Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Part 7

That same study-financed and run by the UN University's Inst.i.tute for Environment and Human Security-warned that there would be fifty million environmental refugees by 2010, and it argued that they should be recognized in the same way as are refugees from war or political oppression. This would make them eligible for humanitarian aid from a number of governmental and nongovernmental agencies.

Most of the refugees come from sub-Saharan Africa, but there have been similar migrations in the south Pacific, where New Zealand agreed to accept all eleven thousand inhabitants of the Tuvalu atoll, which had been rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. According to the journalist Terry Allen, upon arriving in Auckland the Tuvaluans found themselves "lonely and lost, without the support of community and culture, or the skills to survive an urban life based on money." For better or worse, sometime in the next decade or so, the inhabitants of s.h.i.+shmaref are going to be among the first environmental refugees in North America.

A number of them have come together this afternoon for a meeting in the town's community center. It's a low brown building suffused with what crepuscular light can fight its way through bleary windows. Those present are talking with state highway officials about the early preparations for the evacuation of s.h.i.+shmaref. The town's elders have determined that the village will be moved twenty miles across the lagoon to the mainland, to a place not far from the town of Tin Creek. It is a peaceful little spot, small and quiet enough for s.h.i.+shmaref to reconst.i.tute itself according to its traditional culture. "The elders wanted to keep one area as serene as possible because it's a subsistence setting for our lifestyle here," Luci Eningowuk explains.

The process of moving the residents of s.h.i.+shmaref is complicated and expensive. (The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated that the cost of moving a nearby village half the size of s.h.i.+shmaref to be approximately $1 million per resident.) In fact, today's meeting is not about moving the village. It's not even about building a road to move the village. It's not even about gathering stone to build a road to move the village. It's about building a road to the place where someone can gather the stone to build the road to move the village.

They're having trouble finding a place with enough gravel to make building a road worthwhile. A spot near Ear Mountain seems promising, but it is logistically difficult to reach, and there are complications in building the road over which the gravel will be carried because the area is located inside protected park land. Patti Miller, an official from the Alaska Department of Transportation, fields questions in the front of the room. Every answer yields another question. Somebody mentions $3 million in government funds already earmarked for a.s.sistance in the project.

"Three million dollars," Miller says, "doesn't go very far toward building that road."

Heads nod around the room. Several men get up and pore over the topographical maps that Miller has spread out on the broad tables that, later tonight, will be used for the town's bingo games.

"The reason we're talking about it this way is that we don't really have the funds to move the village," explains Tony Weyiounna, a village official who's been deeply involved in the relocation project for more than five years. "But we do have funding to do some parts of the relocation process. Building the road is one of them.

"In 2002, we developed a strategic relocation plan, along with a flooding and erosion plan, to help guide our community, and we've been trying to follow that along to try and do things symmetrically. Constructing the new seawalls was one of the first things, so that was highlighted, and that's how come we're building so much of the protection piece.

"But the other aspects, like the relocation project, it's slow to gather a.s.sistance. You know, in our country, for most people to get a.s.sistance, you need a big ma.s.s of people that the money will benefit. In our case, we're only six hundred people and the cost of the relocation work is so big, and the benefits to our country are so small, that it doesn't justify getting a lot of a.s.sistance."

"Just to move them is going to take twenty years and probably two hundred million dollars," says Patti Miller, after the meeting has broken up. "And the people in the Lower Forty-eight don't understand that. To them, that's like an outrageous amount of money, and it is an outrageous amount of money, but these people haven't got any choices." There was a good turnout for the meeting. After all, the temperature was fifty-eight degrees outside, a nice day for the first week of November.

ON February 18, 2004, sixty-two scientists, including forty-nine n.o.bel laureates, released a report in which they criticized the administration of George W. Bush for its treatment of the scientific process. The report charged the administration with barbering doc.u.ments, stacking review panels, distorting scientific information, and forcing science itself into a mutable servility to political ends. In short, the scientists charged that the tobacco industry's approach to science-which is "Science is whatever we can sell"-had become indistinguishable from the government's. February 18, 2004, sixty-two scientists, including forty-nine n.o.bel laureates, released a report in which they criticized the administration of George W. Bush for its treatment of the scientific process. The report charged the administration with barbering doc.u.ments, stacking review panels, distorting scientific information, and forcing science itself into a mutable servility to political ends. In short, the scientists charged that the tobacco industry's approach to science-which is "Science is whatever we can sell"-had become indistinguishable from the government's.

The outrage had been building for a while, and it had become quite general, taking in areas far removed from the study of global warming. At about the same time that the scientists released their report, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, whose groundbreaking work on telomeric DNA has revolutionized cancer research, was summarily dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics. Her firing culminated nearly two years of wrangling with the panel's chairman, Dr. Leon Ka.s.s, an outspoken opponent of stem cell research and the man who injected the phrase "the ick factor" into profoundly complicated bioethical debates.

Ka.s.s is a true crank, which would be fine if he'd kept his place and carved out a niche among America's rich trove of exotic philosophical and religious fauna, rather than finding himself installed in the government. He has opposed-in no particular order-in vitro fertilization, cosmetic surgery, organ transplants, contraception, and the public eating of ice cream cones. In thundering against the latter, Ka.s.s sounds like someone who missed his calling as a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus: "Worst of all ... are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone," he writes, "a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know that eating in public is offensive. Eating on the street-even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat-displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly."

This fellow, waving his stick like an Old Testament prophet who'd somehow wandered into Coney Island-this was the man with whom Elizabeth Blackburn was supposed to make national policy on critical issues affecting millions of lives. Actual science played a very limited role in the dispute. The serious debate seemed more suited to a caucus room in Iowa, or a late-night bull session in a seminary, than to a panel aimed at giving policymakers the best advice possible on the way to make policy.

The final crack in the relations.h.i.+p between Ka.s.s and Blackburn came over the relative therapeutic benefits of adult stem cells, to which the political right has no objections, and embryonic stem cells, which engage the politics of the abortion issue. Among scientists in the field, these two approaches are complementary. They do not compete with each other. The argument that caused Elizabeth Blackburn's dismissal was a completely political one.

Blackburn did not slink away from the fight. She published quietly outraged articles in the medical journals, and she gave more interviews than she had ever expected to give. "I wasn't maddened, necessarily," she says. "You know, you try to give your input based on what you know about, and what you can find out about the science. And you sort of just do your best. My sense was that all I could do was keep giving my input about what I knew about.

"The idea was to just lay it out and say, 'Here's what we, as scientists, did think of the scientific situation. First and foremost, that stood out to me because, when one looks at the mandate of the federal commission, it is very clear what they are and it's advisory to policy. It struck me that, if you're going to be advisory, you're trying to give the best advice you can give. It doesn't make policy, but it certainly has the function of being a resource for advice."

The dynamic that ensnared Elizabeth Blackburn played out most vividly with respect to climate studies. A report released in December 2007 by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives stated flatly that the administration "engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming." In the introduction to its report, the committee quotes an internal doc.u.ment from the American Petroleum Inst.i.tute in which the voice of Clarence Cook Little seems to echo quite clearly.

"Victory will be achieved when ... average citizens 'understand' uncertainties in climate science ... [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" The quote marks are what poker players call a tell. At its heart, this is a strategy that depends vitally on its ability to confuse people. Where most science seeks to clarify, this seeks to muddle. This is science turned against itself at the service of salesmen, selling uncertainty. But the strategy is rooted in the confidence that there will always be a market.

According to the House Oversight Committee's report, White House political officials determined which government scientists could give interviews about the subject, and what they could say. All requests were routed through something called the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the operation of which would strike Elizabeth Blackburn as very familiar. For example, on July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, was scheduled to testify before the committee. The CEQ's editing of his prepared testimony is almost comically piddling. According to the House report, Karl was prepared to testify that "the state of the science continues to indicate that modern climate change is dominated by human influences." The CEQ, at the request of the Office of Management and Budget, changed the word "dominated" to "affected."

Elsewhere, the committee laid out how frantically political appointees at NASA tried to keep Dr. James Hansen, whose outspoken criticisms of the administration's policies toward global warming run throughout the committee's report, from doing a single interview on National Public Radio in 2005. The scramble took almost two weeks, and the paper trail of increasingly agitated e-mails-"If Hansen does interview," reads one, "there will be dire consequences"-is a case study in panicky bureaucratic flop sweat that would have embarra.s.sed the East Germans. None of these frenzied people knew the first thing about climate science, but that hardly mattered. The frenzy wasn't about science. Hansen did not appear on NPR.

Not all of the committee's findings are so petty. Throughout the report, there is a striking sense of how profoundly actual scientific expertise was either sacrificed for political purposes or abandoned entirely. All administrations have a natural tension between their political sides and the outside experts brought in to advise on policymaking. But, on this particular issue, this particular administration seemed to be determined to make the information it rejected simply disappear. Major reports were extensively edited not by experts in the field but by a man named Philip c.o.o.ney, the chief of staff at the CEQ. Previously, c.o.o.ney had spent fifteen years as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Inst.i.tute, where his last a.s.signment had been as the "team leader" at the API on issues of climate change. He had been there when the "victory" memo had been written, and he seemed more than willing to apply its principles to his government job.

The committee found c.o.o.ney's fingerprints on a number of draft reports-softening the data with adverbs, making statements more equivocal by running them through the pa.s.sive voice. In a 2003 draft report, for example, model simulations "demonstrated that the observed changes over the past century are consistent with a significant contribution from human activity." In c.o.o.ney's hands, the model simulations only "indicated" that the observed changes "are likely consistent with a significant contribution from human activity." Thus do uncertainties become part of the "conventional wisdom." They're put there by lawyers, and by political appointees. The only empirical contribution they can make to the discussion is to muddle it.

James Gustave Speth has been working on the science of global warming for over thirty years. In 2007, he wrote a scathing letter to the New York Times New York Times, warning against what he called "the suppression of information and the act of disinformation" that he saw in the collision between science and politics over the previous decade. Like Madison and most of the other founders, Speth sees science and self-government as inextricable. What imperils one imperils the other.

"What we have is that the scientific content of public policy issues is increasing," he says. "The difficulty of understanding public policy issues, because of their technological and scientific content, is increasing. And so, what you need is a whole support system that really helps a.s.sist the public in understanding this. When you have efforts to cloud up public understanding, to cloud up issues that should be clarified, then you are making a serious problem worse. And I think that's what we've had.

"And what's really at stake is democracy, because the scientific and technical content of public policy issues will continue to increase, I mean, how is the public to understand nanotechnology when the word doesn't mean anything to most people? So there really is a profound issue here. The issue is even more complex now on the environmental front, where I work, where there is a whole range of threats. I mean, n.o.body wants to believe bad things to begin with, and when you can't see them, and you can't verify them in your own experience, and then somebody tells you they're not happening, well, it's very easy to conclude they're not happening."

In October 2002, a draft copy of a doc.u.ment called the Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program came across Philip c.o.o.ney's desk. It included this sentence: "Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas." Finding the conclusion too strong, c.o.o.ney put some mush into the verb. The sentence came out reading: "Warming temperatures may also affect Arctic land areas."

THE ocean is not a presence in lower Manhattan, not the way it is in s.h.i.+shmaref. Walk around Ground Zero, where the iron is rising again, and you hardly remember that the ocean is a few blocks over, just past Battery Park. Its sounds are buried in the noise of traffic and the gabble of conversation. It smells as rank as a dungeon cell, but is overwhelmed by the hydrocarbons in the air. Its tides seem less powerful a hidden force than the subway rattling beneath the sidewalk. And that is how most of us look at the sea-as an afterthought, a secondary, vestigial presence. Its power seems an ancient myth, almost a superst.i.tion, like a dragon or a snow beast. We fool ourselves into thinking it's something we've outgrown, when it's really only something we've talked ourselves out of believing in. We have become quite good at mistaking amnesia for wisdom. The sea is something we can spin, and that is how Frank Luntz looks at the sea. ocean is not a presence in lower Manhattan, not the way it is in s.h.i.+shmaref. Walk around Ground Zero, where the iron is rising again, and you hardly remember that the ocean is a few blocks over, just past Battery Park. Its sounds are buried in the noise of traffic and the gabble of conversation. It smells as rank as a dungeon cell, but is overwhelmed by the hydrocarbons in the air. Its tides seem less powerful a hidden force than the subway rattling beneath the sidewalk. And that is how most of us look at the sea-as an afterthought, a secondary, vestigial presence. Its power seems an ancient myth, almost a superst.i.tion, like a dragon or a snow beast. We fool ourselves into thinking it's something we've outgrown, when it's really only something we've talked ourselves out of believing in. We have become quite good at mistaking amnesia for wisdom. The sea is something we can spin, and that is how Frank Luntz looks at the sea.

In 2004, a report called the Arctic Climate Impact a.s.sessment was released, showing the devastating ongoing effect of global warming on the Arctic region and its consequences. Almost immediately, a think tank funded by, among other people, ExxonMobil, attacked the science in the report. James Inhofe, then the chairman of the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, cited the latter report to attack the science in the former report. He looks at the sea as something that can't fool him, James Inhofe, who is smarter than the sea will ever be. And that is how James Inhofe looks at the sea.

For centuries, the Arctic seemed an alien place, a place on the earth but not of it. The Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee summed up that view: [This] image of the Arctic as a world apart, where the laws of science and society may be in abeyance, is ... also moulded by a view of the Arctic that comes down to us from the distant past, when the region was alien and as impossible for most people to reach as another planet.... For millennia, this Arctic vision has successfully absorbed the hearsay evidence of travellers' tales, the accelerating flow of scientific information and, in recent years, even the tedium of government reports, while retaining its aura of wonder. The Arctic is not so much a region as a dream: the dream of a unique, unattainable and compellingly attractive world. It is the last imaginary place.

There is an edge to the evening breeze. A vague chill settles in your bones before you know it's there. It is in the hours like this that you can begin to feel how winter could come pressing in on all sides, like the ice that traps a whaling fleet. But it's a shadowy and insubstantial feeling, more an intuition than an instinct. The children walk down the street with their coats open.

A couple of nights a week, the people of s.h.i.+shmaref gather in the community center to play bingo. The hall buzzes constantly as teenagers wander between the tables, selling extra cards to the players. A sign on the doors warns that n.o.body even smelling of alcohol will be allowed inside to play. This is high-stakes, compet.i.tive bingo. The numbers fly swiftly around the room as the players work four and five cards at once, marking off the numbers in the complicated patterns-"Picture frame!" "La.s.so!"-of the game's variations.

John and Emily Weyiounna, Tony's cousins, hunch over a long table near the back of the hall. In addition to their own cards, they are helping a clumsy stranger try to keep up with the play. Emily sees first that the stranger has completed his "picture frame," filling in all the spots around the perimeter of the card. He calls out "Bingo!" too soon, though, and has to split a $300 pot with another player whose timing was better. They laugh as the stranger offers to share his winnings with them.

"What?" John Weyiounna says to him. "Do you think we are poor people?"

They have taken upon themselves the aspect of refugees. They have made provisions within themselves to maintain the community they have built here wherever they eventually go, the way the European immigrants came to the great cities in the Lower Forty-eight and re-created in their neighborhoods the old places they'd left behind. They have no illusions about what is happening to them. There are some local conspiracy theorists who believe that someone, somewhere, wants this land for some nefarious purpose, but most of the people have seen the ice come later and later in the year, and they've felt the permafrost soften beneath their feet, and they know there is no argument they can make against what is happening to them.

The bingo game runs late. When it finally breaks up, the people scatter down the clotted, muddy streets. It is dark and the sky is alive with stars. Moonlight ripples across the waves. Come to the seawall in the Arctic, where now n.o.body knows when winter will come again. Come and dispute cleverly those things that the people of s.h.i.+shmaref have known for thousands of years. The sea feeds, but the sea also devours. And that is how they look at the sea.

CHAPTER NINE

The Principles of Automatic Pilot

In 1912, the Sperry Corporation developed the first automatic pilot system for airplanes. Two years later, Lawrence Sperry, the son of Elmer Sperry, a famous inventor and founder of the company that bore his name, took an airplane up and flew it around for a while with his hands spread wide and away from the controls. Spectators on the ground gasped in not inconsiderable alarm. Modern autopilots do occasionally fail. Some crashes occur when the human pilot fails to disengage the automatic pilot before attempting to fly the plane manually. All delicate mechanisms fail most catastrophically through human error or, especially, through human neglect.

The country was founded by people who considered self-government no less a science than botany. It required an informed and educated and enlightened populace, or else all the delicate mechanisms of the system would come apart. The founders provided no mechanism for a government to run on automatic pilot.

"Public opinion sets bounds to every government," Mr. Madison wrote in an essay that the National Gazette National Gazette published in December 1791, "and is the real sovereign in every free one." Later in the same essay, though, he warned: "The larger the country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited; when ascertained or presumed, the more respectable it is in the eyes of individuals. This is favorable to the authority of government. For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty." published in December 1791, "and is the real sovereign in every free one." Later in the same essay, though, he warned: "The larger the country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited; when ascertained or presumed, the more respectable it is in the eyes of individuals. This is favorable to the authority of government. For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty."

Mr. Madison, whose scientific curiosity was piqued more by agriculture than by mechanics-John Quincy Adams once referred to him as "the best farmer in the world"-was most acutely conscious of how easily any government, even a republic, could slip into war and find itself wrecked before anyone knew it had been damaged in the first place. "In war," he wrote in 1795, "the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied, and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of seducing the force, of the people.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

He ended up, of course, with a war of his own, a picked fight with Great Britain in 1812 out of which the United States gained Andrew Jackson, Old Ironsides, and its national anthem, but which was ruinously expensive and was highlighted by Madison's fleeing the White House a few steps ahead of the Royal Marines, who burned the place. Not even he could resist wholly the temptations he saw as inherent in any executive. However, he did try, as hard as he could, to maintain control over the delicate mechanisms he'd designed. The war was properly declared by Congress and when, late in the hostilities, delegates from New England convened in Hartford to discuss seceding from the Union, Madison did not march on the hall.

"Because he was worried [about the use of his war powers] is the reason, I think, that the French amba.s.sador [Louis Serurier] said it was a triumph because the country got through the war and accomplished at least a standstill, without compromising or destroying its republican inst.i.tutions," Ralph Ketchum says. "Madison really stuck to it. He repeatedly refused to whip up a kind of hysterical intolerance around the war. And when it looked darkest, and some New England leaders were gathering for the Hartford Convention-it looked like they might try to make an alliance with the British and with Canada-he did nothing more than warn a good loyal militia unit in New York, 'Stand by on the border. If these characters in Hartford do anything that's treason, you go.'"

In fact, the Hartford Convention's resolves didn't get to Madison until after the Treaty of Ghent had ended the war. Madison received them with a silence that Jefferson said, "showed the placid character of our Const.i.tution. Under any other their treasons would have been punished by the halter. We let them live as the laughing stocks of the world and punish them by the torment of eternal contempt." Idiot America has no gift for that.

IN August 2001, an official of the U.S. government dropped by Louise Richardson's office at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Born and raised in rural Ireland, Richardson had been steeped in the revolutionary history of that country. "The extremism I imbibed came from school, books, popular history, and songs," she once wrote. "It came from the air around me." She had friends from home-and, later, friends from Trinity College-who took the oath and joined the Irish Republican Army. Having watched as their politics gravitated toward the gun and the bomb, Richardson was struck by how poorly understood the subject of terrorism was. August 2001, an official of the U.S. government dropped by Louise Richardson's office at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Born and raised in rural Ireland, Richardson had been steeped in the revolutionary history of that country. "The extremism I imbibed came from school, books, popular history, and songs," she once wrote. "It came from the air around me." She had friends from home-and, later, friends from Trinity College-who took the oath and joined the Irish Republican Army. Having watched as their politics gravitated toward the gun and the bomb, Richardson was struck by how poorly understood the subject of terrorism was.

She made it her field of expertise. She sought out terrorists and listened to them. Gradually, there developed a network of experts on the subject. They even once held a conference, at an undisclosed location, where "activists," as she put it, critiqued the academic papers presented by Richardson and her colleagues. Working with a cell of Chechen rebels in a kind of war game, Richardson discovered that, when the decision came about targeting women and children, it was the academics who embraced the option first. "I mention this not to make light of a serious issue," she writes, "only to make the point that terrorists are human beings who think like we do."

Richardson had taken it upon herself to develop and to teach courses at Harvard on the subject of terrorism. She'd achieved some renown in what was still an orphan specialty among political scientists. When the government man showed up at her office, he wanted to know why no terrorist group had ever used an airplane like a guided missile, flying it into a target on the ground. Richardson told him that it had occurred to people, and that somebody was likely to do it sooner rather than later.

A month later, after terrorists of the Al Qaeda network had flown planes into the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and after a third hijacked plane had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania where today people are arguing about the shape of the memorial, Richardson and her colleagues around the country e-mailed each other furiously, trying to bring their expertise to bear on what had happened. Not long afterward, Richardson went to another undisclosed location, this time at the invitation of the Pentagon.

"They wanted me to go somewhere in Virginia and talk with some people," she recalls. "And I walked into the room and my heart soared. Because if you had asked me who were the twenty people in America who knew the most about terrorism, I'd have named the twenty people in that room. And n.o.body has ever heard of them. You never see them on TV. We are talking about people who have been working in this field for years, and we spent several days there, and they were asking us questions constantly. We sat around a table and debated points.

"Afterwards, the people who'd invited us were extraordinarily complimentary and grateful and asked if we'd come back again, and we, of course, said yes. None of us ever heard a word again."

Over the next seven years, when the response to the September attacks morphed inexorably into a "war on terror" that produced the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Richardson was on the outside looking in at problems she'd spent twenty years a.n.a.lyzing. "The people [who had been] in that room, they sat back and watched these newly minted experts pontificate," she says, "and those experts were dismissive of us for failing to predict that this would happen. It was apparent to me at the time that we were doing this wrong, that there was a lot we could derive from the experience of other countries, but the people who were saying that were obscure academics like me.

"From my prism of being a terrorism expert, it was apparent to me that there were absolutely no links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden. They hated one another. People like me knew that. This information was readily available to the decision makers in Was.h.i.+ngton. They must have known it. So that legitimization of the war, I felt, was preposterous. For someone as notoriously paranoid as Saddam Hussein to give weapons of ma.s.s destruction to terrorists is preposterous.

"I think most Americans are not terribly interested in foreign policy. They are interested in paying the bills and the rest of it. And then, you have your leaders.h.i.+p telling them the simple story of good and evil. We're good. The other guys are bad. And the media, I think, have really let us down insofar as they haven't sought out-not necessarily me, but contrary voices. They've gone for the easy spokespeople."

The "global war on terror"-and the war in Iraq that it sp.a.w.ned-is a real war with real casualties. It began, as all our wars now do, without the const.i.tutional nicety of a formal declaration of hostilities. However, after the initial shock of the September 11 atrocities wore off, and the United States slid almost dreamlike toward the catastrophe in Iraq, it was clear that war nonetheless had been declared. Through millions of individual decisions, through the abandonment of self-government, through the conscious and unconscious abandonment of the obligations of citizens.h.i.+p, it had been declared by Idiot America.

The war was Idiot America's purest product. It was the apotheosis of the Three Great Premises. People believed what they were sold, not what they saw. Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, admitted that the administration would push for war in the autumn of 2003 because everybody knew that the fall was when you rolled out your new product line. Later, after so much had gone to ruin, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the war's architects, explained that the administration had settled on pitching the war on the basis of Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program because that was the easiest case to sell. Those weapons, of course, were as faith-based a fiction as saddles on a dinosaur.

Americans chose not not to believe those people who really knew what they were talking about. They chose to believe those people who seemed most sure of everything about which they had no clue. Expertise became a liability, a form of softness in the face of an existential threat. Expertise was not of the Gut. In the months and years after September 11, the worst possible thing was to know what you were talking about. People who knew too much were dangerous; on this the country largely agreed. to believe those people who really knew what they were talking about. They chose to believe those people who seemed most sure of everything about which they had no clue. Expertise became a liability, a form of softness in the face of an existential threat. Expertise was not of the Gut. In the months and years after September 11, the worst possible thing was to know what you were talking about. People who knew too much were dangerous; on this the country largely agreed.

It was a huge and expensive demonstration of Hofstadter's argument: The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion.It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which trans.m.u.tes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism.... Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect ... is lost.

Inside the government, things were little better. On September 11, 2001, n.o.body in that government knew more about Al Qaeda than did Richard Clarke. He'd watched it grow. He'd watched it strike-in New York, in Africa, and in the harbor in Yemen. He'd spent the summer trying to get people to hear his warnings that an attack might be imminent. That morning, in the Situation Room at the White House, Clarke watched the Twin Towers burn and fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days, a lot of people around him-people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat-wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew. He left the government.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke explains. "Interagency decision papers were models of a.n.a.lysis, where a.s.sumptions would be laid out and tested.

"That's the world I grew up in. The approach still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, 'Wait a minute, that isn't a.n.a.lysis. It's the important issues where we really need a.n.a.lysis.'

"In the area of terrorism, there's a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]-they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions-was that we didn't have time for emotion that day."

It ought not to have shocked anyone that a government that deliberately put itself at odds with empirical science would go to war in the way that it did and expect to succeed. The Bush administration could sell anything. Remember the beginning, when it was purely about the Gut, a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. (Donald Rumsfeld lamented that there wasn't enough in the country to blow up.) In Iraq, though, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. Nukes on the gun rack of every pickup in Baghdad. Our troops would be greeted with candy and flowers. The war would take six months-a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. "Major combat operations are over."

"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the a.n.a.lytic process because they'd be shown up," Clarke says. "Their a.s.sumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said [Iraq] was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the post-conflict."

The worst thing you could be was right. Today, there are a lot of s.h.i.+ny Was.h.i.+ngton offices housing people who got it right and got left behind. They form a kind of underground. Some of them failed to press their case as hard as they could have. Some of them did press their case, and were punished for doing so. They were ignored, many of them, because they knew too much. They were punished, many of them, because they knew too much and spoke out about what they knew. They see where the country went on automatic pilot. They're a government in exile representing the reality-based community.

Four thousand lives later, they remember the beginning. A career neoconservative ideologue named Michael Ledeen made himself famous by espousing a doctrine by which, every few years or so, the United States should "throw a small nation up against the wall" to prove that it meant business in the world. And Idiot America, which was all of us, was largely content to put the country on automatic pilot and, cheering, forgot to disengage the mechanism.

G.o.dd.a.m.n right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the backroom will have.

THE office is neat, which is to say that the books are arranged in an orderly fas.h.i.+on as they overwhelm the shelves, and the great stacks of paper are evenly stacked, one next to another, on the desk and on the various tables. Tucked into a brick rowhouse in the Georgetown section of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., the office is every bit as full as the usual academic's landfill, but it is nowhere near as chaotic. It is a busy place, but there's nothing random about it. Every pile has its purpose. office is neat, which is to say that the books are arranged in an orderly fas.h.i.+on as they overwhelm the shelves, and the great stacks of paper are evenly stacked, one next to another, on the desk and on the various tables. Tucked into a brick rowhouse in the Georgetown section of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., the office is every bit as full as the usual academic's landfill, but it is nowhere near as chaotic. It is a busy place, but there's nothing random about it. Every pile has its purpose.

In 2002, Paul Pillar was working for the Central Intelligence Agency as its national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. One of Pillar's duties was to a.s.sess and evaluate intelligence regarding, among other places, Iraq. In October 2002, the CIA produced two doc.u.ments in which Pillar had had a hand. The first was a National Intelligence Estimate that the agency presented to Congress regarding what the Bush administration argued was the overwhelming evidence that Iraq had stockpiled a vast number of dangerous weapons. There were mobile biological laboratories: a captured spy codenamed Curveball said so. There was a deal to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger. There were doc.u.ments that said so, produced by the Italian government and vetted by British intelligence. There were aluminum tubes that could only be used for building centrifuges for the production of nuclear bombs.

The NIE also contained within its fine print the information that a number of government agencies thought the whole case was a farrago of stovepiped intelligence, cherry-picked data, wishful thinking, and utter bulls.h.i.+t. For example, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research thought the tale of the aluminum tubes was a bunch of hooey. The Air Force pooh-poohed the threat of Iraqi "drone aircraft" that could zoom in through U.S. air defenses, spraying anthrax. The whole Niger episode read to the people who knew the most about Niger, uranium, Iraq, or all three like comic-opera Graham Greene. "There were so many ridiculous aspects to that story," says one source familiar with the evidence. "Iraq already had five hundred tons of uranium. So why would they bother buying five hundred tons from a country in remote Africa? That would raise the profile in such a high way."

According to the investigative journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff, one staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee read the NIE for the first time and determined, "If anyone actually takes time to read this, they can't believe there actually are major WMD programs." The staffer needn't have worried. Hardly anyone in the Congress read the NIE.

Instead, two days later, the CIA released a white paper on the same subject. The white paper was produced with congressional la.s.situde in mind. It was easy to read. It had color maps and charts and it was printed on glossy paper. All the troublesome caveats in the NIE were gone. In their place were scary skull-and-crossbones logos indicating where the scary weapons were. The thing looked like a pesticide catalog. Seven months after the release of the NIE and the white paper, the United States launched the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ever since, Pillar has written and spoken about the climate within which those two doc.u.ments were produced-an environment in which expertise was devalued within government for the purpose of depriving expertise of a const.i.tuency outside government. "The global question of whether to do it at all," he muses. "There never was a process that addressed that question. There was no meeting in the White House or in the Situation Room. There was no policy options paper that said, 'Here are the pros and cons of invading. Here are the pros and cons of not invading.' That never happened. Even today, with all the books that have been written, and with some great investigative reporting, you still can't say, 'Ah, this is where the decision was made.'"

In the years since the war began, more than a few people have said that the invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion the moment that the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Bush v. Gore Bush v. Gore in 2000. The incoming administration was stacked to the gunwales with people who'd been agitating for over a decade to "finish" what they believed had been left undone at the end of the first Gulf War. Lost in the now endless postmortems of how the country got into Iraq as a response to the attacks of September 11 is the fact that the country had been set on automatic pilot years earlier. in 2000. The incoming administration was stacked to the gunwales with people who'd been agitating for over a decade to "finish" what they believed had been left undone at the end of the first Gulf War. Lost in the now endless postmortems of how the country got into Iraq as a response to the attacks of September 11 is the fact that the country had been set on automatic pilot years earlier.

Madison warned at the outset how dangerous the war powers could be in the hands of an unleashed executive. "War," he wrote in 1793, "is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." As the years went by, and the power of the presidency grew within both government and popular culture, Madison looked even more prescient. Writing in the aftermath of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, which collapsed like a dead star from the pressure of an ill-conceived war, Johnson's former press secretary George Reedy limned the perfect trap that a president can set for himself: "The environment of deference, approaching sycophancy, helps to foster an insidious belief: that the president and a few of his trusted advisors are possessed of a special knowledge that must be closely held within a small group lest the plans and designs of the United States be antic.i.p.ated and frustrated by enemies."

Reedy cites the decisions that were made regarding the bombing of North Vietnam. As he concedes, "it is doubtful that a higher degree of intelligence could have been brought to bear on the problem;" the flaw lay in the fact that "none of these men [Johnson's pro-bombing advisers] were put to the test of defending their position in public debate." Even then, President Johnson solicited the opinion of Under Secretary of State George Ball, who thought the whole Vietnam adventure a b.l.o.o.d.y and futile waste. Johnson wanted Ball's opinions even when those opinions sent him into paroxysms of rage. Pillar sees inevitable, if imperfect, parallels in the meetings he sat through during the period between September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq. He recalls walking face-first into a foregone conclusion.

"The only meetings and discussion were either, How do we go about this? or, most importantly, How do we sell this, and how do we get support for this?" he says. "It was a combination of a particular bunch of people who were really determined to do this thing, with a president who seized on the post-9/11 environment and thought, 'Oh, I'm going to be the war president.' That's my thing, after sort of drifting theme-less for a while. There was a synergy there. They came into office with even greater contempt for the bureaucracy and for all the sources of expertise beyond what they considered their own.

"I look at the work of the people who would have been my counterparts ... during the Vietnam era, and I admire the courage of some of them. On the other hand, they had it a lot easier than people like me in Iraq, because they were asked and their opinions were welcome. In Iraq, our opinions were never asked. Your opinion clearly wasn't welcome."

Elsewhere, the country had become accustomed to confronting self-government through what the historian Daniel Boorstin called "a world of pseudo-events and quasi-information, in which the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false, but merely credible." The effect on the country's leaders was that they began to believe their own nonsense. The effect on the country was that citizens recognized it as nonsense and believed it anyway. A culture of cynical innocence was born, aggrieved and noisy, nurtured by a media that put a premium on empty argument and Kabuki debate. Citizens were encouraged to deplore their government, ridicule its good intentions, and hold themselves proudly ignorant of its functions and its purposes. Having done so, they then insisted on an absolute right to wash their hands of the consequences.

Cynics bore even themselves eventually. However, as a land of perpetual reinvention and of many frontiers, and founded on ideas and imagination, America had a solution within its genome. It could create fictions to replace the things from which cynicism had drained its faith. It could become a novelized nation.

Novelizations are so preposterous an idea that they only could have been hatched as an art form here. They are based on the a.s.sumption that people will read a book that fills in the gaps of the screenplay of a movie they've already seen. A novelization is pure commerce, a salesman's delight. Few writers brag about writing them; one online critic referred to them memorably as "flipping burgers in someone else's universe."

The very first one, written by Russell Holman in 1928, was aimed at promoting a Clara Bow film called Follow the Fleet. Follow the Fleet. Since then, science fiction fans have come to dote on them as treasure troves of previously unknown arcana, the movies themselves having spent little time on Han Solo's childhood bout with Rigellian ringworm. The most successful of the genre was William Kotzwinkle's best-selling rendition of Steven Spielberg's Since then, science fiction fans have come to dote on them as treasure troves of previously unknown arcana, the movies themselves having spent little time on Han Solo's childhood bout with Rigellian ringworm. The most successful of the genre was William Kotzwinkle's best-selling rendition of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which sold more than a million copies on top of the tens of millions of people who saw the actual movie, but in which, as the film writer Grady Hendrix pointed out in a piece for Slate Slate, Kotzwinkle grafted onto the story a genuinely creepy obsession on the part of the lovable little alien with the mother of the children who take him in. Some gaps are best left unfilled.

As art, novelizations are almost completely worthless. As commerce, they make perfect sense. They are creatures of the First Great Premise, by which anything has value if it moves units. And their principles are ready to be applied to almost every endeavor in a country dedicated to using whatever raw material is at hand to create vast vistas of abject hooey.

Once, when there were still actual frontiers, novelizing the country helped explain the new parts of the country to the old. Now, though, all frontiers in America are metaphorical, and the novelization of the country serves to give the national cynicism an America it can believe in. In this, the presidency came to represent a comforting counterfeit. If you sold a presidency well-and it was all about selling-the easy cynicism about "government" could be abandoned with respect to the president, who was the one part of "the government" over whom citizens seemed proud to claim common owners.h.i.+p.

All the way back to Parson Weems, presidents have been in some way fictionalized, but the modern presidency now takes place in the place where art is defined almost solely by commerce, and a place where the president is the only fungible product. In a way that would have shaken Madison down to the buckles on his shoes, the presidency became the government's great gravitational source, around which every other part of the political culture orbited, and it became the face of government in the popular culture.

Actual presidents-and people who wanted to be the actual president-caught on quickly. The pursuit of the presidency is now a contest of narratives. Create your own and get it on the market fast, before someone-possibly your opponent, but probably the media-creates one for you. Poor Al Gore learned this lesson far too late. The successful narrative is judged only by how well it sells. Its essential truth becomes merely a byproduct. The Third Great Premise now dominates the marketplace of narratives, which is not necessarily the same as the marketplace of ideas. If enough people believe that Gore said he'd invented the Internet, or that George Bush is a cowboy, then those are facts, even though Gore never said it and Bush is afraid of horses. If people devoutly hate Gore for saying what he never said, or profoundly like Bush for being what he isn't, then that becomes the truth.

In 1960, Nixon had lost to the first thoroughly novelized presidency, that of John F. Kennedy. The New Frontier was a fairly conventional political narrative; nothing sells in America like the notion that we have to pick up ourselves and start anew. But, like William Kotzwinkle cobbling together E.T.'s libido, historians and journalists and other scribbling hangers-on fell all over themselves to fill in the elided details of the television photoplay. The idea of the cool and ironic Jack Kennedy, who used to run with the Rat Pack in Vegas, turning mushy over a piece of treacle like Camelot Camelot is on its face preposterous. But it sold well enough to define, in shorthand, everything from Pablo Casals playing in the East Room to the Cuban missile crisis, which was decidedly not a time for happy-ever-aftering. is on its face preposterous. But it sold well enough to define, in shorthand, everything from Pablo Casals playing in the East Room to the Cuban missile crisis, which was decidedly not a time for happy-ever-aftering.

The apotheosis of the modern novelized presidency was that of Ronald Reagan. He and his people created a remarkable and invulnerable narrative around him, so complete and whole that it managed to survive, relatively intact, until Reagan's death in 2004, when what was celebrated in lachrymose detail was not his actual biography but what had been created out of it over the previous forty years. To mention his first marriage, to Jane Wyman, during the obsequies was not merely in bad taste, but seemed irrelevant, as though it had happened to someone else besides the deceased.

Reagan's people maintained their basic story line even through the perilous comic opera of the Iran-Contra scandal. The country learned that Reagan had arranged to sell missiles to the people who sponsored anti-American terrorism in the Middle East, in order to finance pro-American terrorism in Latin America, and that on one occasion, he sent an important official to Teheran with a Bible and a cake. The country learned this without laughing its beloved, befuddled chief executive out of office. Ol' Dutch, what a card.

When Karl Rove (or whoever) talked to Ron Suskind about the contempt he felt for the "reality-based community," and how his administration would create its own reality for the rest of us to study, he wasn't saying anything groundbreaking. People in his job had been doing that for years. What he had was a monumental event to act upon. When September 11 happened, and it was clear that events moved whether people wanted them to or not, the country swung radically behind a president who, somehow, was not a part of "the government," but a quasi-official king and father. It was said that irony died on September 11; but cynicism was what fell most loudly.

Suddenly, "the government" was us again. Of course, "the government" largely was defined as the president, whom we were accustomed to treat as our common property. Dan Rather told David Letterman that he would "line up" wherever George Bush told him to line up. This att.i.tude of wounded deference obtained for nearly three years. The Iraq war happened because the people who'd wanted it all along were uniquely positioned to create a narrative about why it should happen, and seized the right moment for its release date.

In short, all the outside checks on what Paul Pillar saw within the government were gone. Events were becoming novelized, and the wrong people were filling in the elided details; the relations.h.i.+p between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which didn't exist in fact, existed within the prevailing narrative. The Iraqi nuclear program was an established threat, as real as Jack Kennedy's love for the scores of Lerner and Loewe. Public opinion, which Madison said "sets bounds for every government," was in no condition to set any limits whatsoever. It needed a narrative, and the people who were selling the war gave the country what screenwriters call a through-line, from Ground Zero through Kabul to Baghdad.

"We are talking here about national moods," says Paul Pillar. "And, of course, 9/11 was the big event here in suddenly bringing about a change in the national mood. It became far more belligerent, far more inclined to strike out somewhere, and so it was the perfect environment for something like going to war on automatic pilot in Iraq to work. Politically, it wouldn't have been possible without 9/11 at all.