[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback. ]

In recent months, among other uproars and scandals, Americans learned that the Defense Department has been collecting intelligence on and tracking domestic antiwar activists; that, since 2001, the National Security Agency (NSA) has had a presidentially authorized, law-breaking, warrantless surveillance program to listen in on the international phone calls of possibly tens of thousands of U.S. citizens; that, with the help of three of the four major telephone companies, it also has had a data-mining operation -- "the largest database ever assembled in the world" -- linked, at least one case, directly into a major telecommunication carrier's network core ("where all its data are stored"), giving it access to almost all telephone calls made in this country; that, as Director of the CIA, Porter Goss, a Bush-appointed, Cheney-backed, ex-congressman, had whipped out his lie detector and conducted an internal war and purge of an agency viewed by the administration as little better than the Axis of Evil, tearing its upper ranks apart via numerous resignations and retirements; that, meanwhile, Goss's third-in-command, a fellow with the evocative name of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo (think: fog o' intelligence), was being investigated for possibly granting illegal Agency sweetheart contracts to a pal already involved in another major Washington corruption scandal (and don't even get me started on those poker games and prostitutes); that Goss, in turn, was pushed out of the CIA by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte, head of a new uber-intelligence "office" (ODNI) meant to coordinate the whole sprawling "intelligence community," and his second in command, Air Force General Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA (who oversaw those surveillance and data-mining operations for the administration); that the President then nominated the active-duty general to take Goss's place as the head of the country's major civilian spy agency -- in his Senate hearings, he would offer the following comment on Goss's tenure: "You get a lot more authority when the work force doesn't think it's amateur hour on the top floor"; that Republican and Democratic Senators, having questioned the credibility of a military man who had overseen a patently illegal surveillance program on American citizens for years and then defended it vigorously, promptly collapsed in a non-oppositional heap of praise, and rubber-stamped him director by a vote of 78-15; that in the ever-upward-rippling CIA-agent-outing case of Valerie Plame -- about which a stonewalling Goss said, while still head of the House Intelligence Committee, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation" -- rumors of Karl Rove's indictment continued to circulate; while Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reserved the right to call the Vice President, whose office seems ever more in his sightlines, to testify in former aide I. Lewis Libby's trial next year.

All this news involving what we call "intelligence" -- and much more -- played out on the front pages of the nation's newspapers and on TV, replete with copious leaks from within the intelligence community, threats from the White House to prosecute journalists reporting those leaks, outraged press editorials about sundry intelligence topics, and a great deal of heat and noise.

Each scandal came and went, the news spotlight flickering from one to the next; and yet, as Hayden's testimony before the Senate made clear, just about no one seemed to have the urge to ask the obvious what's-it-all-about-Alfie question. Nobody wondered what this thing called "intelligence," over which so many tens of thousands of analysts, code breakers, and agents labor with so many tens of billions of our dollars, really is; what sort of knowledge about our planet all those acronymic intelligence organizations really deliver. The value of the "intelligence community" to deliver this thing called "intelligence," whatever mistakes or missteps might be made, is simply taken for granted.

Department of Redundancy

Let's back up a moment, though, and consider what any of us out here can know about the alphabet soup of the American Intelligence Community or IC (as it likes to term itself). Start with the simplest thing: There's obviously a lot we don't know. Much of this world is, by definition, plunged into the darkness of secrecy, including untold billions of dollars hidden away in highly classified "black" budgets. Moreover, the blanket of intelligence secrecy (regularly broken by leaks to the media from so many unhappy members of that roiling "community") has grown ever more encompassing, given the Bush administration's general mania for secrecy. So whatever numbers follow have to be taken with a large grain of unverifiable salt. But we do know this: The IC is simply enormous with, seemingly, a life of its own -- imperially vast, a veritable mountain of proliferating agencies, groups, and organizations, larger by multiples than that of any other country -- and growing more enormous almost literally as you read.

Until fairly recently, newspaper articles regularly cited an iconic 15 civilian and military intelligence agencies in that all-American "community," a number now raised to 16 at the official website of the IC, and that figure doesn't even include Negroponte's new Office of the Director of National Intelligence with its near billion-dollar budget.

In addition to the Central Intelligence Agency, the gang of 16 includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA (surveillance and code-breaking), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO-- satellites), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA -- mapping), all under the aegis of the Pentagon, as well as the intelligence agencies of each of the Armed Services and the Coast Guard. Our second defense department, the Department of Homeland Security, has its own expanding intelligence arm with a mouthful of a name: the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. (No self-respecting agency in our government would be without one!) So do the FBI, the State Department, the Energy Department, the Drug Enforcement Department, and the Treasury Department. But the iconic 16 (or 17) don't include numerous other intelligence groupings tucked away in the government. Some outsiders doing the counting have come up with upwards of 30 entities in the IC. That assumedly represents a whole heap of secret knowledge and, certainly, a whole heap of taxpayer money.

Recently, in a slip of the tongue, Mary Margaret Graham, deputy director for national intelligence collection under Negroponte, offered (for only the third time since the founding of the CIA) a public estimate of the overall annual U.S. intelligence budget -- $44 billion just to cover the iconic 15. Undoubtedly, that's a low-ball figure, but as a crude measure of IC growth, consider that it's almost $18 billion higher than the 1998 IC budget -- that being the last time such an estimate came our way.

Of the various intelligence outfits, the CIA, the IC's star of the big and small screen, is the most famous (or infamous, depending on your address on this planet). Its budget is estimated at perhaps $5 billion a year and, by another ballpark estimate, it has 16,000 employees; yet, in budgetary and payroll terms, that makes up a relatively small part of the intelligence landscape, dwarfed by the Pentagon's intelligence organizations. The NSA has a budget estimated at $6-8 billion yearly; the NRO, $6-8 billion; the NGA, $3 billion; the DIA, $1 billion; and that's not even counting the sizeable intelligence outfits run by the four individual services.

Cumulatively, an estimated 80-85% (or possibly more) of the total U.S. intelligence budget is controlled by the Pentagon, the 800 pound intelligence gorilla in the IC room -- and in the midst of a growth spurt that's threatening to send it soaring into the one-ton range.

As with so much else in these last years, the real story in the intelligence community seems to have had less to do with the production of, or analysis of, intelligence than with its militarization. Known for his skill as a bureaucratic infighter, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld conducted a tough rear-guard action against the creation of Negroponte's 9/11 Commission-sponsored ODNI; then, upon "giving in," he managed to get what was essentially a Pentagon veto over Negroponte's power to meddle with military intelligence. He also lobbied successfully in Congress "to curtail much of Negroponte's clout over personnel and budgets." (According to Doyle McManus and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times, when Negroponte did try to make changes at the Defense Department, he was told "to take a flying leap.")

Far more important, just as in recent years the Pentagon has moved into areas once controlled by the State Department, so Rumsfeld has for several years been moving aggressively to infringe on the CIA's key turf, "human intelligence" or "humint." (Think: operatives out in the field doing whatever.) Not long after 9/11, according to Barton Gelman of the Washington Post, Rumsfeld issued a written order to end his "near total dependence on [the] CIA" for humint. Then, using "reprogrammed funds" not authorized by Congress, he established a secret organization, the Strategic Support Branch, to provide him "with independent tools for the ‘full spectrum of humint operations.'"

In March 2003, he set up his right-hand man, neocon Stephen Cambone, as the first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence. (Cambone is now regularly referred to as the Pentagon's "intelligence czar.") Cambone, in turn, took on as his deputy, the notorious, born-again, evangelizing Lieutenant-General William G. Boykin, who plunged himself into controversy in 2003 by saying of Islam, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol," and of President Bush, "The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." Naturally, he rose in the administration hierarchy as a result.

Rumsfeld charged them both with "reorganizing" -- meaning, of course, expanding -- Pentagon intelligence operations through "the Special Operations Command, which reports to Rumsfeld and falls outside the orbit controlled by John Negroponte." They were to expand specifically into the CIA's "humint" area, creating intelligence that would "prepare the battlefield" -- in part, by sending covert operations teams to spy in various countries where no battlefield was even faintly in sight. Cambone now "oversees 130 full-time personnel and more than 100 contractors in an office whose responsibilities include domestic counterintelligence, long-range threat planning and budgeting for new technologies." And only a month ago, Rumsfeld gave the "green light" for yet another new group to be set up -- the Defense Joint Intelligence Operations Center, to further "centralize" intelligence.

For some years now, the American IC has focused much attention on the issue of global nuclear proliferation, but think of these as the real "proliferation wars," inside the only world, the only reality, that truly matters. The results, no matter which agencies top the list of winners, add up to an unsightly, ungainly Department of Redundancy and Overlap. While the NSA may, for instance, be conducting extensive data-mining operations, so is another new Pentagon organization, the Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA (on which more below). You don't have to be inside the IC to see it as a vast bureaucratic landscape for fierce turf wars, power grabs, mini-empire building, squabbling, scrabbling, coups and purges, alarums and preemptive attacks; nor do you need special insider's knowledge to recognize that the basic urge to know the world in a deeper way, to anticipate what one's enemies (and friends) have in mind, to grasp how they think and what they may do, takes, at best, a distinct second place to the complex politics of, the real and necessary knowledge of, the intelligence world itself.

Intelligence Empire Builders in a Growth Universe

Put another way, the real story of American intelligence is simply growth and bureaucratic infighting. The Bush administration, supposedly made up of "conservatives" who loath (and once endlessly railed against) "big government," have ensured that, like the Pentagon, the IC, already an entangled monstrosity when they arrived, would experience its greatest growth spurt in memory, becoming an ever more bloated example of hopeless big government. This reflects a more general pattern clearly visible in the creation of the administration's pride and joy, the Department of Homeland Security, another vast, bloated, inefficient agency filled with redundancy, riddled by turf wars, plagued by inefficiency -- and just to make matters worse still, the creation of an ever-expanding US Northern Command (Northcom) for the defense of -- you guessed it -- the "homeland."

Within the IC, consider but three examples of Bush administration growth policies:

Start with the CIA, an agency in the process of being downgraded. It has, in fact, lost its central position as the President's daily briefer -- Negroponte does that now -- and the agency is no longer his covert right-arm either. As intelligence expert Thomas Powers wrote recently: "Historically the CIA had a customer base of one -- the president. When its primacy in reporting to the White House was taken away, the agency was being told in effect that henceforth it would be talking to itself." But talking, it turns out, is hardly everything in the IC.

In the very period when it was slipping down the pole of influence, its forces on the ground were ramping up. The Agency has opened or reopened 20 stations and bases abroad, experienced a flood of new recruits, and, since 2001, tripled the number of case officers it has in the field -- without as yet coming anywhere close to "a presidential directive, announced in late 2004, to increase the number of case officers and intelligence analysts by an additional 50 percent."

Or take Negroponte's ODNI operation. When originally suggested by the 9/11 commission and approved by Congress, it was to be a lean, mean coordination office meant to bring the sprawling IC under some control. Its staff of perhaps 750 was to lop the fat and overlap out of the IC. Instead, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, it has undergone "rapid growth," now has a staff of over 1,500, and a budget of nearly $1 billion -- "about one-third the size of all CIA funding in years before… Sept. 11, 2001" -- without yet having any significant accomplishments (other, of course, than its own growth).

Or, to return to the Pentagon, consider the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which started as a small office to protect military facilities and personnel, but in the last years has "grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority." As CIFA garnered more power, it also gained "the ability to propose missions to Army, Navy and Air Force units, which combined have about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian investigators in the United States and abroad." At the same time, according to that NBC Investigative Unit, it is becoming "the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community… Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies." Recently, CIFA reportedly "contracted with Computer Sciences Corp. to buy identity-masking software, which could allow it to create fake Web sites and monitor legitimate U.S. sites without leaving clues that it had been there."

Now, multiply what happened at the CIA, ODNI, and CIFA, across 17-30 major and minor organizations, all sensing financial good times and looking for expansive "intelligence" missions to "protect" us all And so, as Kurt Vonnegut might have written, it goes.

Thirty Flew into the Cuckoo's Nest

There is, of course, no way for an outsider -- or probably any insider either -- to keep track of, or make sense of, this imperial mess. In the this-way-the-madness category, consider just how blind to the larger impulsions of the intelligence world you have to be to decide to reorganize, coordinate, and simplify it, so that information-sharing and the like become normal ways of life, by placing yet another "office" on top of the hodgepodge of powerful competitors already in existence. You would have to be nearly brain-dead not to predict that such a new office would have no choice but to follow the well-beaten path of expansion, develop its own institutional base, its own institutional prerogatives, and its own turf, only adding to the chaos -- or wither and die.

This is, by now, a process that should be as predictable as that at the Pentagon when it comes to the competing weapons systems of the four services. In the most recent Department of Defense budget, for instance, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, supposedly intent on "transforming" the military into a leaner, more agile, more high-tech fighting force, let every major weapons system, no matter how useless or redundant, pass through essentially untouched and with not a single one cut.

With the IC, add in another factor: Even if all its competing parts really did add up to a "community" -- rather than a group of warring, bureaucratic mini-states on a collective proliferation mission -- what kind of "intelligence" could possibly come out of such a conglomerate entity? Try to imagine these organizations, each filled with thousands of employees, most of them believing in intelligence and that they are in the process of delivering it, sorting through and pouring out information of every sort. Globally, all those billions of telephone calls, cell-phone calls, letters, and emails to be monitored, all those satellite photos to be checked and interpreted, all that data to be mined, all that territory to be mapped, all that "humint" to sort through, not to speak of the "open-source" material in the media, on-line, in foreign documents of every sort, spewing into our world in a Babel of languages and images.

From such a tangled web of intelligence organizations, fighting for turf, squirreling away money in black accounts, running covert operations (not to speak of secret prisons and interrogations, kidnappings and assassinations), surveilling everyone in hearing or sight, and monitoring the universe, undoubtedly comes a tangled mass of information, however computerized, beyond the ken of any set of human beings. This is the definition not of "intelligence," but of information overkill. It is a perfect formula either for drowning in data or cherry-picking only the data and analyses that suit your preexisting plans and urges.

You can find hints of this problem in many news pieces on individual intelligence programs. For instance, that NBC Investigative Unit mentioned earlier cited "Pentagon observers" who worried that, "in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military's expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data." Seymour Hersh in a recent New Yorker piece on the NSA surveillance and data-mining programs similarly quoted a "Pentagon consultant" this way: "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focused and not productive… It's intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you're looking and what you're after."

Almost by definition, what has to emerge from the IC much of the time is essentially the opposite of "intelligence," whatever that might be. We out here often fret about being barraged by information; now, imagine a world filled with hopeless reams and streams of information, a world in which any piece of information will be but another needle in an endless series of haystacks. In a sense, the minute you begin "mining" billions of phone calls, you've already admitted that, in information terms, you're at a loss.

In search of information on the inner workings of our world, no one reasonable would ever set up a system like the IC. Were you forced to reform such an already existing mechanism, you would certainly cut all those agencies and organizations down to, at most, two competing ones -- for alternate views of the world. Not that that would be ideal either.

For a maximum of a few million dollars, you might put almost any fifty knowledgeable people in a building with normal computers, access to the usual search engines, libraries, and open-source information, and you would surely arrive at a more comprehensible, saner view of our planet and what to do on it than anything $44 billion and a bevy of militarized agencies could produce. If, in fact, you had simply read Tomdispatch.com (produced for next to nothing) on a number of areas of the world over the last few years, you would have had more coherent, accurate "intelligence" than the IC seems to have been able to provide much of the time. And let's not forget that human beings, no matter what they say on the phone, in emails, or even to their closest associates in private often don't themselves understand what they are about to do or why they are doing it, and so are essentially unpredictable.

In other words, whatever the IC may be, it can't be a system for the reasonable delivery of "intelligence" to American leaders. If you need proof of this, just consider one thing: On the single most important subject for every administration in the last decades of the last century, the Intelligence Community simply didn't have a clue. With so many of its resources focused on that other empire, the USSR, they were incapable of predicting its collapse even as it was happening. Most of them didn't believe it even after it happened.

Oh, and here's one more awkward thing to throw into the intelligence mix. The administration that has done more than any other in recent memory to expand the IC, that has poured untold billions into ever more active intelligence capacities, has had a visible, violent allergy to intelligence. After the endless sorting of information, after the blind alleys and lying informants, after all that pressure from the Vice President as well as other top officials, and who knows what else, when the IC actually got it right, it made no difference whatsoever -- as in the daily briefing handed to the President on that lazy August day in 2001 in Crawford, Texas ("Bin Laden determined to strike in US") or on al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein, or on Niger yellowcake and those infamous "16 words" in the President's 2003 State of the Union Address. In those cases, the intelligence was simply ignored in favor of exaggerated or doctored versions of the same, or lies based on nothing at all (except perhaps a blinding desire to invade Iraq). For $44 billion dollars a year, this administration still had to set up a small separate operation inside the Pentagon, Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, to search for the "intelligence" that would take them where they wanted to go anyway.

If the IC actually worked as an effective intelligence delivery system, we would be a genius nation, a Mensa among states. We would have an invaluable secret repository of knowledge that would be the equivalent of the destroyed ancient Library of Alexandria (which reputedly collected all the knowledge in the then-known world). And you would have to wonder, looking back on the last years: In that case, how exactly could we be quite so dumb?

But let's consider the obvious: While undoubtedly filled with hard-working, thoughtful intelligence analysts, producing -- sometimes -- on-target intelligence, the IC is not in any normal sense a system for the delivery of "intelligence"; that is, operative information through which our leaders could take in the world, its dangers and its possibilities. At the very least, that is only the most tertiary aspect of its operations. And yet, based on claims about the crucial nature of intelligence in our world, it continues to expand without cease.

If not primarily for intelligence, then what is it for, if anything? Does anyone know? Does it even matter? Those are certainly questions worth asking. What we lack, in helping us begin to answer them, is an American John Le Carré, who could bring back in striking form from the strange netherworld of the IC, as Le Carré so devastatingly did from the Cold War world of superpower espionage, a real sense of the lay of the land.

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.]

Jim Lobe and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com have both posted columns about the latest episode in the neocons’ relentless Iran disinformation campaign. A Canadian paper, the National Post, published an article on May 19 by Iranian-American journalist Amir Taheri reporting that on May 15, the Iranian Parliament had passed a law establishing “separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean).”

The story was picked up by UPI and reproduced in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere, and represented as fact by U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. “Despicable,” declared McCormack, adding that Iran was just like “Germany under Hitler.” “This is reminiscent of the Holocaust,” echoed Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis.”

The National Post pulled the story within hours, as it became apparent that no such law had been passed or even discussed. On May 19, the day after the story had appeared, the newspaper published a piece challenging it. But like malicious slanders that linger in the air even after being disproved, the mental image of Iranian religious minorities, badged, marching off to their doom, will remain in the public mind. So this was a success for the disinfo apparatus.

And there’ve been other successes. The masses have been indoctrinated with the conviction that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, is defying the “international community” and international law, and is plotting the destruction of Israel. The latter charge is bolstered by the report that President Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the map. But he never actually said that. He quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini, who died 17 years ago, as stating that the occupation of Jerusalem would be erased from the page of history, which is a rather different statement. No matter. The Washington line is that Iran wants to use nukes to annihilate the Jews.

Preparing to attack Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam (“a new Hitler”) might turn over weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda terrorists who could then produce a mushroom cloud over New York. It was all nonsense, subsequently debunked, but in the interim the lies accomplished their purpose: to generate fear. The neocon disinformation specialists are at it again, confident they can fool the masses twice or three times as they pursue their project for a Southwest Asian empire. And maybe they’re right. They must take comfort in poll results that show most Americans would favor military strikes against Iran if it proceeds with its (imagined) nuclear weapons program. They know most Americans can’t find Iran on the map, and don’t know that it’s bordered on either side by U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, surrounded by U.S. bases in those countries as well as Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait, that it is bordered by the oil-rich Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south. They know that most Americans have short historical memories, do not realize that Iran hasn’t attacked any country in its modern history or that the last time the U.S. successfully intervened in Iran it deposed a democratic regime, empowered the vicious Shah, and set the stage for the massive anti-Shah popular uprising of 1979. They know that most Americans are clueless when it comes to the nature of nuclear technology, and that the mushroom-cloud image is the most potent fear weapon they can deploy as they set Iran up.

Their embarrassments and setbacks notwithstanding, the warmongers continue to dish out the bullshit, the psy-ops directed at the American people -- who to the extent that they wise up, constitute their real and natural enemy.

[Abbas Amanat is a professor of history at Yale and author of the forthcoming "In Search of Modern Iran."]

IT is easy to label Iran's quest for nuclear energy a dangerous adventure with grave regional and international repercussions. It is also comforting to heap scorn on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his earlier denial of the Holocaust and his odious call for the obliteration of the state of Israel. The rambling intransigence expressed in his recent letter to President Bush offers ample insight into this twisted mindset. Yet there is something deeper in Iran's story than the extremist utterances of a messianic president and the calculated maneuvering of the hard-line clerical leadership that stands behind him.

We tend to forget that Iran's insistence on its sovereign right to develop nuclear power is in effect a national pursuit for empowerment, a pursuit informed by at least two centuries of military aggression, domestic meddling, skullduggery and, not least, technological denial by the West. Every schoolchild in Iran knows about the C.I.A.-sponsored 1953 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Even an Iranian with little interest in his or her past is conscious of how Iran throughout the 19th and 20th centuries served as a playground for the Great Game.

Iranians also know that, hard as it may be for latter-day Americans and Europeans to believe, from the 1870's to the 1920's Russia and Britain deprived Iran of even basic technology like the railroad, which was then a key to economic development. At various times, both powers jealously opposed a trans-Iranian railroad because they thought it would threaten their ever-expanding imperial frontiers. When it was finally built, the British, Russian (and American) occupying forces during the Second World War made full use of it (free of charge), calling Iran a "bridge of victory" over Nazi Germany. They did so, of course, after Winston Churchill forced the man who built the railroad, Reza Shah Pahlavi, to abdicate and unceremoniously kicked him out of the country.

Not long after, a similar Western denial of Iran's economic sovereignty resulted in a dramatic showdown that had fatal consequences for the country's fragile democracy and left lasting scars on its national consciousness. The oil nationalization movement of 1951 to 1953 under Mossadegh was opposed by Britain, and eventually by its partner in profit, the United States, with the same self-righteousness that today colors their views of the Iranian yearning for nuclear energy. ...

The crowded room felt like a sauna, a natural effect of the scorching sun hitting the tin roof and the lack of a fan or air conditioner to ease the desert heat. Everyone was talking about the "Wine Route," the Israeli government's plan for a series of farms and wineries designed to draw tourists to the Negev, and the latest insult to its marginalized Bedouin population.

"It is high time to strategize," one person said. "There is no way to oppose it," another responded. This heated discussion went on for several minutes until people began settling down on the mats and pillows adorning the concrete floor.

The meeting's organizer, a coordinator from the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, asked our hosts to speak. One after another, the Bedouin men stood up to relate their personal stories. They all told of the state-sanctioned abuse carried out against their community. Injustice followed injustice to produce a merciless tale of expulsion, violence, repression and deception.

Ali Abu Sheita recounted how his parents had been torn from their tribal land and transferred to a barren region where for years they had had to walk fifteen kilometers with their camels and donkeys just to bring water to the village. Yet in the Jewish village nearby, Abu Sheita continued, pipes delivered water directly to every sink. Halil al-Aseiby pointed to the high-voltage electric poles just outside the shack, emphasizing the regulation that forbids "unrecognized Bedouins" from connecting their homes to the power grid. "Even people who need to keep life-saving medicine refrigerated do not receive an exception," he said. Another man suddenly waved a demolition order that was pasted on his "illegal" shack on April 25. "Any day now," he said, "the bulldozers might arrive."

These Bedouins are Israeli citizens just as I am; their only crime is that they are not Jewish.

Bedouins are the indigenous people of Israel's arid Negev Desert. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, approximately 60,000 Bedouins lived in the area, but following the 1948 war only 11,000 or so remained; the rest fled or were expelled to Jordan and Egypt. Under the directives of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, those who remained in Israel were uprooted from the lands they had inhabited and were concentrated in the northeastern part of the Negev, a mostly barren area known as the "enclosure zone," while the more fertile western part of the Negev was reserved for Jewish settlement.

Throughout the 1950s and until the mid-1960s, a considerable portion of their ancestral lands was confiscated and registered as state land. In the 1970s about half of the Bedouin population was moved once again by the Israeli government, this time into seven townships. The idea was to concentrate the Bedouin population within a small area that makes up only a very small percentage of their original tribal lands, the land from which they had been expelled. These Bedouins had to give up all claims to their ancestral land in order to be granted the dubious privilege of living in these overcrowded townships.

The remaining half of the Bedouin population, which today totals about 75,000 people, were unwilling to give up their property rights and are now scattered across the Negev in forty-five villages that have never been recognized by the state.

I visited one of these villages recently with the Negev Coexistence Forum. No more than twenty-five minutes from my small but nice air-conditioned apartment are a series of Bedouin shantytowns. None of the homes in these unrecognized villages are connected to electricity grids, running water, a sewer network or telephone lines. There are no paved roads leading to the villages, and as a result, emergency services cannot reach them quickly, while access to other basic services--health, education and welfare--is difficult and limited.

These Bedouins are currently represented by the unrecognized regional council of the unrecognized villages (since the villages have not been recognized by the Israeli government, the Israeli government has also been unwilling to recognize the Bedouins' elected council). During our visit, council head Hsein al-Refaya pointed out that the unrecognized population suffers from an extremely high unemployment rate: approximately 60 percent for men and 85 percent for women. The population endures grinding poverty, a high rate of infant mortality, a shortage of skilled laborers and a high crime rate. Moreover, approximately 40 percent of the unrecognized Bedouin children drop out of school before graduating.

For years, these Bedouins have been struggling for their basic right to be recognized and to receive the same services that every other Israeli citizen is given by virtue of being a citizen. Their representatives have met with scores of government officials, testified in front of numerous committees and submitted a seemingly endless number of petitions to the Israeli courts. They have often been met with sympathy, but they have never encountered justice.

This is where the "Wine Route" comes in. The Israeli government is currently carrying out a land-use scheme that further violates the land rights of the Bedouins and intensifies their alienation from Israeli society. The "Wine Route" plan authorizes the construction of thirty private farms, which are supposed to cater to Israeli tourists. Some of these farms have already been built and are located on the same land that the Bedouins consider their own; all of the farms--built and planned--will receive the services that the Bedouins have been denied for several decades: running water, electricity and paved roads.

The "Wine Route" plan exposes the lie informing Israel's treatment of the unrecognized Bedouins. For years, Israeli officials have emphasized the need to concentrate the 75,000 Bedouins in large townships, stating that their forty-five villages are too small and scattered along a fairly large area, making it very difficult to provide them with infrastructure. This served to justify the policy of not recognizing them. And yet now, the very same officials are handing out permits to scores of scattered farms, which stretch across thousands of dunams (a dunam is approximately a quarter of an acre), each one home to a single family.

But the "Wine Route" does much more than expose Israel's lie. The farms, explains Ariel Dloomy of the Negev Coexistence Forum, insure that only Jewish citizens have access to large segments of the Negev; in this way they undermine the Bedouins' attempt to reclaim their ancestral land. One government document clearly states: "The reasons for initiating [these farms] is for protecting state land...and offering solutions for demographic issues." Incidentally, Dloomy adds, one farm was given to a Bedouin to serve as a fig leaf covering Israel's blatant discrimination against them.

Professor Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer from Ben-Gurion University whose work focuses on the relation between space and ethnicity, adds that the "Wine Route" initiative "draws a link between, on the one hand, Israel's longstanding efforts to restrict and circumscribe the space which its non-Jewish citizens are permitted to occupy and, on the other hand, new entrepreneurship projects. The state, in other words, is using entrepreneurs to advance its discriminatory practices, adopting, as it were, a new mechanism to prevent the Negev's Bedouin inhabitants from returning to their ancestral lands. Thus, in addition to demolishing their homes and spraying their crops with poison, now the government is building farms on their land."

"How," Abu Sheita asked the members of the Negev Coexistence Forum, "will you help us counter this initiative?"

"Our friends don't have access to the corridors of power, and we can't expect them to stop the longstanding discrimination of all past Israeli governments," the person next to him immediately answered.

"Perhaps not," Abu Sheita continued, "but we can expect them to try." And after a short silence he added: "The discrimination against the Bedouins is like a big boulder; a pickax can never break it with one fell swoop, but if you continue hitting for many years, it will eventually shatter."

---

Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

Bush Administration policies in Iraq have largely been a failure. It has created a failed state in that country, which is in flames and seething with new religious and ethnic nationalist passions of a sort never before seen on this scale in modern Iraqi history. The severe instability in Iraq threatens the peace and security of the entire region, and could easily ignite a regional guerrilla war that might well affect petroleum exports from the Oil Gulf and hence the health of the world economy.

The relatively small number of US fighting troops that the US has in Iraq, some 60,000 to 70,000, cannot possibly hope to provide security to a country of 26 million under such conditions of ethnic and political civil war. The much smaller British presence in Basra appears not to have been effective in halting that city's spiral down into insecurity, with tribal and militia grudge fights and assassinations having become common.
The inauguration of a new Iraqi government was marred by the enormous amount of time it took to form it (5 months!), by open US imperial intervention in the choice of prime minister and in other negotiations, by the walk-out of over two dozen parliamentarians from both the Shiite (Virtue Party) and Sunni (National Dialogue Front and Iraqi Accord Front) parties, and by the failure of the new prime minister to name three key cabinet ministers central to the country's security-- Defense, Interior, and National Security. The Iraqi government is among the more corrupt in the world, working by bribes and a party spoils system.

The new parliament is virtually hung, and Prime Minister al-Maliki governs as a minority prime minister, being able to count on less than 115 MPs from his own party, in a parliament with 275 members. He is therefore hostage to the Kurds, who want to move Iraq in the direction of having a very weak central government, a degree of provincial auto nomy unknown in any other country in the world, and who want to unilaterally annex a fourth province, oil-rich Kirkuk, to their regional confederacy, despite the violent opposition of Kirkuk's Turkmen and Arab populations to being Kurdicized.

The Bush administration reconstruction project in Iraq has largely failed. In part, it was foiled by sophisticated guerrilla sabotage, so that billions have had to be diverted from actual reconstruction to security. And nor has security been achieved. In part, it was foiled by a degree of corruption, cupidity, embezzlement, lawlessness and fraud that is unparalleled in US history since the Gilded Age. And in part is has been foiled by a US insistence on making most often unqualified US corporations the immediate recipient and major beneficiary of funds, so that Iraqi concerns get much less lucrative sub-contracts and relatively little of the money benefitted the Iraqi economy directly.

Military engagements between Sunni Ar ab guerrillas and US troops of some seriousness have been fought at Ramadi in the past week, though little noticed by the mainstream US press. Fallujah is dangerous again. Neighborhoods of the capital, Baghdad are blown up every day. A nighttime hot civil war produces some number of corpses daily, sometimes dozens, to the extent that morning corpse patrol has become a central duty of Iraqi police. A lot of us suspect that some units of the police themselves are involved in these kidnappings and killings, so that often they know just where to look for the corpses.

The main US military tactic still appears to be search and destroy, a way of proceeding guaranteed to extend the scope and popularity of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas appear more well-organized, determined, and effective than ever, and no lasting and effective progress appears to have been made in counter-insurgency anywhere in the Sunni Arab heartland. The human toll of the war has been d eeply depressing. The number of Iraqi dead in the war and its aftermath (killed in political violence by any side) cannot be estimated, but certainly is over 100,000 and could easily be more. The 30,000 figure often cited comes from counts of reports of deaths in Western wire services, which are demonstrably a fraction of the true total. None of the nearly 1,000 Iraqis assassinated in Basra during the past month, possibly with police involvement, appears in such statistics. The US has lost over 2400 troops dead, and the number of wounded in action is over 17,000, some significant proportion of them seriously wounded, with long-term disabilities. Some Iraq War vets are suffering mental problems and were discharged because of them under circumstances that make it difficult for them to get VA care. Some Iraq War vets are shoing up homeless in US cities already. Meanwhile, Halliburton is back from the brink of bankruptcy.

There is no evidence of the new Iraqi army and sec urity forces proving themselves effective against the guerrillas. The security forces with the possible exception of the new army are heavily infiltrated by partisan militias. A recent news article quoted an approving US officer as saying that Iraqi troops in Baqubah fought a guerrilla attack right down to the point where the troops ran out of ammunition. These were almost certainly Shiite and/or Kurdish troops fighting Sunni guerrillas, so this was actually another battle in the Civil War. No wonder they fought to the bitter end. But what I take away from this anecdote is that the guerrillas have more ammunition than do the poor s.o.b.'s in the Iraqi army, and I don't see that as a good sign. A unified military is almost impossible to achieve in conditions of civil war, in any case. Lebanon had an army when the civil war broke out there in the mid-1970s, but President Elias Sarkis was unable to commit it, for fear it would split along ethnic lines. The same problems now exi st in Iraq, and are unlikely to be resolved for some years, if ever.

Iraq cannot be stabilized without the active help of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the neighboring countries. But the Bush administration has actively attempted to alienate Iran and Syria, threatening them with regime change or military attack, and guaranteeing that they would be hostile to US success and continued presence in Iraq. The US has also alienated Turkey by allowing the violent leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement, the PKK, to base itself in northern Iraq and to attack Turkey and Iran from that safe haven. The US has alienated Saudi Arabia in a whole host of ways, from insinuations that the Wahhabi form of Islam is in an unqualified way a source of terrorism, to US insensitivity to Saudi fears of the rise of a Shiite Crescent.

Bush administration ineptitude, ignorance, and often stupidity is matched by some regional players. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud El Faisa l came to the US in fall of 2005 and castigated the US for allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the Iranians (i.e. pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites), provoking a severe diplomatic tiff between Baghdad and Riyadh. Instead of being helpful to a fellow Arab country, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt alienated the Shiite south of Iraq by saying that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. After these incidents, which enraged the Iraqi Shiites, the prospect for a fruitful role in Iraq for the Arab League have receded substantially, since Shiite Iraqis cannot see it as an honest broker.

The Bush Administration trumpets that a defeat of "al-Qaeda" in Iraq would be decisive for defeating terrorism in the world at large. But Bush and his policies led to there being anything like an effective Islamic radical terrorism in Iraq in the first place. The tiny Ansar al-Islam group that operated in the north before 2003 had been hunted by the Baath security and onl y survived because of the US no-fly zone that prevented Iraqi armor from being deployed against it. Bush has not shown any particular ability to put this genie, which he unleashed, back in the bottle. His war in Iraq has been an enormous boon to the international Salafi Jihadi movement, encouraging angry youths from all over the world to join it to fight to the US. Bush by his aggressive and inept policies is creating the phenomenon he says he is fighting, and so can never defeat it.

The prospect lies before us of years, perhaps decades of instability in the Gulf and eastern reaches of the Middle East. There is a danger of it doubling and tripling our gasoline prices. There is a danger of it forming a matrix and a school for anti-US terrorism for years to come. Are people in Fallujah, Tal Afar and Ramadi really ever going to forgive us? And there is no guarantee of the Shiites remaining US allies for very long, either. Many, of course, already have conceived a new hat red of America as a result of over-reaction of green National Guardsmen, who often have killed innocent civilians in the south, and as a result of iron fist policies when US troops were fighting the Mahdi Army.

The Bush administration has pushed us all out onto a tightrope in Iraq, 60 feet up and without a net.

[Roger Daniels is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His most recent book, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882, was published in 2004 by Hill and Wang.]

NOTE: The following essay was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004.--Editors

President Bush heralded his recent proposal for sweeping reform of American immigration policy as "a new temporary-worker program." Indeed, in his State of the Union address, he went out of the way to distance himself from previous immigration programs. "I oppose amnesty," he insisted -- while carefully avoiding any discussion of past "amnesties." Historians who study immigration history know better: The president's plan actually mimics a long line of past policies. Some perspective seems called for if we are going to have informed debate about immigration.

The president laid down four basic goals for immigration policy: to help control the borders; to serve the nation's economic needs; to avoid giving "unfair rewards" to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process; and, most crucially, to "provide incentives for temporary foreign workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired." Like most of its predecessors, the president's plan was drawn up with the needs of Southwestern agricultural interests and other low-wage sectors in mind.

The ideal of the retractable immigrant worker is an old one, covering often elastic definitions of who is worthy of admission, when, and why. For example, Hubert Howe Bancroft, the pioneering historian of California and a confirmed racist, explained bluntly in his 1912 memoirs that Westerners want Mexicans "for our low-grade work and when it is finished we want [them] to go home and stay there until we want [them] again." Ninety-two years later, not much has changed.

During World War I, the federal government, facing labor shortages, authorized "the admission and return of otherwise inadmissible aliens applying for temporary admission." The program brought in some 250,000 Mexicans, who were registered and photographed. Perhaps an equal number came informally. Loose as the arrangements were, some officials wished them even less formal. Among the regulations Herbert C. Hoover, then war-food administrator, wanted lifted in 1918, for example, was one that called for two photographs of each immigrant. Part of Hoover's stated rationale was that "the Mexican has a primitive suspicion of the camera."

Those Mexicans worked chiefly on farms but also on railroads, in mines, and in manufacturing plants. Some went as far north as Chicago and were among the pioneers of the now substantial Mexican American community there. We don't know how many such "temporary" workers returned to Mexico, but it is clear that large numbers did stay in the United States and that others, who returned "home," also came back. Retractibility could not always be depended upon.

The quota acts of 1921 and 1924 virtually eliminated immigration from East and South Asia and greatly limited European immigration, but placed no numerical limits on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere -- in major part at the insistence of Western growers. One often unnoted aspect of the 1924 act, the requirement of a visa for entry as an immigrant, however, gave the government a way to limit legal Mexican immigration of people who wished to stay.

In 1924, Congress also created the Border Patrol. As today, lawmakers thought of the Mexican border as a line that could be defended, but ignored the reality that it was, and is, a collection of binational communities, interdependent economic units within which thousands of people cross the border daily in each direction to work, shop, and play. Then, as now, control of our borders was an illusive, and ill-understood, goal.

That Mexican immigrants had become some 11 percent of legal immigrants in the 1920s did not go unnoticed. Both the Coolidge and Hoover administrations reduced legal immigration from Mexico by fiat rather than statute. In new instructions to American consuls in 1930, the State Department made it clear why: "If the consular officer believes that the applicant may probably be a public charge at any time, even during a considerable period subsequent to his arrival, he must refuse the visa."

Once the Great Depression had set in, the Hoover administration silently assented to "voluntary" programs to send workers back to Mexico. Sponsored by states, counties, and even corporations, those programs often ignored workers' immigration status and in some cases their citizenship. Years later, a Mexican American worker remembered being told by a steel-company official in northern Indiana that his family would starve on the $7 or $8 per payday he made. But, the official added, "You have an alternative ... go to Mexico. We have a train available."

During World War II, the Bracero Program again brought Mexicans north. Beginning in 1942, temporary agricultural workers were recruited with the approval of Mexico City and with guarantees about wages and working conditions (which would not be strictly enforced). In 1943, Congress extended the program to cover West Indians and Bahamians, who toiled largely in Eastern agriculture. Some 225,000 agricultural workers were imported during the war years, nearly three-quarters from Mexico. A separate wartime Bracero Program provided about 50,000 maintenance workers for Western railroads. As in World War I, perhaps as many came without being officially in the program. Unlike the World War I program, however, the Bracero Program continued until 1964 and officially imported nearly five million temporary agricultural workers, more than four million of them from Mexico. Although many came more than once, surely millions of individuals were involved. After the end of the program in 1964, special authorization to import agricultural workers could be obtained from the Labor Department.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, illegal-immigrant agricultural workers, many of whom had been initially imported under a government program, continued to do much of the agricultural harvest not just in the Southwest, but throughout the country. After years of Congressional stalemates and the appointment of two presidential commissions, Congress finally passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Signing it, President Reagan predicted: "Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people -- American citizenship." The act, of course, did no such thing, but it did refresh the supply of agricultural labor spectacularly.

The legislation is complicated, but one aspect is crucial to evaluating President Bush's current plan. Although popularly called "amnesty," a provision in the statute spoke of "adjustment of status," a phrase normally used to describe the process by which an alien legally in the United States changes from one status to another. Most politicians, then and now, seem to believe that "amnesty" smacks of weakness and permissiveness. But it was an amnesty: The 1986 law provided ways for persons here illegally to gain a legal status and begin the process toward citizenship.

There had been two such processes in the past. "Registry" began in 1929. It provided that anyone who had resided in the United States continuously since January 1, 1921, and was of good moral character, could adjust to permanent resident-alien status and thus be eligible for citizenship. The cut-off date now stands at January 1, 1972. The second, and more limited, process was the so-called Chinese Confession Program, which operated between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Illegal Chinese residents who had entered fraudulently might be able to regularize their status if they confessed and implicated other family members who had used the same fraudulent process. More than 10,000 persons confessed, implicating thousands of relatives, many of whom were deported. The justification for this nonstatutory program was national security: It seems that most of those expelled were leftists who supported Red China.

Over all, the 1986 law provided for two kinds of amnesty. The original program was aimed at illegal aliens who had been in the United States continuously since January 1, 1982. Some 1.7 million persons were legalized under this program, which did not increase the supply of agricultural labor. Legislators who catered to Southwestern agricultural interests insisted, for the price of their votes, on amnesty for "special agricultural workers" who had worked in American agriculture for as much as 90 days between May 1983 and May 1986. Qualification did not require continuous residence, allowing many workers to go back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Described as a minor add-on -- the Congressional Budget Office had guessed that 250,000 people would apply the provision eventually led to the acceptance of some 1.3 million, making a total of three million immigrants who were granted amnesty under the 1986 law.

Since 1986, there have been no new programs involving permanent changes of status for persons illegally in this country, but the Immigration Act of 1990 created "temporary protected status," which provides short-term renewable immunity from deportation for persons of a given nationality, if conditions in their homeland pose a danger to personal safety. Every president since 1990 -- that is, both Bushes and Clinton -- has renewed and extended that provision. It is more of a stay of execution than an amnesty, but it still permits hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and continue to work.

Thus, rather than a new departure, George W. Bush's proposal is fully consonant with much past immigration policy. As we listen to the debate in Congress in coming months, it would behoove us to remember this: In general, that policy promised what it failed to deliver, and delivered, in many instances, the opposite of what its advocates promised.

The state secrets privilege has been invoked by the Bush Administration with greater frequency than ever before in American history in a wide range of lawsuits that the government says would threaten national security if allowed to proceed.

In virtually every case, the use of the privilege leads to dismissal of the lawsuit and forecloses the opportunity for an injured party to seek judicial relief.

Most recently, a lawsuit brought by Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who alleged that he was kidnapped by the CIA and tortured over a five month period, was dismissed after the CIA invoked the "state secrets" privilege.

The dismissal was not based on a finding that the allegations against the CIA were false.

"It is in no way an adjudication of, or comment on, the merit or lack of merit of El-Masri's complaint," wrote Judge T.S. Ellis, III in a May 12 order.

In fact, "It is worth noting that ... if El-Masri's allegations are true or essentially true, then all fair-minded people... must also agree that El-Masri has suffered injuries as a result of our country's mistake and deserves a remedy," he wrote in the order dismissing the case.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/statesec/elmasri051206.pdf

"Yet, it is also clear from the result reached here that the only sources of that remedy must be the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch, not the Judicial Branch," he suggested.

But in this case the executive branch is the alleged perpetrator of the offense, and the legislative branch has no procedures for adjudicating allegations such as El-Masri's, even if it had an interest in doing so. That's what courts are for.

Terrorists can kill people and destroy property. But they cannot undermine the rule of law, or deny injured parties access to the courts. Only the U.S. government can do that.

The state secrets privilege has been invoked lately in a remarkable diversity of lawsuits. See this selection of case files from recent state secrets cases:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/statesec/index.html

Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive reflected on the growing use of the state secrets privilege and how it relates to the larger climate of secrecy in "The lie behind the secrets," Los Angeles Times, May 21:

http://tinyurl.com/mkd78

Recently introduced legislation would "provide protection from frivolous government claims of state secrets," the Project on Government Oversight noted:

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2006/05/state_secrets_.html

Wired News today published documents pertaining to the alleged role of AT&T in NSA warrantless surveillance related to another lawsuit in which the state secrets privilege has been invoked. See:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70947-0.html

EARLIER THIS MONTH, two contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination stood together to stop what they saw as a dangerous drift in their party's stance on national security. At the National Press Club on May 9, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh summoned Democrats to dig in for ''what will in all likelihood be a generation-long struggle against jihadism and radical, suicidal terror." Former Virginia governor Mark Warner agreed that his partymates had to refute Karl Rove's taunt that they cling to a ''pre-9/11 worldview" by championing their own plans to fight al Qaeda. Though neither man named names, they implicitly chided their party's growing antiwar faction for railing against Bush's record without offering a vision of how to protect America.

The vision Bayh and Warner offered is one being heard increasingly from a host of younger journalists and policy mavens-from newly formed groups like the Truman National Security Project and the Foreign Policy Leadership Council to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, the author of a much-discussed new manifesto. It's an approach that repudiates the Democrats' post-Vietnam reluctance to use military power. Yet it also views armed force as part of an arsenal of tools-including economic development, robust alliances, and international law and institutions-that the US, as the world's de facto leader, must be ready to employ.

Such a vision would seem quite appealing, especially in a global age when there's no drawbridge for America to pull up. Yet no sooner had reports of Bayh and Warner's remarks appeared than they-and their way of thinking-came under fire from the bloggers and pundits whose influence among party activists they were seeking to curb. Across the Web, the politicians and their ilk were slammed as ''warmongers," ''Vichy Democrats," and ''enablers" of a Republican regime. And such attacks are nothing new. For months the left has been belittling the thinking of the internationalists, scoffing at how many of them backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, with The Nation-the flagship magazine of the antiwar faction-refusing to support any Democratic office-seeker who won't seek a speedy pullout.

Beneath this internecine party warfare lies a fundamental, and possibly debilitating, ideological divide. Liberals, who tend to view terrorism as the chief foreign policy concern, have been trying to revive the philosophy of internationalism-the belief that US intervention abroad can be noble in intent and beneficial in its results. Leftists, on the other hand, viewing the Iraq War as the most urgent problem, more often subscribe to a philosophy that might be called anti-imperialism-the belief that US intervention abroad is typically avaricious in intent and malign in its results.

By the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton had come to be a champion of intervention, and internationalists-such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton, and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress-still dominated the Democratic party's foreign policy brain trust. But the anti-imperialist activists have conquered the blogosphere and, as the Iraq War drags on and hopes for a satisfying outcome fade, their arguments are winning converts among rank-and-file voters.

Consider: After Sept. 11, most Democrats agreed that defeating al Qaeda should be foreign policy goal No. 1. Now, while most Americans still share that goal, Democrats rate it 10th, according to a Security and Peace Initiative poll last year; withdrawal from Iraq is named first. Another survey, from MIT, showed that doubts about interventionism have spread beyond Iraq: As of November 2005, only 59 percent of the party-versus 94 percent of Republicans-still supported the invasion of Afghanistan.

The Democratic party's rift between liberal internationalists and radical anti-imperialists is, of course, decades old. And Beinart, in his deftly argued new book, ''The Good Fight: How Liberals-and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again" (HarperCollins), helpfully grounds the current debate in its oft-forgotten history. A proud internationalist, Beinart persuasively shows that calls by today's liberals for America to actively project its power abroad represent not a betrayal of principle but a return to what liberalism is really all about....