But one always has to watch out for what one wishes for, doesn't one?

Today, the presidential commission investigating the explosion that killed 11 workers, causing the worst offshore oil spill ever in this country's history, released its first official finding. According to internal memos, Halliburton, the giant formerly run by Dick Cheney, and the cementing contractor on the fated well, knew of dangerous flaws in their cement before the explosion. Halliburton shared test results with BP, but the companies did nothing. "Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable," a letter from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill says, "but neither acted upon that data."  

The Journal has excellent coverage, including a gaggle of troubling graphics on the spill.

Related: Halliburton's Greatest Hits

Norman Finkelstein has also criticized me, for trying to make my bones by being mean to Chomsky, something he says a lot of people on the left do. Finkelstein says I should have shown more grace.

Just to stand up for myself for a second, let me say that: a, the guy had a bad night, and I said so, justly. Alas I was also a 7-letter word that begins with a about it, and I apologized for my tone. Enuf.

b, Chomsky was wrong about Walt and Mearsheimer last year. He was wrong because he does not seem to have a sociocultural or psychological bone in his body, but tends to (fudging that one; I haven't read him) see everything in Marxist terms, always talking about the corporations. And so he would finger Cheney's evil Halliburton backstory, ignoring the fact that Cheney also had a long AEI backstory, in bed with neocon intellectuals who obviously influenced him (his wife worked there, too), and whom he then moved into the White House en masse, and whom he and Bush then listened to; and Chomsky thereby immunizes a powerful ethnic-religious lobby of any role in the Iraq disaster.

The novel’s anti-hero is Misha Vainberg, an obscenely fat and rich Russian who is, by his own reckoning, a “holy fool” out of Dostoyevsky. After earning a degree in multicultural studies in the United States, Vainberg moves to Manhattan and falls madly in love with the ghetto-chic Rouenna, hailing from the South Bronx, with a background that is “half Puerto Rican and half German. And half Mexican and Irish.” The only problem is that he can’t seem to score an American visa, owing to the sticky fact that his Russian father killed an American businessman some years back. And so our portly protagonist finds himself back in the wasteland of Putin, beseeching the I.N.S. to allow him re-entry. The promise of a forged Belgian passport brings him to the imaginary nation of Absurdistan, a country swiftly descending into a civil war. The conflict—between two rival Christian tribes, the Sevo and the Svanï—is being helped along by a healthy smattering of U.S. contractors of the Halliburton/K.B.R. variety.

Unable to leave the country and holed up in the temporary safety of the Hyatt Hotel, Misha struggles gallantly to make sense of the mess—whether the Sevo are evil, why the local hookers offer 30 percent discounts to employees of “Golly Burton,” and the slippery meaning of Ukrainian mercenaries on the hotel roof shelling the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, Rouenna e-mails to say that she’s leaving him for Russian expat author Jerry Shteynfarb, author of The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. Heartbroken, Misha falls in love with Nana Nanabragovna, the daughter of the man at the helm of a radical Sevo political party. Drawn in by the rhetorical lure of his prospective father-in-law, Misha takes a job as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, accepting a mandate to appeal to the Jewish population of Israel to aid Absurdistan’s oppressed minorities.

There’s a heart hidden beneath the over-the-top satire. Misha Vainberg could be merely ridiculous—he’s a 325-pound post-Communist atheistic Russian Jew with a penchant for quoting American gangsta rap—but we end up actually sympathizing with the poor schmuck. Absurdistan is really two books—a love story mashed up with a thinly veiled attack on Dubya, Halliburton and war for oil—and Mr. Shteyngart juggles them adeptly without veering off into cartoon high jinks. Eager to make money and protect his own hide, Misha isn’t a saint or a moralist, and it’s this basic humanity that saves Absurdistan from being a comedic farce strung together from the table scraps of Chomsky and Vidal. The novel spotlights the logical extremes of the 21st century without issuing any tiresome call to arms. It’s up to you whether you’d like to change the world—or just chuckle guiltily at its prolific idiocy.

In the imaginary nation of Absurdistan, populated with a cast of very plausible politicos and insiders, Mr. Shteyngart sets in motion a plot that makes the wildest accusations of Michael Moore seem like pussyfooting understatements. Absurdistan might not exist, but something like it certainly resides in the idle fantasies of America’s neocons and foreign-policy cowboys. It’s part nation-state and part stage set for the unveiling of late capitalism’s gushing wet dreams—a country where the dollar’s primacy crushes any petty concern for conscience and the sanctity of human life. “The Americans have really been helping us out,” says one local democrat. “Free use of the fax machines after nine p.m., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary, five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan.” It’s what the world would look like if no one were watching and global affairs were managed with all the discretion and tact of Lindsay Lohan. When Absurdistan’s vaunted oil reserves turn out to be a sham, the savvy American politicos don’t pack their bags and head back to Texas—they incite a bit of internecine bloodshed in the hope of scoring fat, no-bid peacekeeping contracts from the Department of Defense.

The political satire is vicious, but it’s the author’s digressions on Judaism that will end up ruffling the most feathers. Misha Vainberg’s disdain for the Orthodox community, and his own embrace of an atheistic Jewish identity, seem designed to incite rabbinical frowns in Mr. Shteyngart’s own Brooklyn and beyond. Likewise Misha’s outline for the Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, a snarky satire-within-a-satire about the impulse to market and promote Holocaust suffering as if it were a cheeseburger or a can of soda:

“The Holocaust, when harnessed properly as a source of guilt, shame, and victimhood, can serve as a remarkable tool for Jewish community. The problem is the oversaturation of the Holocaust brand in media and academe, creating the need for a fresh, vibrant, and sexy (yes, sexy—let’s keep our eyes on the prize) approach to the mother of all genocides.”

It’s good to know that a well-wrought joke can still elicit shock and awe.

The boiling-over lunacy of Absurdistan isn’t far removed from what even a cursory peek at a newspaper reveals. “‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto,” explains one of the book’s insiders, a Mossad agent masquerading as a good ol’ boy from Texas. “‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

The novel asks, in the baldest terms, whether American rapacity is so great that ethnic turmoil and bloodshed are little more than ideological smokescreens meant to cover an underlying thirst for petroleum, wealth and government contracts. After Absurdistan’s deft barrage of serious laughter, you won’t have to be a card-carrying leftist to answer with a resounding maybe.

Scott Indrisek is the New York editor of Anthem.

The novel’s anti-hero is Misha Vainberg, an obscenely fat and rich Russian who is, by his own reckoning, a “holy fool” out of Dostoyevsky. After earning a degree in multicultural studies in the United States, Vainberg moves to Manhattan and falls madly in love with the ghetto-chic Rouenna, hailing from the South Bronx, with a background that is “half Puerto Rican and half German. And half Mexican and Irish.” The only problem is that he can’t seem to score an American visa, owing to the sticky fact that his Russian father killed an American businessman some years back. And so our portly protagonist finds himself back in the wasteland of Putin, beseeching the I.N.S. to allow him re-entry. The promise of a forged Belgian passport brings him to the imaginary nation of Absurdistan, a country swiftly descending into a civil war. The conflict—between two rival Christian tribes, the Sevo and the Svanï—is being helped along by a healthy smattering of U.S. contractors of the Halliburton/K.B.R. variety.

Unable to leave the country and holed up in the temporary safety of the Hyatt Hotel, Misha struggles gallantly to make sense of the mess—whether the Sevo are evil, why the local hookers offer 30 percent discounts to employees of “Golly Burton,” and the slippery meaning of Ukrainian mercenaries on the hotel roof shelling the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, Rouenna e-mails to say that she’s leaving him for Russian expat author Jerry Shteynfarb, author of The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. Heartbroken, Misha falls in love with Nana Nanabragovna, the daughter of the man at the helm of a radical Sevo political party. Drawn in by the rhetorical lure of his prospective father-in-law, Misha takes a job as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, accepting a mandate to appeal to the Jewish population of Israel to aid Absurdistan’s oppressed minorities.

There’s a heart hidden beneath the over-the-top satire. Misha Vainberg could be merely ridiculous—he’s a 325-pound post-Communist atheistic Russian Jew with a penchant for quoting American gangsta rap—but we end up actually sympathizing with the poor schmuck. Absurdistan is really two books—a love story mashed up with a thinly veiled attack on Dubya, Halliburton and war for oil—and Mr. Shteyngart juggles them adeptly without veering off into cartoon high jinks. Eager to make money and protect his own hide, Misha isn’t a saint or a moralist, and it’s this basic humanity that saves Absurdistan from being a comedic farce strung together from the table scraps of Chomsky and Vidal. The novel spotlights the logical extremes of the 21st century without issuing any tiresome call to arms. It’s up to you whether you’d like to change the world—or just chuckle guiltily at its prolific idiocy.

In the imaginary nation of Absurdistan, populated with a cast of very plausible politicos and insiders, Mr. Shteyngart sets in motion a plot that makes the wildest accusations of Michael Moore seem like pussyfooting understatements. Absurdistan might not exist, but something like it certainly resides in the idle fantasies of America’s neocons and foreign-policy cowboys. It’s part nation-state and part stage set for the unveiling of late capitalism’s gushing wet dreams—a country where the dollar’s primacy crushes any petty concern for conscience and the sanctity of human life. “The Americans have really been helping us out,” says one local democrat. “Free use of the fax machines after nine p.m., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary, five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan.” It’s what the world would look like if no one were watching and global affairs were managed with all the discretion and tact of Lindsay Lohan. When Absurdistan’s vaunted oil reserves turn out to be a sham, the savvy American politicos don’t pack their bags and head back to Texas—they incite a bit of internecine bloodshed in the hope of scoring fat, no-bid peacekeeping contracts from the Department of Defense.

The political satire is vicious, but it’s the author’s digressions on Judaism that will end up ruffling the most feathers. Misha Vainberg’s disdain for the Orthodox community, and his own embrace of an atheistic Jewish identity, seem designed to incite rabbinical frowns in Mr. Shteyngart’s own Brooklyn and beyond. Likewise Misha’s outline for the Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, a snarky satire-within-a-satire about the impulse to market and promote Holocaust suffering as if it were a cheeseburger or a can of soda:

“The Holocaust, when harnessed properly as a source of guilt, shame, and victimhood, can serve as a remarkable tool for Jewish community. The problem is the oversaturation of the Holocaust brand in media and academe, creating the need for a fresh, vibrant, and sexy (yes, sexy—let’s keep our eyes on the prize) approach to the mother of all genocides.”

It’s good to know that a well-wrought joke can still elicit shock and awe.

The boiling-over lunacy of Absurdistan isn’t far removed from what even a cursory peek at a newspaper reveals. “‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto,” explains one of the book’s insiders, a Mossad agent masquerading as a good ol’ boy from Texas. “‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

The novel asks, in the baldest terms, whether American rapacity is so great that ethnic turmoil and bloodshed are little more than ideological smokescreens meant to cover an underlying thirst for petroleum, wealth and government contracts. After Absurdistan’s deft barrage of serious laughter, you won’t have to be a card-carrying leftist to answer with a resounding maybe.

Scott Indrisek is the New York editor of Anthem.

For in the nation’s capital, at least, that traditional philosophy of society and statecraft appears to have degenerated into a public-relations scam.

The obvious fact is that Republicans are the party of big spending, big deficits and big government, no matter how indignantly their leaders profess to despise all those terrible things. Yet the history of the Bush administration and the G.O.P. Congress makes it equally obvious that they’re also incompetent at governing. So the question that Americans now confront is why these fakers should be allowed to waste hundreds of billions of dollars, adding to the hundreds of billions they have already squandered, when the results of their exertions are so unsatisfactory—and so self-serving.

Although George W. Bush is universally acknowledged to be the most conservative President in recent memory, he is now doing exactly what he and his ideological allies have always mocked liberals for doing. In the classic right-wing cliché (which isn’t heard much these days), he is “throwing money at the problem” of the hurricane’s aftermath.

According to journalists familiar with the panicky deliberations inside the White House, the President and his aides are ready to jettison their cherished principles of federal frugality and limited government, with little ceremony and few regrets. Time magazine reports that they will pursue a simple approach in hopes of reviving the Bush Presidency: “Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later.”

There probably isn’t any other way to relieve suffering and restore civilization down there. But knowing what we know about this administration, there can be little confidence that those billions will be spent wisely and competently.

In fact, there is every reason to worry that far too much will be wasted on partisan patronage and no-bid contracts. The flaming right-wingers who have controlled Congress since 1995 long ago proved eager to grease their friends with federal money. Their excesses make the old-line Democratic pols who used to run Congress look stingy.

The money quote on this topic was uttered by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Asked once why his revolutionary Republican comrades were consuming so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did, the Texas conservative replied smugly: “To the victors go the spoils.” (He now leads Freedomworks, a national organization advocating limited government and lower taxes.)

The Bush conservatives resolve the contradiction between their ideology and their compulsion to spend by channeling public funds to their corporate cronies. Such corrupt logrolling hardly qualifies as traditional conservatism, but that is what currently defines governance in the White House, the Capitol and along K Street.

The Medicare prescription-drug benefit, designed to entice elderly voters, disguised a massive subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry—which returns many millions to Republican causes and conservative institutions. The energy bill provided still more enormous subsidies to the oil and utility industries, which likewise recycle millions to right-wing candidates and think tanks. Thanks to Republican tax policies, the money to grease these highly profitable corporations comes increasingly from middle-income families, redistributing national income upward.

All the boodling might be less troubling if they were using public money to accomplish an important public purpose. Waste and corruption accompany almost every major enterprise. But crony capitalism—the governing philosophy of the Bush family—is a notoriously inefficient way to run a government.

Enormous sums have simply disappeared in Iraq, where Halliburton has battened on its cozy relationship with the White House and the Pentagon by billing for hundreds of millions of dollars in “questioned” and “unsupported” expenses. How has the Bush administration punished its favorite firm for those abuses? By almost instantly awarding Halliburton new contracts for cleaning up the Gulf Coast destruction, with the prospect of much more to come.

Emphasizing the Halliburton embarrassment was the presence in New Orleans of the company’s “consultant,” Joe Allbaugh, a longtime Bush staffer and friend who also happens to be the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He is the man responsible for the elevation of Michael D. (Brownie) Brown, the unqualified pretender who just resigned in disgrace from that same FEMA post.

The story of the FEMA buddies offers a paradigm of public service in the Bush era. Behind their anti-government rhetoric, the Republicans have learned how to make government work for them, by employing the unemployable and enriching the super-rich. Critical needs are left unmet, and gigantic deficits are left to posterity.

This isn’t conservatism, but a con—and they’re taking us all for suckers.

For in the nation’s capital, at least, that traditional philosophy of society and statecraft appears to have degenerated into a public-relations scam.

The obvious fact is that Republicans are the party of big spending, big deficits and big government, no matter how indignantly their leaders profess to despise all those terrible things. Yet the history of the Bush administration and the G.O.P. Congress makes it equally obvious that they’re also incompetent at governing. So the question that Americans now confront is why these fakers should be allowed to waste hundreds of billions of dollars, adding to the hundreds of billions they have already squandered, when the results of their exertions are so unsatisfactory—and so self-serving.

Although George W. Bush is universally acknowledged to be the most conservative President in recent memory, he is now doing exactly what he and his ideological allies have always mocked liberals for doing. In the classic right-wing cliché (which isn’t heard much these days), he is “throwing money at the problem” of the hurricane’s aftermath.

According to journalists familiar with the panicky deliberations inside the White House, the President and his aides are ready to jettison their cherished principles of federal frugality and limited government, with little ceremony and few regrets. Time magazine reports that they will pursue a simple approach in hopes of reviving the Bush Presidency: “Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later.”

There probably isn’t any other way to relieve suffering and restore civilization down there. But knowing what we know about this administration, there can be little confidence that those billions will be spent wisely and competently.

In fact, there is every reason to worry that far too much will be wasted on partisan patronage and no-bid contracts. The flaming right-wingers who have controlled Congress since 1995 long ago proved eager to grease their friends with federal money. Their excesses make the old-line Democratic pols who used to run Congress look stingy.

The money quote on this topic was uttered by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Asked once why his revolutionary Republican comrades were consuming so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did, the Texas conservative replied smugly: “To the victors go the spoils.” (He now leads Freedomworks, a national organization advocating limited government and lower taxes.)

The Bush conservatives resolve the contradiction between their ideology and their compulsion to spend by channeling public funds to their corporate cronies. Such corrupt logrolling hardly qualifies as traditional conservatism, but that is what currently defines governance in the White House, the Capitol and along K Street.

The Medicare prescription-drug benefit, designed to entice elderly voters, disguised a massive subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry—which returns many millions to Republican causes and conservative institutions. The energy bill provided still more enormous subsidies to the oil and utility industries, which likewise recycle millions to right-wing candidates and think tanks. Thanks to Republican tax policies, the money to grease these highly profitable corporations comes increasingly from middle-income families, redistributing national income upward.

All the boodling might be less troubling if they were using public money to accomplish an important public purpose. Waste and corruption accompany almost every major enterprise. But crony capitalism—the governing philosophy of the Bush family—is a notoriously inefficient way to run a government.

Enormous sums have simply disappeared in Iraq, where Halliburton has battened on its cozy relationship with the White House and the Pentagon by billing for hundreds of millions of dollars in “questioned” and “unsupported” expenses. How has the Bush administration punished its favorite firm for those abuses? By almost instantly awarding Halliburton new contracts for cleaning up the Gulf Coast destruction, with the prospect of much more to come.

Emphasizing the Halliburton embarrassment was the presence in New Orleans of the company’s “consultant,” Joe Allbaugh, a longtime Bush staffer and friend who also happens to be the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He is the man responsible for the elevation of Michael D. (Brownie) Brown, the unqualified pretender who just resigned in disgrace from that same FEMA post.

The story of the FEMA buddies offers a paradigm of public service in the Bush era. Behind their anti-government rhetoric, the Republicans have learned how to make government work for them, by employing the unemployable and enriching the super-rich. Critical needs are left unmet, and gigantic deficits are left to posterity.

This isn’t conservatism, but a con—and they’re taking us all for suckers.

On Monday the 11th, the Senate showed that, no matter what the public thinks, Cheneyworld still calls the shots. It legitimated a raid on the Public Capital, embracing subsidies, buyouts, tax breaks, preferences and so on that will add up to $140 billion over the next 10 years. The bill passed the upper house 69-17.

Not voting were Senators Kerry and Edwards. The excuse lamely given in The Times —or perhaps it should be the lame excuse given in The Times —was that the two were busy campaigning.

I don’t understand that. This bill, economically spurious and socially indefensible, is redolent in every stinking pore and orifice of attitudes toward public money and the public purse that we might collectively call "The Halliburton Syndrome." Halliburton and all that it entails are something Senator Kerry and his party have had in their sights since Day 1.

What an opportunity this bill presented for John Kerry to break off campaigning, fly to Washington, stride onto the Senate floor and vote loudly, massive chin held high, against a bill that "represents everything that I and my ticket stand against, and everything this administration stands for!" What a chance to display a profile in courage, if you will.

But he didn’t do that. Instead he stayed away, blathering on in some swing state or another about health insurance and continuing, in a hard-edged, bitter, few-holds-barred campaign, to indulge in utterances like his terrorism/nuisance trope, which invariably boomerang because they lend themselves to calculated misquotation in the best tradition of Fox News. Watching the Kerry campaign makes one bless the sweet Lord that the venues in which he appears don’t accommodate themselves to PowerPoint.

But back to the main issue. Where was you, Johnny, you man of principle, on the Big Giveaway? As the King of Siam notably mused: "Is a puzzlement."

The suspicion has to be, well, if Lyndon Johnson could boast that he had an opponent’s "pecker in my pocket," perhaps Teresa Heinz Kerry can say that she has her husband’s in her pocketbook.

For a more benign view, let me recommend Daniel Gross on Slate (10/12; http://slate.msn.com/id/2108136/), who points out that really rich people like Teresa Heinz Kerry don’t care about such things, any more than they care about two- or three-point bumps in the income-tax rate—which they don’t pay anyway. The Kerrys only paid an effective rate of 12 percent on their 2003 income of nearly $7 million, of which a small fraction is attributable to the Senator. His contribution reminds me of an anecdote involving Nick Etten, a good hit/no-field Yankee first baseman of long ago. Around 1944, he signed a contract for $15,015, whereupon a New York sportswriter opined: "The fifteen bucks is for fielding." So doth the Senator’s take-home relate to the whole.

The giveaway bill was for people and companies that need to cheat to build wealth, because wealth is the key. What people don’t understand is that you need capital to cut your effective tax rate, capital with which to buy tax-exempts or put up the money for non-suspect tax fiddles (you should see what accountants can do with private-jet ownership). Capital-poor wage slaves can’t play this game. Thus do the rich get richer.

So where are we now? It is clear that the President thinks he was picked by the deity to lead us against the heathen and is instructed by divine voices (God’s mouth to his ear)—we might as well call him "George of Arc." It is evident that Dick Cheney is a thug, albeit possessed of the cunning one frequently encounters in not-all-that-bright (look at his record at Halliburton) people who have an instinctive feel for how to game the system. Still, many of us who dread another four years of George Bush fear four years of John Kerry only slightly less and still need convincing. Web sites like www.Kerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com don’t quite do the job.

We need a non-rhetorical rating system. I’ve got one.

Years ago on Wall Street, I absorbed a great truth: Every number exists in two dimensions, the absolute and the proportionate—and you use whichever best supports the lie you are about to tell. I have applied that to the present campaign and evaluated the two candidacies in terms of absolute and relative negatives. In this race, there are no positives—none.

Here’s how my rating system works. I’ve broken the campaign down into five essential categories: Bush vs. Kerry personally; Bush vs. Kerry in terms of policy substance and realism; Cheney vs. Edwards; Kerry-knockers vs. Bush-haters; Fox vs. CNN (media slant and performance). I then rate each in terms of relative and absolute awfulness (a term that encompasses every negative and minus I can think of, of every kind) on a scale of 1 to 10, the latter being the absolute worst. High score loses, which is in keeping with the spirit of the campaign.

Here’s where I come out. George W. Bush a 9, John Kerry a 9 personally. On policy, both get a 10. Dick Cheney is, of course, a 10 on every count, but John Edwards gets off with an 8. I find Bush-haters unacceptably shrill and obtuse: 10 for the pack of them. The Kerry-knockers come across a shade less mindlessly hysterical, so say 9. As for the media, each polarity of the commentariat gets a 10: a plague on them both!

Now add it up. The Bush side: 9+10+10+9+10 = 48. The Kerry side: 9+10+8+10+10 = 47. John Kerry by the thickness of a hair on Pinocchio’s nose. With two weeks to go, he’s my man. But that could change.

P.W. Singer, in Corporate Warriors (Cornell University Press, 2003)-a book that I cannot recommend too highly-writes that "due to a financial dispute between two subcontracting agents, the ship began sailing around in circles outside of Canadian waters. Until the matter was resolved, the ship refused to make the delivery, essentially holding about one third of the entire Canadian army's equipment and soldiers hostage. The standoff lasted for almost two weeks, during which time this sizable chunk of the Canadian military's inventory was unavailable, solely because its leadership had privatized transportation to save a minimal amount."

The American military is in similar shape. It can neither move itself nor supply itself unless serviced by gigantic private corporations on which it depends for thousands of indispensable functions. Food, water purification, electrical generation, construction of roads, bridges, mail delivery, medical services, land-mine clearance, communications and scores of other tasks are no longer done by the American military, but are jobbed out to multinational corporations which, in turn, job them out to subcontractors.

Even the Reserve Officers Training Corps, found on hundreds of college campuses, is no long run by service personnel but by the employees of contractors who wear Army uniforms but are not subject to military discipline. Some of the most advanced, technically complicated weapons in the American military are being maintained by private contractors. "The maintenance and administration," Mr. Singer writes, "for such strategic weapons as the B-2 stealth bomber, the F-117 stealth fighter, the KC-10 refueling aircraft, the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and numerous naval surface warfare ships are all privatized."

Elsewhere, Mr. Singer writes of "the reversal of long-standing weapons purchasing requirements. The mandate once held that the military had to be able to achieve self-sufficiency in maintaining and operating new weapons systems within 12 months of their introduction. The new norm, however, is that instead of the military planning to do the job itself, weapons systems' contracts generally include service elements, detailing civilian-provided lifetime technical support." Thus, the United States military is in a situation not dissimilar to a poverty-stricken African kleptocracy, which swaps diamonds or oil for modern war machinery that would rot and fall to pieces without the personnel to maintain and operate it.

When a soldier does substandard work or fails in his duty, he or she is punished-and rightly so, since dereliction and incompetence can bring on death and disaster. When a private contractor fails-and they do-lives may be lost, but there is little the government can do other than sue. To save money, P.M.F.'s cut costs by scrimping on quality and competence. Mr. Singer gives an example that should scare the hell out of the men and women on active duty with the armed services:

"DynCorp's contract with the U.S. military for aviation support is an egregious example of such cutting corners with staffing. Among the personnel the firm reportedly assigned to the maintenance of U.S. combat aircraft were employees whose only previous work experience was as waitresses, security guards, cooks and cashiers. As one DynCorp mechanic working on the contract writes, 'We have people working on aircraft with absolutely no aviation experience nor ground-equipment skills.'" Mr. Singer tells his readers that there is reason to believe that an unknown number of service people have died in air accidents resulting from faulty private-sector maintenance. So the question arises: Who is killing more of our people in Iraq? Iraqi guerrillas? Or Halliburton, through its Brown and Root Services subsidiary? Are the answers to those questions bound up in the vague, perfunctory and unsatisfactory investigations of the death of our service people by the Pentagon?

The objections to "outsourcing" national defense and safety are so many and so grave that it takes a book like Mr. Singer's to adequately cover them all. But for starters, Mr. Singer reports there is no evidence that outsourcing is less expensive than keeping the work inside the government. Even when there is competitive bidding for these multibillion-dollar contracts, it's pretty much of a joke. At best, the process of awarding contracts should be looked upon as a competitive divvying-up of the boodle. Who awards these contracts? Generals and connected politicians. Who heads the companies who get the contracts? Ex-generals. Thus, every official handing out the bonbons is a future employee of bonbonees.

Nor is there any evidence that P.M.F.'s do the work-i.e., defend the nation-better than the armed services, and a lot of reason to believe that they make the country not only more vulnerable to attack, but to defeat. I repeat: vulnerable to defeat . P.M.F. personnel have taken the place of what were once rear-echelon support troops who sometimes have been called upon to drop their soup ladles and screwdrivers and grab their weapons. Mr. Singer points out that this is what happened at the Battle of the Bulge, as well as what happened 50 years later to American forces at Mogadishu in Somalia.

In such critical moments, do the contractor or subcontractor employees-an unknown number of whom are not Americans-fight? Or do they say "We quit!" and run for the exits? Contractors are not subject to being shot for deserting their posts. It must be a morale booster to our fighting forces to have a bunch of civilians in their rear telling them, perhaps not even in English, "I got your back."

In this connection, it must be emphasized that these commercial warriors do not take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution; they are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Discipline. These people are not in the battle area for reasons of patriotism, love of country, or dedication to freedom and democracy. They are there for the money. If, at any moment, the danger outweighs the money, they will bolt and run, betraying our people and causing their deaths.

Speaking about the morale of our people, what happens as it gradually dawns on our young men and women that they are being paid one-tenth of what the mercenaries around them are getting?

Private military firms are global and, though some of them may have their origins in the United States, they have no loyalty to it. Mr. Singer offers examples of subsidiaries of Dick Cheney's Halliburton working for "rogue regimes" like Libya "in violation of U.S. Government sanctions." Which comes first, country or free market? The motive of the men running these companies is profit, not patriotism. They are traitors by the very definition of their institutional situation. They don't even have an incentive to do their work well and quickly-after all, the longer the war, the bigger the profits. Thus, to Halliburton and the other companies involved in the work, our current war on terrorism has turned out to be the Comstock Lode. In the last few years-during both the Clinton and Bush II administrations-these companies have been awarded well over $300 billion in contracts.

This doesn't begin to cover the objections to privatizing the military. The practice allows the government to hire private armies to do things that Congress has forbidden the official army to do. Such seems to be the case in the ever-worsening nightmare in Colombia. Since these companies are staffed by personnel trained at great public expense, the heaviest costs are borne by the taxpayers-not the P.M.F.'s, who simply get the profit. Yet another objection is that the companies are not only putting American military know-how at the service of others, they are also transferring military technology to people who may, in the not too distant future, use it against us.

Finally, and most seriously of all, violence must be a government monopoly. It is intolerable to think of private parties having any control over armed forces and police in a democracy. Yet they now do in America. Without the cooperation of the "War-Marts," as they are sometimes called, the American military cannot fly, sail or march. We have made it much easier than ever before to pull off some kind of coup d'etat, and I don't put it past the neocon elements to contemplate such a thing if the wrong Democrat were to find a way to get elected to the Presidency.

In the meantime, American corporations will at least have minted a few billion bucks.

For cynics observing the development of U.S. policy, the business of America still seems to be business, abroad or at home, and not democracy. The war was said to be about changing an evil regime, combating terrorism, eliminating weapons of mass destruction or an uplifting combination of the above-and certainly not about anything as grimy as oil. Somehow, the U.S. Special Forces secured the oil fields first, and the troops arriving in Baghdad set up their armor around the Ministry of Oil, and the Iraqi exile politicians now being groomed for power happen to favor privatizing their country's petroleum resources. Preserving the oil fields from destruction was crucial, but whether they were saved for the future benefit of the Iraqi people remains doubtful.

As for post-war arrangements with traditional American allies and multilateral institutions, the administration's exclusion of the United Nations, the French, the Russians and the Germans may or may not be in the national interest. Fareed Zakaria has argued persuasively in Newsweek that our true interest lies in making all assistance to Iraq "multilateral," since this would "take some of the economic and military burden off the United States" and help remove the stigma of U.S. occupation in Iraqi eyes. The White House and the Pentagon, however, have rejected that eminently sensible advice, supposedly for geopolitical and strategic reasons-as well as to punish those who tried to thwart the drive to war. There's another obvious downside to multilateralism: American corporations would have to share with their competitors in Europe and Japan.

Sharing the spoils might not trouble the ordinary taxpayer, who must contemplate spending additional tens of billions from Washington's depleted treasury on Iraq's reconstruction while domestic needs go unmet. Unfortunately, the ordinary taxpayer has little influence over the federal government's dealings in Iraq, where enormous deals made in great haste will surely result in appalling waste.

Last week, the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded a contract worth $680 billion for the reconstruction of roads, bridges and other facilities to Bechtel, the San Francisco– based construction conglomerate whose Republican connections are comparable to those of Enron and the Carlyle Group.

Bechtel's former president is George Shultz, who served as Secretary of State during the Reagan administration, tutored George W. Bush in foreign policy during the 2000 campaign and fervently advocated invading Iraq. The company's current C.E.O., Riley Bechtel, was recently appointed to serve on the President's Export Council.

The most startling coincidence is that the official responsible for overseeing the award of the A.I.D. contract to Bechtel is Andrew Natsios. A protégé of White House chief of staff Andrew Card, the A.I.D. chief knows the San Francisco company very well, indeed. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Mr. Natsios oversaw Boston's Big Dig highway scheme, the largest and most scandalously inefficient building project in American history-whose chief contractor was none other than Bechtel.

In his zeal to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Natsios discarded normal bidding procedures for a rapid process that entertained proposals from only six companies. Why Bechtel won remains a mystery. But the firm's performance in Boston is all too well-known, especially to Mr. Natsios, whose last job in Massachusetts was to restrain the cost overruns and mismanagement that infested the Big Dig. Under his supervision in 2000, the overruns quickly swelled from $1.4 billion to $2.2 billion.

Several months later, Mr. Natsios left that big mess behind to take up his current post in Washington. He departed just before the state's inspector general issued a report describing his "reforms" as a failure that continued to invite "fraud, waste and abuse."

Wherever there are winners, there must be losers, too. Halliburton Inc., the construction outfit that used to employ Vice President Dick Cheney and still pays him a million annually in deferred compensation, was slated for work as a subcontractor on the A.I.D. construction contract under Parsons Inc.

Unfortunately, Parsons lost out to Bechtel this time.

Don't feel too sorry for the Vice President and his former colleagues, though. The Army Corps of Engineers gave a no-bid contract to put out oil fires in Iraq to a Halliburton subsidiary. And Halliburton also earned as much as a billion dollars as the primary logistics contractor for the American expeditionary forces in Iraq.

Oh, what a lovely war.

When one of my colleagues proudly informs me, "I'm a political junkie!"-as one did last week on the way to Penn Station-it makes me wonder, since in the world where I grew up and was educated, addiction, even if officially licensed (the classic WASP world is an island set in a silver sea of gin), is hardly encouraging to clear thinking.

Thus I find it interesting that it is considered a sign of the fitness of Richard Cheney for high office that he fixed things so adroitly for Halliburton when he was its chief executive. I know a bit about that company. My father was a director for almost four decades, from the time it was spun out to the public. My cousin Bill Owsley was the chief of engineering. I was present and remember vividly July 4, 1954, in Duncan, Okla., when company founder Erle P. Halliburton-a man who, if he'd lived long enough, would have never met a Bush he didn't like (as "Ol' Erle P." often put it)-gave his annual address to the company picnic, a tirade similar in tone and view of social democracy to the philosophy that had been expressed from the pulpit a couple of decades earlier at Nuremberg. Halliburton would later acquire Brown & Root, the company so closely identified with the rise of Lyndon Baines Johnson (see Robert Caro's biography passim ). Politically, Ol' Erle P. was the precursor of Garry Trudeau's Uncle Duke: a compassionate fascist. It was a workable philosophy in 1954-but much has changed since.

Its founder's politics notwithstanding, Halliburton was one of the great companies in America until it moved it from Duncan to Dallas and shifted its focus from the oil fields to the lobbyist's suite. It was a source of pride to have driven one of those red-and-gray trucks, to have worked for men like "Preach" Meaders and Logan Campbell and my immediate supervisor, Jimmy Johnson (men who would have been lost on M Street), and the tool-pushers and roughnecks we worked with out in the field. Never since that summer have I done such honest and satisfactory work (I put a lot of that experience into Hanover Place ). An oil well that needs to be perforated or logged, or demands its dose of mud or cement, suffers neither fools nor bullshit artists. All were in evidence, I judge, in Philadelphia.

So while my colleagues were off practicing "convention journalism"-which as Dave Barry observes, appears to consist mainly if not solely of scheming to get into lobbyists' parties subsidized by your and my tax dollars and designed to promote tax cuts for the other guy- your correspondent stayed at home and worried about the real world.

Among other things, I reviewed my clippings collection on Amazon.com: "Suddenly, Amazon's Books Look Better" ( Business Week , Feb. 21, 2000) with picture of contented-looking Jeff Bezos captioned "CEO Bezos could see black ink by 2002"; followed by "Can Amazon Make It?" ( Business Week , July 10, 2000), with caricature of Bezos sinking in quicksand captioned "Bezos: Some analysts say the cash may run out in four to six quarters." I admired Bezos' Man of the Year cover from Time and once again reflected on the pitfalls that attend an editorial philosophy predicated on trendiness and ass-kissing.

Readers will recall that AMZN has suffered severe recent market travails, that Mr. Bezos' noble craft is somewhat adrift, in consequence of the stout hawser of analytical bullishness that moored it to the sturdy dock of Wall Street's good opinion having been worn to the parting point by the scrabbling claws of analytical rats leaving the ship. The pell-mell flight of these intellectually and ethically wee beasties was precipitated on June 22 by Ravi Suria, a Lehman Brothers bond analyst who made the point that in business, as in Republican politics, concepts need cash flow to make them work. "Suria's report," writes Business Week (July 10), "had the audacity to evaluate this icon of the New Economy as a traditional retailer."

While I admire Mr. Suria's audacity, and the ability of his analytical colleagues to see the truth of his observation and change their minds about a stock the Meekers and Blodgets had previously hailed as the second coming of whatever, I feel that a measure of pain and discomfiture might have been avoided by reading what I wrote in this space on Nov. 23, 1998:

"And what of Amazon.com Inc.? The biggest of the 'dot com' booksellers must rank right up there with B&N in the Bertelsmann and Ingram accounts receivable. Amazon is a wonderful place to shop, but I have my doubts of its investment merits. This is a company which seemingly cannot make money on a billion of sales! It keeps going because this stock market has overpriced real profits and is reduced to throwing investors' money at earnings that are purely conceptual. But Amazon is not Boeing North American Inc., with enormous sunk costs, which have to be recovered on the first 100 747's, say, after which the gravy really starts to flow. This is a retail business, where orders have ultimately to be processed by human beings, at X per hour, and books physically taken off shelves by human hands, at Y per hour, to be shipped.

"The magic of Amazon for book buyers isn't the pricing, it's the convenience. An agent of my acquaintance put it well when she observed, 'Amazon has overdiscounted the convenience factor,' which is to say: it's not the price, stupid, it's the service! In particular, the variety of titles available, the ease and efficiency of browsing and the speed of fulfillment.

"Predatory pricing more often than not ends in the predator consuming itself. Price-driven retailing leads to creditors' meetings. Amazon will be forced to raise prices soon, because if it can't make money at $1 billion of volume at present pricing, it probably never can."

Closer to the moment, on Nov. 8, 1999, I wrote: "… [with regard] to Jeff Bezos' thudding announcement of Amazon's third-quarter earnings: I love his business, I'm a loyal and regular customer, but I wouldn't want to have a nickel in it at this point." And on May 8, 2000: "The papers are full of Amazon.com's operating results … I don't think the figures mean what they're being celebrated as meaning, but this is a time when a rainproof parade of naked emperors has trampled underfoot everyone who tried to stand in its path." Seven weeks later, Mr. Suria checked in.

The 80's were the 60's all over again, with two more zeros tacked onto the sums in which deals were conjugated. What you feared was that most inexorable of forces: compound interest. The 90's are turning out to be something different. Forget the sums. There are some new, troubling forces out there, most notably Uncle Sam's decision to make common cause with the private-sector "strike suit" bar, in going after everyone from Philip Morris to Sotheby's. It's an alliance that could prove more threatening to market democracy than anything in the mind of Marx, because it allies a politics of envy with a legalism based on greed.

This has been a heady decade, and periods of intoxication are notably tough times during which to try to keep one's wits about one. One gets careless, one doesn't see that the rules are changing, that the game is no longer what it used to be about. The other night, on "Hardcore Baseball," one of the participants in a roundtable on umpiring got it right (I quote from my hastily scribbled notes): "We don't care how the game's played as long as there's a gentlemen's agreement, but the second someone brings up a rule infraction, that's it!"

The game of finance and business is changing. We must needs be wary. It is no longer sufficient merely to obey the golden rule, drink plenty of water, look both ways before crossing, and never see a movie with a Baldwin brother in it. Given the politicians we have been given, and the journalists who attempt to explain them to us, it will be necessary to think-which won't be easy, given how much time, money and effort has gone into making thinking unfashionable, if not impossible.