what editors may publish, we have huge media conglomerates influenced by money and political pressure. Sure, there are opposing controversial voices, but they are drowned out by infotainment, sensationalism, the pablum of human interest stories and mindless sound bites. Radical voices present no danger to the established order. Is this the kind of democracy we want the world to adopt? Will the world community really take us seriously?

 #  Why Selective Compassion?

There is so much misery in the world. How do we choose recipients for our compassion? For example, millions have died in vicious conflicts in Congo. Shouldn't we be there? The U.S. has just blocked a proposal to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a brutal civil war there. The continuing carnage should teach those pesky French a lesson.  A small fraction of the expenses already incurred on the war on Iraq could fund a program of the World Health Organization to fight infectious diseases in poor countries. The Bush administration wouldn't hear of it. It would seem that the Iraqi have special qualities crying out for our kindness, or could it be that truly decent acts of national kindness lack the macho flair that plays so well on television.

 # Those Weapons of Mass Destruction

Will they eventually be found? If they ever are, how believable will an administration that has declined independent observers be?

 # The Iraqi

One has to look hard to discover the unconscionable number of Iraqi civilians killed or maimed. Dangerous materials and unexploded ordnance remain strewn about to maim and kill unsuspecting children. The Iraqi combatants in uniform get little sympathy, but were they not themselves driven towards our troops to be shot like fish in a barrel? See http://www.iraqbodycount.net for the daily count. Counting the direct casualties of war does not begin to enumerate the death and misery that will follow the breakdown in sanitation, health services, disruption of food and water and lack of electricity.

Though life and health are primary, the loss of Iraq's cultural patrimony cannot be underestimated. The obscenity of Rumsfeld's characterization of the looting of irreplaceable artifacts as a few looted vases being shown on TV multiple times is beyond contempt.

 # That Bad Guy Hussain

The U.S. has backed many dictators, oligarchies, and plutocracies, but very few real democracies outside the West.  And human rights abuses?  Dozens of the world's leading torturers have been blessed by U.S. administrations, including Saddam.  For example, Suharto in Indonesia, killed 200,000 East Timorese. He also killed thousands of suspected "communists" from lists of names provided by CIA.  Saddam's first massacre of about 1,000 people from this same kind of CIA-provided hit list was literally directed by the U.S.

Hussain's cult of personality has not been lost on our president either. Using soldiers on an aircraft carrier as props and landing with a military craft in full military regalia certainly beat the master at his own game. Bush even had the good sense of not repeating Mike Dukakis' mistake by immediately taking off his helmet in time for the photo ops.

This partial laundry list does not begin to detail the mess caused so far. Much more insidious is the erosion of liberty at home. The idea currently being entertained of "pre-emptive self defense" is ominous. Such outward aggression can easily be turned inward to destroy our civil liberties. In this, history is an important teacher. Prior to the rise of Nazism, Germany's Weimar Republic was a democracy with a social conscience. The rest, as they say, is history. Let us not repeat it.