EYE, EYE, CAPTAIN!

Max Blumenthal: Where The One-Eyed Man Is King

Max Blumenthal Sat Jul 9,12:14 PM ET

By now, it's pretty clear that the bombs that ripped dozens of Londoners to shreds and maimed hundreds more were constructed locally by people with little more technical know-how than the Weather Underground. You don't need a faux terror "expert" like Stephen Emerson to tell you that that might mean the attacks were also planned locally. Despite mounting evidence supporting the local angle, an anonymous "senior counterterrorism official," either from the State Department or the Pentagon, is trying to spin journalists with ominous suggestions of a Zarqawi hand in the bombing plot -- and doing so without offering any evidence. I'll get to this disinformation campaign later. For now, read on.

London has a burgeoning community of radical Islamists. Most of them are followers of, or are sympathetic to, one-eyed cleric Abu Hamza Al-Masri. Al-Masri cut his teeth (and lost his hand) in Afghanistan in the 1980's fighting alongside Osama and a entire generation of future jihadi leaders. His Finsbury Park mosque has been a favorite stop of shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacharias Moussaoui. To be sure, the majority of the mosque's attendees reject the radical, politicized version of Islam espoused by al-Qaida's leadership. On Friday, Finsbury Park Mosque played host to one of the Muslim community's fiercest denunciations of the attacks. Al-Masri has nonetheless been under scrutiny since 1999, when Scotland Yard questioned him about terror-related activities. Soon after, Yemen unsuccessfully requested his extradition for plotting bombings there.

Now Al-Masri is on trial for inciting violence. He faces a maximum sentence of life. And he could be extradicted to the US after his conviction. Al-Masri's trial was set to begin on Tuesday -- two days before the terror attacks in London. Could the bombings be related to his prosecution? Undoubtedly. Unfortunately, a "senior counterterrorism official" is trying to spin reporters with the claim that Zarqawi planned the attacks. (The claim is also discussed here.) This looks, smells and quacks like a Pentagon/State Department disinformation campaign designed to reinforce the notion of Iraq as a "central battlefield in the war on terror." Zarqawi's involvement in the London attacks would also bolster his profile among the American public, fulfilling a PR goal the White House established once they essentially gave up on capturing bin Laden.

It appears British intelligence has rejected the Pentagon's misinformation. As the New York Times reports:

Investigators have concluded that the bombs that ripped through three subway trains and a bus on Thursday were relatively crude devices containing less than 10 pounds of explosives each. That finding supports a theory gaining momentum among the authorities that the plot was carried out by a sleeper cell of homegrown extremists rather than highly trained terrorists exported to Britain.

As long as the Bush administration's disinformation is accepted at face value, we are living in the land of the blind, a place where, as Bob Dylan reminded us, the one-eyed man is king.

TIME TO GET REAL

Let's Have This Fight

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Post
Saturday, July 9, 2005; A15

Should a temporary majority of 50.7 percent have control over the entire United States government? Should 49.3 percent of Americans have no influence over the nation's trajectory for the next generation?

Those are the stakes in the coming fight over the next Supreme Court justice. The much-maligned "outside groups" preparing for battle over President Bush's choice deserve credit for openly acknowledging this struggle for power.

Speaking from Denmark on Wednesday, Bush couldn't resist a knock at "special-interest groups" for exploiting the court debate on behalf of "their own fundraising capabilities." Okay, shame on them for raising all that money. But these groups -- left and right -- are fighting because they know how much this matters.

Paradoxically, that's why the White House is telling its right-wing allies to shut up. It's not just that the president is understandably peeved over conservative attacks on his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. By being so vocal, the conservative groups are making clear what the administration would like to obscure: that this is a political and philosophical choice. We are deciding whether one ideological orientation will hold sway over all three branches of the federal government.

That means that the most important questions for senators to ask a nominee have to do with his or her philosophy. It is preposterous to rule such questions out of bounds. It's also hypocritical.

On the Sunday after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, a front-page story in The Post noted that "the conservative movement has within its grasp the prize it has sought for more than 40 years: the control of all levers of the federal government." The story quoted Manuel Miranda, former counsel to Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, as declaring: "It is the moment of conclusion." That is an entirely forthright statement of the conservative hope.

But another story in the same edition quoted a planning document for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. It urged its side to avoid disclosing the "personal political views or legal thinking on any issue" of Bush's prospective nominee. The idea, as the story put it, was "to focus on qualifications rather than specific issues."

In other words, to win an ideological fight and take control of "all levers of the federal government," Republicans will insist that the battle has nothing to do with either power or ideology. The conservative "special-interest groups," no less than their liberal counterparts, have so far refused to play this misleading game.

Many Republicans are already saying that since Bush won the last election and since Republicans control the Senate, the president's choice should be confirmed with dispatch. But as former judge Robert Bork wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court "is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy." Today's Republican majority, based on Bush's 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004, has no inherent right to exercise near-total control over that "most powerful branch."

Consider that since 1992 the Republican presidential vote has averaged only 44 percent and the vote for Republican House candidates has averaged roughly 48 percent. In 2004, with large margins in some of the largest states, Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate received nearly 5 million more votes than their Republican opponents.

Those numbers don't change the fact that the GOP controls both the White House and the Senate. But they do suggest that the Republicans owe a decent respect to the opinions of the Democratic minority and have no mandate for pushing the court far to the right. Yes, this is a "political" assertion. But debates over Supreme Court nominations have been political throughout our history.

Those who say that politics, philosophy and "issues" shouldn't be part of the confirmation argument typically bemoan the prospect of a mean and dirty fight. But if the only legitimate way to stop a nominee is to discover or allege some personal shortcoming, all the incentives are in favor of nasty ad hominem attacks. If senators disagree profoundly with the philosophy of a nominee who happens to be a perfectly decent human being, isn't it far better that they wage their battle openly on philosophical and political grounds? Why force them to dig up bad stuff on a good person? Paradoxically, denying that politics matter in confirmation battles makes for uglier politics.

So, in the coming contest, I say hooray for those supposedly awful outside groups. Yes, they often behave in troublesome ways. But because these groups tell the truth about how important this battle is for the future of our country, I hope they ignore the high-minded scoldings they'll be getting and refuse to shut up.

TAX F@#%$ FOR THE RICH DESTROYING AMERICA'S ECONOMY

The insatiable greed of this shameless president and his morally bankrupt handlers makes for one of the most vile chapters in America's history.

July 7, 2005

Do Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Stimulate Employment?
By ROBERT H. FRANK

THE centerpiece of the Bush administration's economic policy has been large federal income tax cuts aimed mainly at top earners. These tax cuts account for much of the $2 trillion increase in the national debt projected to occur during the Bush presidency. They prompted a large group of Nobel laureates in economics to issue a statement last year condemning the administration's "reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation."

The question of whether to make the tax cuts permanent is still on the Congressional agenda. So it is an opportune moment to examine the president's argument in support of them.

Mr. Bush never pretended that the tax cuts were needed to make life more comfortable for the well to do. After all, with the bulk of all pretax income gains having gone to top earners in recent years, this group has prospered as never before.

Rather, the president portrayed his tax cuts as the linchpin of his economic stimulus package. He argued that because most new jobs are created by small businesses, tax cuts to the owners of those businesses would stimulate robust employment growth. His policy thus rests implicitly on the premise that if business owners could afford to hire additional workers, they would. But whether owners can afford to hire is not the issue. What matters is whether hiring will increase their profits.

The basic hiring criterion, found in every introductory textbook (including those written by the president's own economic advisers), is straightforward: If the output of additional workers can be sold for at least enough to cover their salaries, they should be hired; otherwise not. If this criterion is met, hiring extra workers makes economic sense, no matter how poor a business owner might be. Conversely, if the criterion is not satisfied, hiring makes no economic sense, even for billionaire owners. The after-tax personal incomes of business owners are irrelevant for hiring decisions.

The president's defenders might respond that business owners often need money up front to cover the hiring and training costs incurred before new workers can effectively contribute to extra production. The tax cuts put that money in their pockets. That is true but does nothing to alter the basic hiring rule.

Owners who used their tax cuts to finance the initial costs of new hiring would be acting, in effect, as their own bankers, lending money to themselves in the hope of future returns. The test for whether such internal loans make economic sense is exactly the same as the test for external loans.

A loan from a bank makes sense if the firm's ultimate gain from hiring extra workers is enough to cover not only their salaries but also repayment of the loan plus interest. Internal loans must meet the same standard. They are justified only if the firm's gain from hiring extra workers is enough to cover their salaries and repayment of the loan, including the interest that owners could have earned had they left their tax cuts in the bank. In hiring decisions, the implicit costs of internal loans have exactly the same economic standing as the explicit costs of external loans.

In brief, the president's claim that tax cuts to the owners of small businesses will stimulate them to hire more workers flies in the face of bedrock principles outlined in every introductory economics textbook.

A second way the Bush tax cuts might have stimulated employment is by inducing the wealthy to spend more on consumption. But a large share of the tax windfalls received by the wealthy are not spent in the short run. And even among those who are induced to spend more, the main effect is not increased demand for domestically produced goods and services, but rather increased bidding for choice oceanfront property and longer waiting lists for the new Porsche Carrera GT. Such spending does little to stimulate domestic employment.

Had the dollars required to finance the president's tax cuts been used in other ways, they would have made a real difference. Larger tax cuts for middle- and low-income families, for example, would have stimulated immediate new spending because the savings rates for most of these families are low. And their additional spending would have been largely for products made by domestic businesses - which would have led, in turn, to increased employment.

Grants to cash-starved state and local governments would have prevented layoffs of thousands of teachers and police officers. And many useful jobs could have been created directly. For instance, people could have been hired to scrutinize the cargo containers that currently enter the nation's ports uninspected.

Economists from both sides of the political aisle argued from the beginning that tax cuts for the wealthy made no sense as a policy for stimulating new jobs. And experience has proved them right. Total private employment was actually lower in January 2005 than in January 2001, the first time since the Great Depression that employment has fallen during a president's term of office.

Robert H. Frank, an economist at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, is the author of "Luxury Fever."

Joe Wilson with Sam Park at Valley Democrats United event, 7/22/04

July 5, 2005

Private Spy and Public Spouse Live at Center of Leak Case
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, July 1 - For nearly two years, the investigation into the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's name has unfolded clamorously in the nation's capital, with partisan brawling on talk shows, prosecutors interviewing President Bush and top White House officials, and the imminent prospect that reporters could go to jail for contempt of court.

But the woman at the center of it all, Valerie E. Wilson, has kept her silence, showing the discipline and discretion that colleagues say made her a good spy. As her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, has become a highly visible critic of the administration and promoted his memoirs, Ms. Wilson has ferried their 5-year-old twins to doctors' appointments, looked after their hilltop house in the upscale Palisades neighborhood of Washington and counseled women with postpartum depression.

On June 1, after a year's unpaid leave, Ms. Wilson, now known to the country by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, returned to a new job at the Central Intelligence Agency, determined to get her career back on track, her husband said. Neither the agency nor Mr. Wilson would describe her position, except to make what might seem an obvious point: she will no longer be working under cover, as she did successfully for almost 20 years.

"Before this whole affair, no one would ever have thought of her as an undercover agent," said David Tillotson, a next-door neighbor for seven years who got to know the Wilsons well over back-fence chats, shared dinners and play dates for their grandchildren with the Wilsons' children, Trevor and Samantha.

"She wasn't mysterious," Mr. Tillotson said. "She was sort of a working soccer mom."

He recalled his incredulity on July 14, 2003, when his wife, Victoria, spotted in The Washington Post, in a syndicated column by Robert Novak, a line identifying their neighbor by her maiden name and calling her an "agency operative." Ms. Tillotson kept calling out: "This can't be! This can't be!"

The Wilsons' neighbor on the other side, Christopher Wolf, was similarly aghast. As he sat on his deck staring at the Novak column, Mr. Wilson came out his back door.

"I said: 'This is amazing! I had no idea,' " Mr. Wolf recalled. "He sort of motioned to me to keep my voice down."

A Jaguar-driving, cigar-smoking, silver-haired former ambassador, Mr. Wilson, 55, interpreted the leak of his wife's C.I.A. connection as an act of vengeance from White House officials for his public accusations of deceit in building a case for the Iraq war. Days before the leak, he had gone public in a New York Times Op-Ed article and television appearances to charge that the administration had covered up his own debunking of reports that Iraq had bought uranium in Africa.

What he calls a "smear campaign" against the couple has catalyzed his transformation from nonpartisan diplomat - he worked closely with the first President Bush and his top aides during the first gulf war - to anti-Bush activist.

On Wednesday, a federal judge is expected to decide whether two reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, will go to jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigation into the leak. That the leaker appears willing to permit journalists to be incarcerated rather than taking public responsibility for his actions simply shows the leaker's "cravenness and cowardice," Mr. Wilson said.

It is not known what information, if any, Mr. Novak supplied to prosecutors, but he is not facing jail time.

Meanwhile, Ms. Wilson, 42, whose husband said she has used her married name both at work and in her personal life since their 1998 marriage, declined to speak for this article. She has guarded her privacy, with rare exceptions. She posed with her husband for a Vanity Fair photographer, wearing sunglasses and with a scarf over her blond hair. She drafted an op-ed article to correct what she felt were distortions of her and her husband's actions, but the C.I.A. would not authorize its publication, saying it would "affect the agency's ability to perform its mission."

Former C.I.A. officers differ on the impact of Mr. Novak's identification of Ms. Wilson, who had been working against weapons proliferation in Europe and elsewhere while posing as an analyst for a shell company in Boston, Brewster Jennings & Associates, set up by the agency.

Clandestine service officers working under such "nonofficial cover" - rather than the traditional guise of diplomat - are considered to hold the most sensitive and vulnerable jobs in intelligence, lacking the protection of diplomatic immunity if they are unmasked overseas. Disclosing the C.I.A. employment of officers under cover can endanger the officers, their operations and their agents, as well as violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the law that prompted the current leak investigation.

"This situation has been very hard on her, professionally and personally," said Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former C.I.A. case officer and a friend of Ms. Wilson. "Not only have you removed from the playing field a very knowledgeable counterproliferation officer at a time when we really need her services. But before this she was on a fast track as a candidate for senior management at the agency. With something like this, her career will never recover."

But other former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson's cover was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that Brewster Jennings was little more than a mailbox. Though she traveled regularly, Ms. Wilson, who speaks French, German and Greek, had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson, ended any pretense of having no government ties.

"At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency employee," said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990, who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career and calls her "one of the best, an excellent officer."

Yet outside the spy world, word of her real employment came as a shock. To have such a carefully nurtured identity shattered in a single stroke was traumatic, Mr. Wilson said. "Your whole network of personal relationships over 20 years are compromised," he said.

Ms. Wilson had to explain to friends and relatives that she had never leveled with them since joining the agency shortly after graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in journalism in 1984.

"My sister-in-law turned to my brother," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and said, 'Do you think Joe knew?' "

Joe knew. As their relationship grew serious after they met at a 1997 reception at the Turkish ambassador's residence, Valerie Plame revealed her real job to Mr. Wilson, who had a top secret clearance. Three months after they married, he retired from the State Department after a 23-year career that included an ambassadorship to two countries, Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe. Now he consults on business projects in Africa as J. C. Wilson International Ventures.

Their marriage was her second and his third; he is also the father of 26-year-old twins from his first marriage. Friends say that after the birth of their twins in 2000, Ms. Wilson suffered postpartum depression, which prompted her to become active in helping other mothers.

The Wilsons have had a low-key social life, friends say. Mr. Wilson said they had attended only one "A-list Washington party," given by Ben Bradlee, the retired Washington Post editor. Before July 2003, some neighbors knew them from the playground only as "Trevor and Samantha's mom and dad."

Their turn in the limelight changed that temporarily, as liberal celebrities embraced them; they were honored in late 2003 at a dinner at the guesthouse of the television producer Norman Lear, with guest list that included Warren Beatty.

The couple's actions in 2002 have become, in the polarized politics of the Iraq war, subject to divergent interpretation. All agree that Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in February 2002 at the C.I.A.'s request to assess reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium there. There the agreement ends.

In the version of his Republican critics, laid out in part by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Mr. Wilson's trip was a junket orchestrated by his wife. Further, the critics say, Mr. Wilson's findings on the uranium question were equivocal. But as a partisan Democrat, they say, he exploited his minor involvement to attack the president, asserting that Mr. Bush misled the American people by citing the questionable uranium claim in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Mr. Wilson has laid out his own account in interviews and in his memoir, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's C.I.A. Identity." The 514-page book, which features on the back cover photographs of Mr. Wilson with the first President Bush, President Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein, has sold 60,000 copies in hardcover, according to the publisher, Carroll & Graf. The just-published paperback includes an 11,000-word essay by Russ Hoyle, an investigative reporter recruited by Carroll & Graf to examine factual disputes raised by the case.

Mr. Wilson said that though his wife wrote a memorandum describing his expertise at the request of a C.I.A. superior, she did not propose him for the Niger trip. He scoffs at the notion that a trip to one of the poorest countries on earth, for which he was paid only his expenses, was some kind of prize.

He has acknowledged he may have misspoken about a few details, like the date he became aware of forged documents purporting to show a uranium sale. But conservatives' attacks on his credibility, he said, are merely an effort to distract Americans from a far graver fact: that the United States went to war on the basis of flimsy, distorted evidence.

"I'm deeply saddened that the debate before the war did not adequately take into consideration issues that a number of us had raised," Mr. Wilson said.

While his wife has shunned publicity, he has become an always-available news media voice, lending the weight of international experience and insider status to criticism of Mr. Bush's conduct of the war.

Despite conservatives' efforts to portray him as a left-wing extremist, he insisted he remained a centrist at heart. But after his tangle with the current administration, he admits "it will be a cold day in hell before I vote for a Republican, even for dog catcher."

Mr. Wilson ended a long interview in a downtown hotel when he realized he was late to pick up the twins. As the first gulf war loomed, and Mr. Wilson was the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein, his older twins, Joe and Sabrina, were 12 years old, and worried that their father might not make it out of Baghdad to join them in the United States, he said.

During this war with Iraq, the gravest danger to him has been political vilification. He and his wife, Mr. Wilson said, have tried to insulate their children from the hubbub that followed the leak of her name.

It has not always been easy. Once, when Trevor was 3, he recognized his father on yet another show.

"He banged on the TV," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and said, 'Dad, get out of the box!' "

THE PRESIDENT THAT CRIED ATTACK

Only a conservative IDIOT believes George W. Bush knows the truth, tells the truth or will ever be able to find it in the bright light of day.

July 3, 2005

The Two Wars of the Worlds

By FRANK RICH NYT OP-ED

ON the morning after George W. Bush spoke to the nation from Fort Bragg, Americans started marching off to Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds." Both halves of this double feature invoked 9/11, perfectly timed for this particular holiday. Ever since "Jaws," a movie set on the July Fourth weekend, broke box office records 30 summers ago, Independence Day has come to stand for terror as much as for freedom.

Decide for yourself if "War of the Worlds" is more terrifying than "Jaws." Either way, it's scarier than the president's speech. Yet the discrepancy between Mr. Spielberg's ability to whip up fear and Mr. Bush's inability isn't merely a matter of aesthetics. On Independence Day 2005, this terror gap is an ideal barometer for gauging the waning political power of a lame-duck president waging what increasingly looks like a lame-duck war.

As we saw on Tuesday night, doomsday isn't the surefire hit it used to be for Mr. Bush. Now that the rhetorical arsenal of W.M.D.'s and mushroom clouds is bare, he had little choice but to bring back that oldie but goodie, 9/11, as the specter of the doom that awaits us if we don't stay the course - his course - in Iraq. By the fifth time he did so, it was hard not to think of that legendary National Lampoon cover: "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog."

Planned or not, the sepulchral silence of Mr. Bush's military audience was the perfect dazed response to what was literally a summer rerun. The president gave almost the identical televised address, albeit with four fewer 9/11 references, at the Army War College in Pennsylvania in May 2004. It's so tired that this time around even the normally sympathetic Drudge site gave higher billing to reviews of "War of the Worlds." Fewer TV viewers tuned in than for any prime-time speech in Mr. Bush's presidency. A good thing too, since so much of what he said was, as usual, at odds with reality. The president pledged to "prevent Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban" a full week after Newsweek and The New York Times reported on a new C.I.A. assessment that the war may be turning Iraq into an even more effective magnet and training ground for Islamic militants than Afghanistan was for Al Qaeda in the 1980's and 90's.

"War of the Worlds" makes as many references to 9/11 as Mr. Bush did. The alien attack on America is the work of sleeper cells; the garments of the dead rain down on those fleeing urban apocalypse; poignant fliers are posted for The Missing. There is also a sterling American military that rides to the rescue. Deep in the credits for "War of the Worlds" is a thank-you to the Department of Defense and some half-dozen actual units that participated in the movie, from the Virginia Army National Guard to a Marine battalion from Camp Pendleton, Calif. Indeed, Mr. Spielberg seems to have had markedly more success in recruiting extras for his film than the Pentagon has had of late in drumming up troops for Iraq.

That's not the only way that "War of the Worlds" shows up Mr. Bush. In not terribly coded dialogue, the film makes clear that its Americans know very well how to distinguish a war of choice like that in Iraq from a war of necessity, like that prompted by Al Qaeda's attack on America. Tim Robbins - who else? - pops up to declare that when aliens occupy a country, the "occupations always fail." Even Tom Cruise's doltish teenage screen son is writing a school report on "the French occupation of Algeria."

Mr. Spielberg's movie illuminates, too, how Mr. Bush has flubbed the basic storytelling essential to sustain public support for his Iraq adventure. The president has made a tic of hammering in melodramatic movie tropes: good vs. evil, you're with us or you're with the terrorists, "wanted dead or alive," "bring 'em on," "mission accomplished." When you relay a narrative in that style, the audience expects you to stick to the conventions of the genre; the story can end only with the cavalry charging in to win the big final battle. That's how Mr. Spielberg deploys his platoons, "Saving Private Ryan"-style, in "War of the Worlds." By contrast, Mr. Bush never marshaled the number of troops needed to guarantee Iraq's security and protect its borders; he has now defined "mission accomplished" down from concrete victory to the inchoate spreading of democracy. To start off sounding like Patton and end up parroting Woodrow Wilson is tantamount to ambushing an audience at a John Wayne movie with a final reel by Frank Capra.

Both Mr. Bush's critics and loyalists at times misunderstand where his failure leaves America now. The left frets too much that the public just doesn't get it - that it is bamboozled by the administration and won't see the light until it digests the Downing Street memo. But even if they couldn't bring themselves to vote for John Kerry, most Americans do get it. A majority of the country view the Iraq war as "not worth it" and going badly. They intuitively sense that as USA Today calculated on Friday, there have been more U.S. military deaths (roughly a third more) in the year since Iraq got its sovereignty than in the year before. Last week an ABC News/Washington Post survey also found that a majority now believe that the administration "intentionally misled" us into a war - or, in the words of the Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration "fixed" the intelligence to gin up the mission.

Meanwhile, the war's die-hard supporters, now in the minority, keep clinging to the hope that some speech or Rovian stunt or happy political development in the furtherance of democratic Iraqi self-government can turn public opinion around. Dream on. The most illuminating of all the recent poll numbers was released by the Pew Research Center on June 13: the number of Americans who say that "people they know are becoming less involved emotionally" with news of the war has risen from 26 percent in May 2004 to 44 percent now. Like the war or not, Americans who do not have a relative or neighbor in the fight are simply tuning Iraq out.

The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf. That's why a film director engaging in utter fantasy can arouse more anxiety about a possible attack on America than our actual commander in chief hitting us with the supposed truth.

If anything, we're back where we were in the lazy summer of 2001, when the president was busy in Crawford ignoring an intelligence report titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" and the news media were more preoccupied with a rash of "Jaws"-like shark attacks than with Al Qaeda. The sharks are back, and the "missing girl" drama of Natalee Holloway has echoed the Chandra Levy ur-text. Even the World Trade Center is making a comeback, if we are to believe that the new Freedom Bunker unveiled for ground zero might ever be built.

AS those on all sides of the Iraq argument have said, the only way for Mr. Bush to break through this torpor is to tell Americans the truth. Donald Rumsfeld did exactly that when he said a week ago that the insurgency in Iraq might last as long as 12 years. If that's so, then what? Go ahead and argue that pulling out precipitously or setting a precise exit timetable is each a bad option, guaranteeing that Iraq will become even more of a jihad central than this ill-conceived war has already made it. But what is Plan C?

Mr. Bush could have addressed that question honestly on Tuesday night. Instead of once more cooking the books - exaggerating the number of coalition partners, the number of battle-ready Iraqi troops, the amount of non-American dollars in the Iraq kitty - he could have laid out the long haul in hard facts, explaining the future costs in manpower, money and time, and what sacrifices he proposes for meeting them. He could have been, as he is fond of calling himself, a leader.

It was a blown opportunity, and it's hard to see that there will be another chance. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the current war's unpopularity now matches the Gallup findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968. As the prospect of midterm elections pumps more and more genuine fear into the hearts of Republicans up for re-election, it's the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will be in its last throes. Is the commander in chief so isolated in his bubble that he does not realize this? G.W.B., phone home.