Liars, my father taught me, usually are cowards. And GW Bush fits that to a T. Oh he will fake courage, but he is above all else a mere political tactician unable to think strategically. That's why he had Rove on board so high up: policy was to be the handmaiden of politics. Now, Bush-- who didn't care about history, according to Woodward, because "we'll all be dead by then"-- has suddenly become obsessed with history marking him as exactly what he had been through the whole of his biography: an profligate failure and deep disappointment to his "Poppy." So Iran stands, not as a critical American strategic problem (that's just a part of propaganda a la Cheney) but as an excuse for a bold Bush move, should that prove to admirably divert his history as president from his biography as a dry drunk. Anything else matters little, for as Nixon told me: do not worry about polls falling to the floor because then you are on your own to do what you want and if you succeed, the polls will rise as quickly as they fell.

The problem is not Bush, and not the neocons. The problem is that the American people want to avoid citizenship responsibility so they are willing avoid their political liability, to sacrifice freedom of choice for freedom from uncertainty and complexity. This is a nation of at least 40% "Good Germans," (many indeed of German heritage, the largest immigrant group in America from Europe). They will swallow manure as if it were Snikers bars whenever the alternative seems to suggest complexity or uncertainty. There is a reason why America is the world's greatest consumer of acetaminophen!

Let's look at the World Trade Center. In 1993 an attempt was made to topple it with a rented truck. It failed and so we saw it as a criminal incident, the FBI finding and the Federal Prosecutors duly prosecuting the perpetrators in Federal Court. Our reaction was to increase truck rental reporting-- after all, the Oklahoma bombing also involved rented vehicles-- and create a national nuts list for all police departments. Thus the problem was loose controls-- hence OUR fault-- and the solution was tighter controls on rental vehicles and fertilizer compounds.

On 9/11, four jumbo airliners going coast to coast were sky-jacked within 20 minutes. They were all but one turned into missiles against the WTC and the Pentagon by teams of suicide bombers. Now this was war. No longer some loose screws in police security but a "Pearl Harbor" against America. We were in global war and military "transformation."

But what is the difference between 1993 and 2001, other than failure vs. success?

The same people that ran 1993 ran 2001. How is it that one is merely a police methods foul-up at tracking and the other is war on America by some marvelous enemy global super-enemy, the Islamo-fascists?

Hidden from view is the fact that the 19 shahids who were looking for a way to "get" America, repeatedly rode First Class across the nation and constantly found that the pilot's cabin door is always wide open. And this, they noted, despite the fact that as a result of a string of skyjackings in the 1970s, it was made law that on all passenger planes the pilot's cabin would be impenetrable and there would be two hidden sky-marshals on every plane.

This security regulation was not to be implemented. Why? According to one American Airlines official queried after 9/11: "The pilot's cabin door needs to be open because, "if you pay so much money for a First Class seat you have to right to see that someone is driving the damned thing." So much for the security mentality of the airlines industry.

But more to the point, instead of publicly recognizing our defect, as we did in 1993 about WTC security, we paint the perpetrators as some sort of magic devils that can take over passenger aircraft no matter what we do, so we must got to kill them all over the whole world, wherever their alQaeda masses reside.

In the end, we quit our search for binLaden (keeping secret his death) and linked Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and WMDs in order to invade his country, put in permanent bases to protect the massive oil exploration and exploitation we expected our companies to do. To this day-- though voters took control of Congress from the Republicans in 2006 out of disgust with their do-nothing corruption, perversity and also in protest for how the Iraq War is going-- they did so only by small margins in each district and clearly did not wrestle with the competing policy perspective of the two sides. That would risk a slide into the murky pool of complexity and uncertainty.

In sum, Hulsman's historic American, I would argue-- the moral realist-- only existed after World War II to 2001. The way Americans accepted Bush's sociopathic Maoist view of democracy through the barrel of a gun, is clinically very significant. You see, Mr. Hulsman, the idealists of the 60s who brought to American academia the concept of "meaningful dialogue" all aged educated in college on social babble, evading math, science and the complexities of reality. By 2000, they had reached middle age and desperately needed certainty through simplicity. And that was offered by the Evangelical Pied Piper, the semi-doc Billy Graham, who "saved" GW Bush from the bottom of a bottle by introducing him to Jesus. Rich Bigot Graham proved what the media always knew: that Americans will pay big bucks for a "nice story"-- in no way does it have to be truth-- that can serve as a rug under which they can hide all the complexities and uncertainties of reality.

In no time, literate Americans outnumbered the illiterates (the latter chose Crack and metanephrine cooking instead Jesus for a "high") raising their hands, head dorsiflexed and eyes closed, reciting Scripture instead of reading facts in mega-churches. Bible-babble became what the New Left 60s generation revolution resorted to when it passed into its 50s-- the opiate of the masses.

So now, Bush can mix two parts fear with ten parts faith and voila, a President that follows its gut to its end-product...the perfect premise to make politically popular to send someone else's son on a "Crusade" to kill those filthy Islamofascists.

I defy Mr. Hulsman to explain why it is wrong to say that America's "unipolar moment" is now in the hands of sub-human primates. The neocon success was in realizing that they are indeed on the Planet of the Apes. They knew that terrible things will frighten and stampede these "dumb goyim" apes and they, the neocons, can guide the fear propelled stampede into massacring Islamics from the air and even on the ground. The Zionazis, Mr. Hulsman (as you found out when you were summarily eradicated, as if a Soviet apparatchik under Stalin, from the Heritage Foundation) are filling America with fear and hate, supported by the Christian Right that claims that the Second Coming of Jesus will only be when Israel dominates the Middle East. As a Christian of deep faith, I find this vile sacrilege.

So please don't expect the rampaging apes to suddenly stop, read your book authored with that Brit Lieven and suddenly become moral realists. They first must vomit out the necon parasites in their bellies; the very neocons that drive them insane with fear and rage. But most fearful is that it is not the neocons who will suffer when the stampede stops-- they'll hide out in their villas on the Riviera of that supposed "anti-Semite" nation, France. It is the mass of Jewish Americans who did more than anyone to get people to stop stampeding and climb back up the evolutionary tree in order to become moral realists.

So, Bush will attack or not attack Iran for the most mundane of reasons because he can't mentally process above "mundane." And then, the most moral, intellectual and realist of Americans, our Jewish brethren, will be scapegoated when it goes even worse that Iraq.

Let us cry for our America, Mr. Hulsman. But to save it we must want to save it as much as the Bible-babblists wanted to "save" it; and we must be as willing to stand on street corners-- rain, sleet, hail or snow-- to pitch the importance of moral realism. Those of us who love America-- as I do, having wondered half way around the world to come to this Paradise of Freedom (and now am the father of 100% Americans); let us begin on the corner, not at the podium of Wash DC think-tanks.

Daniel E. Teodoru