THE LOW POST: An Undeniable Embarrassment

Because the old Karl Rove understood that there's only one real sin in American politics, and that's apologizing. You act like you know what you're doing, people in this country will buy whatever you're selling. They'll eat chocolate-covered cotton. They'll eat worse. They'll crawl on their knees to eat wet dogshit and beg for more. You just can't ever flinch as you ladle it onto their plate.

The old Bushies understood this, but this newest incarnation is too broken and demoralized to remember the strategies that got them to the top. They are being held back now, ironically, by the tiny, anemic quotient of restraint and decency parasitically embedded in their policies. If Bush had simply invaded Iraq, ransacked the place in search of WMDs, seized its oil wells, captured Saddam Hussein and impaled him on a pike, and then declared victory and pulled the troops out, leaving the non-oil-producing regions of the country to tear themselves apart in an insane chaos of civil war and religious violence, his approval rating would still be in the high sixties, maybe even the seventies.

Instead, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" prophesy has sadly come to pass -- but why was that inevitable? Why couldn't we just break shit and then saunter out of the store, both middle fingers trained at the cashier's face? After all, we're America! Who would stop us? The world would have been horrified, but to hell with the world; here in America, all people care about is American casualties and American taxes. If our soldiers were out of Iraq now and we weren't still spending a billion bucks a minute on this war, most of America would still be on board with the original decision to go in -- even if the Iraq we eventually left behind was a Rwanda-like, smoldering-cemetery of a state. After all, the American population has successfully blown off plenty of massacres before -- even ones we helped cause, like Indonesia in the Sixties and Guatemala in the Seventies and Eighties. Iraq could have been the same kind of easily ignored little coffee stain on the American conscience.

But that train has left the station, and the reason for that is that this administration apparently really is wedded to its nutty dream of building a Switzerland full of happy neo-capitalist Muslims in the middle of Asia Minor. If Bush had been just a little more evil, just a little more of the cheap, vicious fuckhead we all thought he was for so long, we'd be out of Iraq right now and engaged in the next policy "success" -- i.e. a "Tehran Spring" and a subsequent taxidermy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the "Mission Accomplished" money-shot cued up for the first Monday in November 2008.

Instead, it's Ahmadinejad who is toying with us, as the Bush administration flounders in the lethal middle ground between mindless military bravado and reluctant, halfhearted consideration for the constraints of civilization and international law. Having entered Iraq without any semblance of an occupation plan, our blockheaded leader is belatedly acting like a man concerned with his legacy as a nation-builder, a Dr. Frankenstein who cannot bring himself to kill his monstrous dream of Iraqi democracy. And it's this fatal weakness that is producing perhaps the very worst consequence of this war, the stunning international political victory of Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying Iranian reptile.

Last week, two things happened. The first is that Bush received al-Hakim, a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric who has very close ties to Iran and Ahmadinejad. Bush is cozying up to al-Hakim because he can't afford to kiss Ahmadinejad's ass publicly and al-Hakim is the next best thing, a person whose cooperation will be necessary if the security situation in Iraq is to be improved. By itself this was a kind of humiliation for Bush, a recognition that he can't provide for Iraq's security by himself, even with the world's mightiest army, and still needs to play supplicant to some prehistoric ascetic in a beard and cape.