Since then, according to Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, the wild, dark ride of the United States toward moral and financial bankruptcy has accelerated, around the globe and at home. As the nation’s military garrisons the planet and colonizes outer space, Americans are living with perpetual war and covert operations, as well as assaults on individual freedom, the separation of powers and constitutional government. Like the Roman Army, the Pentagon has become a state within a state. And like Octavian, “our own putative Boy Emperor from Crawford, Texas,” has united America’s political institutions “under one person—himself.” Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, is ready: “[T]he short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end.”

Preceded by Blowback (2000), an exposé of the costs of clandestine C.I.A. activities, and The Sorrows of Empire (2004), an indictment of global overreach, Nemesis is the final volume of Mr. Johnson’s apocalyptic trilogy. The argument remains the same: In a futile attempt to maintain an empire, a bloated military-industrial complex is destroying America’s democracy. Mr. Johnson is a 21st-century Jeremiah (more pit bull than bullfrog) armed with “shock and awe” rhetoric. Atop his list of the “seven morons” who lost the war in Iraq is President George W. Bush, a “desk murderer” who has “repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tool of American foreign policy.” Donald Rumsfeld and his generals, Mr. Johnson asserts, showed “indifference—even glee” at the looting of the treasures housed Baghdad’s museums. And Americans remain “comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them.”

It’s easy to dismiss Mr. Johnson as a Chicken Little with two left wings. But along with the Bush-bashing, Nemesis provides fascinating information about the Department of Defense’s practices, many of which have received little Congressional oversight and no public scrutiny. Relentless and resourceful, Mr. Johnson draws on obscure publications like The Orbital Debris Quarterly News to blow the whistle on the Pentagon’s vast network of military bases, Status of Forces Agreements, and weapons designed to destroy the surveillance satellites of other countries.

According to Mr. Johnson, the D.O.D. inventory of 737 installations—a staggering number in itself—omits “facilities provided by other nations at foreign locations,” including bases in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Uzbekistan and Israel. And it fails to include deployments that might embarrass host countries, like the 5,000 troops based in Jordan. An honest count would probably top 1,000 bases; by any estimate, the Pentagon is one of the largest landlords on the planet.

These installations, Mr. Johnson claims, are designed, in the lexicon of the Pentagon, for “full spectrum dominance.” The United States uses the war on terrorism to pressure foreign governments to allow huge Main Operating Bases, midsize Forward Operation Sites or Cooperative Security Locations (“lily pad” staging areas for emergencies) on their soil. The penetration of Paraguay, for example, began with demands that the “triborder” area shared with Argentina and Brazil, where many Syrians and Lebanese live, be cleared of terrorists. But the Special Forces, Mr. Johnson suggests, are really there to intervene against Evo Morales of Bolivia, who recently nationalized the second-largest natural gas field in South America.

Most U.S. installations are exempt from the environmental regulations and noise-pollution ordinances of the host countries. And, Mr. Johnson indicates, Status of Forces Agreements stoke additional resentment among local citizens because they stipulate that jurisdiction over service personnel accused of crimes remains with the United States. In 1995, the rape of a 12-year-old girl by two Marines and a sailor sparked huge anti-American protests in Okinawa. Nine years later, anger erupted again when the armed forces of the United States sealed off a helicopter crash site at Okinawa International University, barring local police and Japanese aviation officials. Under pressure, the American government agreed to give “sympathetic consideration” to relinquishing jurisdiction over suspects accused of “heinous crimes.” And the Bush administration revealed plans to transfer 8,000 Marines to Guam.

Mr. Johnson believes that the military base, “America’s version of the colony,” may be an endangered species. “It is no longer inconceivable,” he writes, that Germany, Japan, Spain, Turkey and South Korea “might one day kick us out—and get away with it, just as the East Europeans did with the Soviet Union in 1989.” Without bases, he implies, America’s empire would collapse.

And yet, he acknowledges grudgingly, in 2006 the Japanese government signed an “extraordinary” security agreement with the United States. Japan has agreed to pay $6.1 billion to house American soldiers and families, construct a new airport, and host a new Army command center near an upscale residential area whose residents adamantly oppose enlarging the base. (The Koizumi government, Mr. Johnson fumes, acted without popular support.)

Reports of the death of America’s overseas bases may well be exaggerated. So, too, may be Chalmers Johnson’s prediction that the United States will drift along until a financial crisis produces a dictatorship. He’s surely right that empire and democracy are incompatible. But the apocalypse he envisions seems neither imminent nor inevitable. The military-industrial complex is, of course, embedded in the structure of America’s political economy. But imperialist designs ebb and flow and are subject to countervailing forces. Despite “military Keynesianism,” for example, Bill Clinton managed to reduce military spending to about 3 percent of G.D.P. while balancing the budget—and intervening in Kosovo on humanitarian grounds.

American imperialism, economic exploitation, military bases, the arms race, covert operations and the arrogance of power won’t disappear when George W. Bush’s Presidency expires. But “preventive war,” a militarized foreign policy, unilateralism, torture memos, signing statements, the theory of the “unitary executive” and warrantless wiretaps could exit the White House with him. Nemesis, in that case, might not feel compelled to strike. Not yet.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Moldy old terms like “appeasement” and “Stalinist” have been brandished to insinuate that anyone who dares to dissent from the failed policies adopted by Joe Lieberman and the Bush administration is at best a fool and at worst a traitor.

Such overwrought commentary, often phrased in terms of deep concern for the future of the party of F.D.R., J.F.K. and Harry S. Truman, usually emanates from commentators whose political objective is continued Republican domination of all branches of government. Democrats should reject the premises of this propaganda barrage—which is designed to deceive but only reveals an extraordinary capacity for self-deception on the right.

The fundamental argument of the propagandists is that opposition to the war in Iraq represents an obsession of the far-left fringe, and that the Democrats will be destroyed by any attempt to extricate our troops from the quicksand. That claim is easily refuted by every reputable survey of public opinion over the past year. Support for the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, and for the President himself, has been declining steadily, in fact, since the end of 2004. And every anchorperson, pundit and squawking head seeking to suggest otherwise is either inexcusably ignorant or purposely lying.

But let’s look at the numbers found by recent surveys. In June, CNN and USA Today separately asked Americans—not Democrats and not left-wing bloggers—whether they favor a “timetable” or “plan” for withdrawing from Iraq. Fifty-three percent said yes to CNN, and 57 per cent said yes to USA Today. Both polls were taken within days or weeks after the killing of Al Qaeda terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the latest advertised “turning point” in the war.

Those jaundiced views of the war—which at its outset did enjoy broad public support—have not changed over the past two months. ABC News and The Washington Post jointly conducted a poll last week that asked whether Americans approve or disapprove of the Bush administration’s handling of “the situation in Iraq.” Thirty-six percent approve, while 62 percent do not.

That same ABC/Washington Post poll found 59 percent felt the war had not been worth the cost, 64 percent felt the Bush administration had no clear plan for victory, and 53 percent felt the number of U.S. troops in Iraq should be decreased. By a plurality of 38 percent, respondents said that a Congressional candidate who supports the Bush policy would be “less likely” to get their vote. Most remarkably, although 66 percent said that Democrats have no clear position on the war, a slight plurality of 43 percent said they trust Democrats more than Republicans to do “a better job” in Iraq.

A CBS News poll came up with much the same result in late July. So did a Gallup poll taken around the same time. And similarly negative results have appeared in polls taken for Fox News, the Associated Press and the Harris Organization, among others. If more than half of the public supports withdrawal from Iraq, and nearly two-thirds disapproves of the President and his policy, then that must be the “mainstream” position.

The neoconservatives are not only factually wrong in their domestic politics but conceptually wrong in their geopolitics. To be “strong on national security” does not mean supporting the misconceived and incompetently executed policies of the Bush administration. American security in years to come will depend, in fact, on undoing this government’s grave mistakes, which have weakened this country’s military posture and undermined support for us around the world. Terrorism experts across the spectrum, from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat, agree that the “struggle against violent extremism” has suffered from the foolish decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Evidently, the neocons hope to escape responsibility for their debacle by complaining that the rest of us lack sufficient zeal. So they now pretend that Democrats and progressives, who overwhelmingly supported the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban and still do, want to abandon that effort. This is another partisan lie invented by the likes of William Kristol, who will answer to history for his own role in promoting the Iraq war.

There have been times in recent years when war was unavoidable, in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. For the neoconservatives, however, the answer to every international conflict is shock and awe, so long as they remain safely distant from the carnage. The American people are turning away from that mindless and dangerous attitude, which is leading us toward disaster. Politicians of both parties should do likewise.

in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies , by Lawrence Weschler.

Pantheon Books, 432 pages, $25.95.

After a fair amount of discussion with folk on neighboring

treadmills, the word I've finally settled upon is "excellentric." It adds a

dash of excellence to the high art of being eclectic, while connoting the

expertise that sometimes goes hand-in-hand with being eccentric. Yes, my fellow

treadmillers and I agree, the word for Lawrence Weschler's new collection of

essays and profiles, Vermeer in Bosnia:

Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies , is "excellentric."

Take, for example, the title piece. The subject matter may sound

like it comes out of right field-how a distinguished Italian judge presiding at

the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at the Hague, daily exposed to the most

stunning tales of man's inhumanity, manages to keep his sanity by making

frequent forays to the Mauritshuis Museum "so as to spend a little time with

the Vermeers."

The sensibility brought to bear on this subject is electrically

precise. Why Vermeer? Because, as Mr. Weschler reports, his paintings radiate

"a sufficiency, a perfectly equipoised grace." As the essay ripples forth, it

turns out that Vermeer lived in an era aboil with religious persecution,

torture, mass rape-indeed, an era when " all

Europe was Bosnia " (the author's italics); it was the painter's genius to

invent within this chaos a space for himself so intimate and safe that it could

also serve as haven to a beleaguered modern jurist three centuries hence: "a

zone filled with peace."

So it goes in this miraculous book: from seemingly off-target to

bull's-eye in one breath. Mr. Weschler, author of the quirkily beguiling Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders (1995),

and director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York

University, is essentially a conductor of conversations with himself and

others-free-floating yet somehow focused conversations that give eclecticism a

good name, whether parsing the moral implications of Kosovo or discussing the

effects of Parkinson's disease on furniture design, or minutely describing what

it's like to be shaken out of bed by the Northridge earthquake. With his

densely textured consciousness, coupled with a curiosity that can only be

called protean, he may be the most civilized staff writer The New Yorker ever lost.

Sometimes his originality takes the form of left-footed leaps, as

when he describes the aura of mutual contempt around the "voluptuously

despised" Polish press spokesman, Jerzy Urban, as being of "an almost erotic

dimension." Sometimes it's in his healthy respect for the underappreciated (he

admires cynicism and mendacity, so long as they're stylishly practiced) and his

disregard for the world's stock put-downs (he approves of "the sort of ironical

woman who'd get a kick out of being referred to as a "wench"). Other times it's

in his unexpected tact, as when referring to one character's manifest ugliness

as a "lack of physical splendor." He's not being coy-just whatever's the

opposite of cloddish.

Most consistently winning of all is that echt capacity of the literate soul: the ability to juggle

incongruities without twitching. Mr. Weschler succeeds in convincing us that a

character can be both "porcine" and "punctilious." Smiles can be "clenched." An

offhand remark can be simultaneously "concise, disgusting, sexist, and

sacrilegious … but not altogether off the mark." (Perhaps the conjunction

should have been "and.")

This sort of cultivation-essentially European, but with an

American jauntiness-isn't something you can teach. But you can keep learning

it, if you're as astute as Mr. Weschler is. In another conversation with Mr.

Urban, the despised Polish press spokesman, you can almost hear Mr. Weschler

soak it up at a master's knee.

"But those are contradictory pleasures," the author points out.

"You can't very well take satisfaction in having once been in the opposition

and then take pleasure in having been part of a government that went and jailed

all your old allies from that opposition."

"And why not?" Mr. Urban counters. "One wouldn't want to

experience just one kind of pleasure in one's life. One wants to sample all different kinds of pleasure' " (the author's

italics).

With such an endlessly nuanced aesthetic in play, surface

inconsistencies give way to inner harmonies, which in turn give way to deeper

inconsistencies. If the author were a Democrat running for office, he would no

doubt be accused of "flip-flopping." But in this arena, let's call it what it

is: layered. Mischievous. Faceted. Fun.

It's also apparently

inspiring to those who encounter it firsthand, to judge from the quotes Mr.

Weschler is able to draw forth from his fellow conversationalists. Here's a

California architect struggling to pin down the famously veiled, luminous light

of L.A.: "Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the

usual twoness. There's the thing-the object-and its shadow, but then a sense of

reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say,

and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in,

splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its

reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here-the air, the

atmosphere, the light-that makes everything

shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world."

Similar eloquence is elicited

from David Hockney discussing the lifelessness of most photography. "I first

noticed this," he says, "with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively:

You can't. Life is precisely what they don't have. Or, rather, time-lived time.

All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them-they stare back,

blankly-and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down ….

The reason you can't look at a photograph for a long time is because there's

virtually no time in it ."

Textured talk allows the reader a textured response. There's a

score of pieces here, and we can admit that in a few of them, the heat is a

little slow in coming. Others are a bit self-cherishing. A couple-notably those

about Mr. Weschler's grandfather, the Austrian-born composer Ernst Toch

("pronounced Talk, with a husky breathy bit of Middle European business tucked

away at the very end")-suffer from the lead sinker of reverence. We can even

admit to being put off by some of the name-dropping: "'Ah, yes,' [John] Cage

said, that marvelously sly twinkle in his eye"-an anonymous "a" would have been

more judicious than the overfamiliar "that."

But this is carping. The only major drawback is that Mr. Weschler

inspires envy. With such excellentric chitchat taking place all over the world,

chatter whose sophisticated, razor-sharp dissonance civilizes everyone

involved, why weren't we invited to the party? Isn't there some interactive

gizmo that would allow those of us stuck on our treadmills to muscle in? Or is

that what books are for?

Daniel

Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .

While there are many good things about casual dating, I've always maintained the best thing was that you never had to worry about breaking up-or so I thought. Recently, whether because of newly frayed nerves or an already-decaying infrastructure, I've heard about lots of people breaking up. Many New Yorkers are moving their antibiotics and antidepressants back to their own medicine chests. While some are ending relationships of months and even years, others-including people who came together in the weeks of late September-are calling it quits after only a few weeks. For these people, the delicate business of saying it's over is complicated by the fact that they're not sure anything had ever begun.

For example, although I haven't actually had a relationship since my last boyfriend, I have, it seems, broken up with people, or had them break up with me, even though I never knew we were going out. This is when relationships become like apartments with lead paint: You don't even know you're in one until you realize you need to get out. The end, which in some cases preceded the beginning in my mind, usually involves an unbearable phone conversation. In terms of sheer discomfort, it is, as a friend of mine said, "like being stuck in traffic on a crosstown bus with Mark Green."

"You feel like you're breaking up with someone you've only been on one or two dates with," said a woman who recently stopped dating a man she called a "resentful former nerd." "It's like the first relationship talk is the end of the relationship."

Part of the problem is that no one can agree on what constitutes a relationship. It isn't necessarily time spent together, or even whether or not you've had sex. So no one can agree on how-or even if-things need ending.

"If you've made out with the person, it would be excellent if you actually called to end things, but you never want to assume they're crazy about you and have them be like, 'Are you nuts?'" said a former model who played a cad on a soap opera. "If you've slept together, you should probably talk to them, but you can just do the attrition route and play phone tag until they forget you."

A man who told me he often meets women at shoe stores had a different take. "If you've only made out, or had exposed breasts, it's still O.K. to stop calling. It's not a comment on the degree of intimacy. If there was genital contact, I would say in person is much more appropriate, but it's one big judgment call."

Many women did not agree.

"If you made out, you should at least get a call," said a woman who raises money for underprivileged children. "If you've exchanged any major body fluids, you deserve to be dumped in person."

Although I'm not kosher, I do prefer the kosher method of killing a "not quite" relationship, namely with one swift stroke and as little suffering as possible. I much preferred the "I've met someone else" note I received on monogrammed, biscuit-colored stationery days after we'd last spoke to the guy who called me--after not calling for a month-to tell me he wasn't going to call again.

For the people who are not sure there's anything to end, there are many different options. When a friend asked me how to tell a woman that he didn't want to see her anymore, I asked what his other friends had advised. "You ask 10 guys, 'If you take out a girl a few times, make out with her a little, do you need to call?', 10 guys would say 'No call.' Eight women would say 'Call.'" He chuckled. "Actually, guys wouldn't even be interested enough to give their opinion." He lamented about a woman, whom he'd taken out five times, "who thinks we're going out now. I take her on a bunch of dates, spend hundreds of dollars on her, then I have to figure out the nicest way to break up with her."

Some don't call their former date directly, but instead call the person who fixed them up. "If friends set you up, then you can decimate the relationship through them," said the former daytime rake. "They're the recruiter, and you can tell the recruiter you're not taking the job."

The shoe-store Romeo had a different method: lying.

"It's perfectly acceptable to make stuff up. I've actually used my emotional dysfunction, even though I'm a lot better now," he said. "The more fertile your imagination, the better off you are."

For many, the nicest way to break up is to somehow convince the other person that they're breaking up with you. A man who said he's "really good at breaking up" said, "What I do is try to be a jerk and not be responsive. If she still doesn't break up with me, then I have to say 'I don't like the way I am around you.' You're saying there's something wrong with them, but you need to make up an excuse to soften the blow."

An animated brunette called this technique the "passive one, where they're so cold they make you do it."

The children's advocate said she believed that "often, guys will say that they take you and your relationship seriously- as a reason for ending it. That way you can't say, 'But it's only been a few weeks.'" I refer to this method as the Gaslight technique, based on the movie where Charles Boyer slowly drives Ingrid Bergman crazy by denying he rearranged the furniture. The Gaslight, true to its insidious nature, leads you to doubt your sanity by causing you to ask such questions as, "How could he have thought we were so serious? I didn't think we were. And he was the one calling all the time. Wasn't he?"

In thinking about how I'd like to be dumped, I decided on a heartfelt, tear-stained note with a generous Yves Saint Laurent gift certificate attached. Like many people, I struggle with ways to say, "You're perfect-just not for me." I went out with a man who told me, within the first hour of meeting him, how he'd like to get the slip. He said, "Don't tell me you want to be my friend. I don't have time for that. Just be honest. I don't like every woman I go out with, either." When he asked me out a few days later, I followed his guidelines exactly, leaving a message on his answering machine. He called me back to thank me.

It was so straightforward, it made me wish all first dates went something like this:

"O.K., waiter, I'm going with the chicken. And I want him to call to say he's not interested, but not to go on too long."

"And I'm going to have the lamb, not too pink. And I'd prefer she breaks up via e-mail. Just make sure she writes 'Subject: Goodbye.'"

it. We throw cruise missiles into Belgrade and bring Milosevic to heel. But

then the gallant Kosovars, whom we saved from ethnic cleansing, turn around and

start cleansing Slavs over the border in neighboring Macedonia. Why won't these

swarthy peasants read their Federalist

Papers and behave?

The best story The

New York Times has run on the latest

crisis was not on the front page but in the B section, where Chris Hedges

reported on recruiting efforts for the Macedonian front in an Albanian

nightclub on Staten Island (most Kosovars are ethnically Albanian). "I called

my father in Macedonia," one 33-year-old told Hedges, "and told him we were

coming. He does not want us to come …. He wants to fight himself, but he is 59.

This is our job." As New Yorkers, we hope the job goes well, because if the

Albanian guerrilla bands operating in Kosovo and Macedonia were wiped out, we

wouldn't have a super left here. But their neighbors-in the Balkans, not Staten

Island-will think differently.

The Albanians of Macedonia-a former republic of Yugoslavia,

now independent-allege that the government, which is dominated by Slavs,

ill-treats them in a variety of ways. They do not claim that they are being

murdered and expelled, as was happening in Kosovo, because they are not. The

Albanian insurgency in Macedonia is not a struggle born of desperation, but a

power grab, an effort to rip off a chunk of the country and graft it onto an

expanded Albania.

There are two prisms for viewing such wars. The first is

idealistic. Most people in the world want to make money and live in peace.

Wicked men sometimes rise to positions of power in which they oppress or

beguile them. But when the people rise up, we owe them sympathy, if not actual

help. When the Greeks began their war for independence against the Ottomans in

the early 19th century, Henry Clay, an idealist to the core, praised them in

Congress as "a nation of oppressed and struggling patriots in arms."

The other prism is Tory-cynical. Civilization is a rare

thing; most people are brutes, and happy to be so. Everyone beyond the English

Channel, or the Atlantic Ocean, is funny, when they are not dangerous. George

Orwell once collected a list of stereotypes of foreigners found in English

boys' fiction of the 1930's: "FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates

wildly. SPANIARD, MEXICAN, etc.: Sinister, treacherous. ARAB, AFGHAN, etc.:

Sinister, treacherous." A massacre here, a pogrom there, is just another

dust-up among wogs.

Americans have viewed the violence that has wracked the

Balkans since the last Bush administration through the first prism. Most

Americans, including the American government, took the side of the countries

and ethnicities that wished to break away from Yugoslavia: Croats, Bosnian

Moslems and Kosovars. The oppressive villains in this view were the Serbs, who

were trying to hold Yugoslavia together, and especially Slobodan

Milosevic-rebaptized by the tabloids, with their perfect instincts in these

matters, as "Slobbo." Americans of this view wrote what a multicultural

paradise the Bosnian city of Sarajevo was; one friend told me that ethnic

cleansing in Kosovo "shocked the conscience"-not just his, but the world's.

There was also a minority view, held by Pat Buchanan

supporters, the Eastern Orthodox and A.M. Rosenthal, who, so far as I know, is

neither of the preceding. In this view, the Serbs, who had been our allies in

two world wars, were struggling gamely against fascist and Islamic gangsters

who had contrived to win the sympathy of clueless European and American elites.

Almost no one said, "A pox on all their houses." James

Baker, Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, did say, as

Yugoslavia was breaking up, that we didn't have a dog in that fight. But, as

with so many of his utterances, this one had all the charm of a bandsaw, and it

didn't carry conviction.

When the Balkans sank into the abyss, journalists turned to

Rebecca West's 1942 travelogue Black Lamb

and Grey Falcon as a primer. I found a shorter one in the article on "ALI,

known as Ali Pasha" in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica . Ali 

(1741-1822) was an Albanian warlord nominally serving the Sultan, and he

explained his little corner of heaven thus to a visitor: "You are not yet

acquainted with the Greeks and Albanians. When I hang up one of these wretches

on the plane-tree, brother robs brother under the very branches; if I burn one

of them alive, the son is ready to steal his father's ashes to sell them for

money." This practical sociology served Ali well until, as an octogenarian, the

Turks besieged him, pardoned him, then stabbed him in the back and cut off his

head.

It is a hard thing to consign a region to violence.

Certainly most people in the Balkans do not behave as Ali described, or did

himself. But the fighting in Macedonia shows that there is enough material for

score-settling to produce frequent eruptions whenever ideologues or bandits

desire. Americans know that race relations are a long, twisted crack in our

character. If they do not make us as bad as the rest of the world, they often

maroon us short of our own ideals. Why is it so hard for us to understand that

ethnicity plays the same role in the Balkans?

Understanding the

underlying situation is not the same as having a policy, and policy must change

with circumstances. Serbia needed to be rebuked, not because its behavior

shocked the conscience-it was disgusting, not surprising-but because their

Russian allies might have been tempted to horn back into the region. Macedonia

shares borders with Greece, which is a member of NATO, so there may come a time

when we will be obliged either to defend Greece or call it off. Until then,

it's hard to see why we should be involved. Although our intervention in Kosovo

helped create the Albanian gang that's now shooting up Macedonia, one hopes

they can be frustrated by some means short of intervening again.

his convictions, even if that should result some day in his resignation as

Secretary of State. Although unnamed "White House aides" reassuringly insist

that the former general's public disagreements with Dick Cheney and Donald

Rumsfeld are nothing worse than an early policy shakeout, the truth is that Mr.

Powell holds an entirely different (and considerably saner) world view than

that of the Vice President and the Defense Secretary.

Were it not so, the embarrassing reversals suffered by Mr.

Powell in recent days, on matters ranging from Korea to Kosovo, would have been

avoided. After all-as we are constantly informed by the admiring Washington

press corps-this second Bush Presidency is a very, very tight ship indeed.

Preserving that image has always been among the highest priorities of George W.

Bush and his aides. So their repeated put-downs of Mr. Powell before the entire

world must have involved at least a degree of calculation.

Now the former warrior

appears to be quarantined politically. He finds himself under attack from

conservatives allied with the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction. Armchair militarists at The Weekly Standard warn that the

Secretary of State is a closet Clintonite, for example, while former fringe

Presidential candidate Gary Bauer suggests that any cabinet official, such as

Mr. Powell, who dares to dissent from right-wing orthodoxy might be "taken to

the woodshed."

Interesting advice, but

who would take him out there-this callow President? A more incongruous scene is

hard to imagine. Actually, Mr. Bush seems intent on placating Mr. Powell with a

billion-dollar increase in the State Department budget.

Despite that fiscal consolation, however, there is already

ample reason for Mr. Powell to wonder why he took this job in the first place.

In fact, there have long been plenty of reasons to wonder why a man with his

moderate views should cling to a party that has veered so far rightward. The

current chill between him and his fellow Republicans echoes his scolding speech

at the G.O.P. convention in Philadelphia last summer. (He probably didn't

appreciate the entertainment value of that strange event.)

As a Bronx native who earned his rank in combat and worked

his way up through the ranks, Mr. Powell has never fit in too well with

tough-talking cowboys, like Mr. Cheney, whose perennially hawkish views never

prevented them from wangling a draft deferment. It is the difference between

real toughness and its unreasonable facsimile that defines the debate between the Powell and Cheney factions.

Pseudo-toughness requires hard-line posturing rather than

prudent policy. The pseudo-tough position on North Korea is to repudiate former

President Clinton's diplomatic efforts on the peninsula, even if that means

undermining the democratic government in South Korea. The pseudo-tough position

on Iraq is to continue the current sanctions despite their inhumanity and

ineffectiveness, while pretending that somebody is going to overthrow Saddam

Hussein someday. The pseudo-tough position on Kosovo is to promote conflict

rather than cooperation with our European allies, regardless of the damage to

important multilateral relationships. The pseudo-tough view of nuclear peril is

to insist on building an outrageously expensive "national missile defense"

which won't work, casually wrecking the arms-control regime constructed with

immense difficulty over the past three decades.

The results are likely to

be bad news for everyone except Mr. Bush's friends and contributors in the

defense industry. Pseudo-toughness encourages similar attitudes elsewhere, such

as the announcement by the Russians that they have stopped dismantling

strategic weapons as agreed under current treaties with the United States.

It was predictable that Mr. Powell would take exception to

this kind of contagious idiocy, if only because he has done so in the recent

past. He was among the few courageous Republicans to endorse the Comprehensive

Test Ban Treaty two years ago, when Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bush were helping to

insure that the agreement was stymied by their friends in the Senate.

That was one of the grossest acts of irresponsible

isolationism committed in Washington since before World War II. It revealed

divergent perspectives about America's role in the world that seem impossible to

reconcile, with Mr. Powell taking sides against nearly everyone who would later

become his colleagues (and antagonists) in this administration.

No doubt the Secretary of State has convinced himself that

his pragmatic internationalism will ultimately prevail. But his role within the

Republican Party has been less that of a leader than of a good soldier and

handsome object for display. Unless he is willing to speak out loudly and

often, he will finally be forced to harmonize with the hard-right choir.

It is Mr. Powell's duty to himself and his country to avoid

that fate.

The slaughter was of a scale unsurpassed in human history, until, of course, the next war. But what earned World War I its place as the beginning of something new was the introduction of a thoroughly modern, utterly 20th-century idea: that all is fair in war-even the mass killing of the old and infirm, of women and children. While civilian deaths in war were hardly unknown to history before 1914, mankind had deluded itself into thinking that it had escaped the clutches of barbarism, that the 19th century had shown that great military powers could conduct their wretched, though sometimes necessary, business without slaughtering noncombatants. The most famous 19th-century battle in North America, Gettysburg, saw thousands of young men consigned to early graves, but there was only one civilian casualty, and that one was an accident. In Europe, Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 without killing children for the crime of sharing Bonaparte's nationality.

The 20th century made Gettysburg and Waterloo seem almost quaint. As British historians Martin Gilbert and John Keegan note in their respective chronicles of World War I (both called The First World War ), once Germans began killing Belgian civilians in the war's first few weeks, all the old rules were relegated to history's dustbin. From Belgium in 1914 to Kosovo in 1999, nations calling themselves civilized freely, even wantonly, made war on defenseless civilians-not by accident, but as part of a deliberate strategy known as total war.

So many dates, people, inventions and attitudes can be, and will be, associated with the 20th century. Surely our casual attitude toward civilian deaths in wartime will be listed among the era's defining characteristics. We may have put funny little artifacts in a thousand time capsules, but what history will remember about us are places and dates we seem to have forgotten: Belgium, 1914; Armenia, 1918; Nanjing, 1932; London, 1940; Dresden, 1945; Hiroshima, 1945; Cambodia, 1975; Rwanda, 1996; East Timor, 1999. Add to that dreadful roster three more expressions of 20th-century barbarity-the Holocaust; ethnic cleansing and international terrorism-and three mass murderers-Hitler, Stalin and Mao-and it becomes clear that only fools would dare to judge the tyrants and standards of the past.

Historians one day will note that even as the century came to an end, the corrosive effects of total war, the legacy of Belgium, 1914, were very much in evidence. Terrorists were holding a planeload of civilians hostage in Afghanistan. Ordnance that failed to explode during the NATO war against Serbia, including the evil weapons known as cluster bombs, were killing civilians in the Balkans. Land mines in Africa and Asia were adding to the century's body count. And, in America, millions of people spent the New Year's holiday in fear of a spectacular terrorist attack designed to kill as many civilians as possible. We may have celebrated the end of the century, but our fears and the daily realities of life in war-torn nations remind us that the 20th century hasn't really gone away at all.

Those who intend to leave a mark on the 21st century no doubt have a great many plans to achieve what they regard as progress, but if they fail to rid the planet of wars against civilians, any other achievements may seem beside the point. As long as politicians and nations believe that war may be made on the defenseless, even the cybercitizens of the third millennium will be condemned as mere barbarians, as ignorant and amoral as the most bloodthirsty savages of the Dark Ages. Or of the 20th century, for that matter.

As Mr. Gilbert notes in his study of World War I, the power elites of the early 20th century thought that free trade, international travel and the intermarriage of global aristocracy made war unthinkable. Today's Fabians no doubt would make a similar argument, with similarly discouraging results. But while war may be inevitable, war against civilians-strategic bombing, genocide, terrorism-ought to be regarded once again as a global taboo.

That, of course, would require genuine moral leadership. And there is none in sight.

It's not exactly B-2 for Dummies . But there it is, attached to the mission commander's thigh by two thin strips of Velcro: a black Filofax-size notebook whose laminated first page begins with the following elegant, if somewhat understated command:

YOUR RESPONSIBILITY

In accordance with AFI 11-215, the air crew is required to use this checklist when operating the B-2 aircraft.

I'm filing this dispatch from Knob Noster, Mo., home to Whiteman Air Force Base and the 21 stealth bombers that make up America's B-2 fleet. Sixty miles southeast of Kansas City, this is where the B-2's took off for their bombing attacks on Kosovo, and where they returned, after refueling four times in midair during the 30-hour flight.

I'm here on this Sunday morning in August to attend an air show and meet with B-2 pilots as research for a screenplay I'm writing for Warner Brothers. The producer of the film and I began the day by watching the pilots prepare for today's training mission; we then accompanied them out to the hangar (in B-2 parlance, a "dock"), stepping over the red line painted around the perimeter of the plane ("Warning. Restricted Area: Deadly Force Authorized Beyond This Point"), and finally, under the watchful gaze of several M-16-wielding Air Force sharpshooters, climbed into the cockpit for a look around. Finished in matte black, it's smaller than I expected, with fewer switches and dials than a commercial airliner. The pilot, who's older and more of a "regular guy" than I expected, offered the following wry insights:

1. This afternoon's target is secret, although "it's safe to assume we've practiced bombing runs on every major city in America."

2. On long missions, it's strictly "pack your own lunch." The Air Force doesn't provide food or beverage service.

3. Yes, there are pages in the manual titled "Nuclear Weapons Delivery Checklist" and "Procedures Following the Delivery of Nuclear Weapons," but I can't look at them.

4. Does it fly itself? "You mean, can a monkey fly it?" Beat. "So far as I know, they haven't tested it with a monkey yet."

Back on the ground, the producer and I put on two levels of ear protection-earplugs, plus headphones-and spent the next 45 minutes watching the crew prepare to take off. The sound was incomprehensible-an awful, shrieking, mind-scrambling thunder.

As the B-2 taxied to a distant runway, we drove to the far end of the base, joining the 65,000 civilians who'd shown up to walk among B-1's, B-52's, F-15's, a U-2, F-117 stealth fighters and countless helicopters and transports stretched out for almost a mile on the concrete.

On one hand, the display was so overwhelming that I found it difficult to be cynical; but on the other, even in Missouri, I remained a New Yorker. So when the producer gasped, "Who are these people?" I couldn't help but reply: "They're our audience, dummy. They have real lives. They're the people who won't be watching all the network TV shows about the entertainment business this fall." As the producer laughed, I started to say that a gray C-17 transport looked remarkably like a sport utility vehicle-sort of a flying Range Rover-and would be the perfect way to one-up the Gulf Stream crowd in East Hampton next summer. But my words were crushed by the shearing thunder of the B-2 flying over the crowd-looking otherworldly, like an apparition, a U.F.O., a bat-before it turned at an oblique angle and seemed to disappear before our eyes.

And for a long moment, all 65,000 people stood silent and astonished in the Missouri sunlight.

The next morning, we met with several pilots at their headquarters-a building that's actually shaped like a B-2.

I'd been asked not to describe the pilots too closely. But my first impressions were confirmed: more Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks than Val Kilmer or Sean Penn. Most are former B-52 pilots, mid-30's to early 40's, married, with children. Not just college graduates, but men with advanced degrees in engineering and physics, along with a few M.B.A.'s. They drive Hondas and are quick to add that given the seniority required to fly a B-2, the first women should be entering the program in a year or two.

Later, a pilot took me on a tour of the B-2 simulator. We chuckled, finding common ground in the fact that whether it's making movies or flying B-2's, our jobs are the envy of every 12-year-old boy in America. I asked what it was like to fly the first bombing mission into Kosovo. He thought, then began, almost reluctantly:

"It was strange. You fly in, alone, at night. And when you get over the target, you realize 'This is for real. Can I do it?' Then the training kicks in. 'Of course you can.' First you feel the plane lighten as the bombs drop. Then you see the flashes and hear the explosions-the first night we hit a refinery-and the jet gets buffeted by a shock wave." He paused, shaking his head. "Twenty-four hours later, I'm barbecuing hot dogs for my family in Missouri. It's slightly surreal. And I get into a long conversation with my father-in-law about this kind of warfare. I love him. He fought on the ground in World War II." He hesitated, looking off at a giant American flag on the wall behind the simulator. "Don't get me wrong. I think what we did in Kosovo was moral and right and just. But I wonder about the long-term implications of sanitized warfare-so far removed from the pain and suffering." He sighed, adding, "I just wonder."

As we drove off the base late that afternoon, I thought back on the words of the major from public affairs who arranged the trip. "You'll go expecting to be impressed by the airplanes," he said. "But you'll come back amazed by our people."

He was right. Now if I could only write the script in 30 hours.

Let us look at the other winners and losers, all mixed.

America . America, leading NATO, forced the Yugoslav Army to withdraw from Kosovo at hardly any cost in lives or even comfort. Two of our soldiers died in a helicopter accident, three were briefly taken prisoner. (Interestingly, the Serbs, who claimed they were the victims of an unjust war, called the Americans criminals, while Washington, which said it was engaged in a conflict, demanded that they be treated as prisoners of war.) This is as close to a bloodless victory as it gets. John Keegan, the English military historian, hailed it as the first victory of air power, although at the very end, a Kosovo Liberation Army attack flushed out Serbian units, thereby setting them up as targets, so the verdict on the old question of ground versus air may not in fact be in.

There was a cost in money and matériel. Mr. Clinton drew down our stock of cruise missiles. He will be scoring points against Congressional Republicans who voted against letting him pursue the air war. When those same Republicans push to restore the arsenal he has depleted, will he support them, or will he hold out for spending on midnight basketball?

America and NATO also face the cost of having troops stationed for years in a strategically null backwater. How many of these little protectorates are we planning to maintain?

The Serbian army . The Serbs retreat with their tails between their legs, but they retreat in good order, with their command structure and much of their equipment intact. They also at least temporarily accomplished their mission, which was to drive 1 million Albanian Kosovars from their homes. Think of them as the German Army after World War I, assuming they had destroyed France.

Serb Kosovars . The Serbian minority in Kosovo is hightailing it out of there, fearing retaliation at the hands of enraged Albanians. Some Serbs committed murder. Most showed indifference to the sufferings of their neighbors. The first offense, ideally, deserves more than displacement. The second offense does not deserve that. But that is what happens after wars of peoples.

Albanian Kosovars . As NATO moves in, the graves are starting to be uncovered. How many of these were dug and filled after we began the bombing campaign designed to protect their occupants? The Serb regime wanted to push Albanians out, and terrorize the rest. In the end, we stopped the Serb plan, but only after speeding it up hugely. Now the refugees are streaming back. Are they wise to do so?

The Kosovo War also raises a number of issues for at least the beginning of the new millennium.

Little wars . Military expert John Hillen wrote an influential article arguing, tartly, that superpowers do not do windows. By this, Mr. Hillen meant that the United States should not move unless the stakes are high and clear, and the effort is major. But other military intellectuals point out that doing the windows–messy, marginal disputes–takes much of a great power's time (cf. 19th-century Britain, or Imperial Rome). In a Kosovo package in National Review , Michael Lind argued that Pentagon planners should give more leeway to the Marines, who historically undertake such missions (the Army prefers to move massively).

Wars for ideas versus wars for things . America has fought both kinds. We fought the War of 1812 and the Mexican War because we coveted land, World War II because we were attacked, the Gulf War to protect the world oil supply. But other wars, from the Revolution to the Cold War, were primarily about ideas. Clearly, Kosovo was the latter kind, since there was nothing we wanted or needed there, and none of the contestants menaced us. Was the idea of this war worth killing for?

The war's supporters mostly gave bad justifications. If we want to stop massacres everywhere, we will be very busy, and we will fail. Mr. Clinton's talk about the Balkans as an incubator of wider conflicts hasn't been true since 1914. The best reason I have heard might be called idealistic gradualism. There is a de facto Pax Americana in the Western Hemisphere and in most of Europe. It may be decades, centuries or never before we can turn our attention to central Africa or central Asia, but meanwhile we do what we can. I might buy this argument. Too bad no one in Washington made it.

Europe . Our NATO allies, under their present "Third Way" governments, would like nothing better than to scrap NATO and run their continent themselves. As of now, their means fall far short of their ambitions. But their efforts can be expected to increase. How do we navigate a reconfiguring world? An idea from the turn of the last century–an English-speaking alliance–has been raised here and there. This idea raises questions of its own: Where would that leave Puerto Rico? Miami? Al Gore having not yet claimed to have invented the English language, the Administration has no thoughts about it. Neither does the Republican Party. Interested parties should submit proposals to Washington, the media and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Empires . Sifting through the ruins of the Balkans has revived nostalgia (see recent Op-Ed pages) for its last imperial ruler, the Ottomans. Empires typically fall short on political freedom, though they can do a good job of securing peace and prosperity. But there must be some organizing principle, either religious (the Sultan was Caliph, the Roman emperor was divine) or racial (Britain bore the white man's burden). America acquired a mini-empire in the 1890's, acting under a providential sense of manifest destiny, but we gave two of the biggest pieces (Cuba and the Philippines) their freedom and made the third (Hawaii) a state. What will move the peacemakers now? Mr. Clinton and his Euro-pals want to make America and Europe empires of liberalism.

A bad idea.

She is a director of a humanitarian relief organization that has been providing medical care to ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo for the past several years. Like most officials of humanitarian and human rights groups, she usually cannot comment publicly on political or military issues without jeopardizing her organization's work and even the lives of its employees. So let's just call her E.

The last time E. went to Kosovo was during the summer of 1997, when she returned with warnings about the deteriorating

conditions there. The first signs of ethnic cleansing were all too apparent, as was the rise in terrorist reaction by the Kosovo Liberation Army. By then, she and her colleagues in the international relief sector were well aware of the Serb government's severe oppression of the local population, although the rest of the world was paying little attention. Deprivation of medical care was one part of a much wider Serbian crusade against the Kosovars, which was why her organization had set up operations there in the first place.

E. spent several days walking through the camps, helping with tent-to-tent surveys of the conditions and needs of families that had just crossed the border into Macedonia. "In each tent, we and our translator would go through a long list of questions with each family, about basic nutrition, hygiene and disease. Did anyone have diabetes or hypertension, lice or scabies? Was anybody pregnant?" The final question asked was whether the entire family was present. "That was when many of them would begin to weep and tell us their stories."

"That opened them up to discuss what had happened to them and their villages," said E. "The stories were mostly very similar: Gangs of marauding Serbs had showed up at their doors, told them they had five or 10 minutes to leave, then looted and burned their houses as they fled. I met a family of five who were ordered to get out and, as they started packing their belongings, the Serbs suddenly shot the father because they said he was too slow, and the mother and children had to step over his body in their living room to get out of their home before the paramilitaries torched it … To our knowledge, this has been

going on for many months, long before the NATO air campaign began. Many of these people had been living in the mountains and forests for close to a year.

"All of them just want to go home. Very few expressed any interest in coming to the U.S. or western Europe. And the only way they believed they would get home would be if there was an armed force to protect them."

What truly stunned E., however, was the spontaneous greeting of the refugees as she walked through the camps. "Everywhere we went, people would come up and thank us-especially the Americans in our group. And they were thanking us not just for the food and medicine, but for the bombing! Over and over again, they told us how grateful they are to America and NATO, because they believe that forcing Milosevic to surrender is the only way they're going to get home again." One family told her that they had worried for weeks about the pilot of an Allied plane they had seen crash-and were relieved to learn later that it was an unmanned surveillance aircraft.

Nor are the refugees quite as critical of NATO's shortcomings as many of our own armchair strategists. "They told us that they understand what happens in a war, that not every bomb is going to hit the right target," said E. "When they heard news of 89 civilians being killed accidentally, they said they knew the Serbs were responsible for putting refugees in harm's way."

Like E., the leaders of American humanitarian organizations are not free to openly voice their opinions about the war. But on April 2, a dozen of them met with President Clinton to thank him for releasing $50 million in emergency refugee aid. In the privacy of the White House, one of them said what all were thinking: "Mr. President, you need to know that we support the bombing campaign, and we don't believe that bombing has caused the refugee problem." Indeed, many feel that Mr. Clinton should be courageous enough to send in ground forces.

Every day, these humanitarians assume responsibility for people in need and in many instances risk their lives. Unlike pundits and politicians they are silent, but they believe NATO must win.