Representatives of the magazine responded that during Annie Liebovitz's shoot, "Miley's parents and/or minders were on the set all day... Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley."

This isn't the first time a star has felt stung by VF. Dewey ingenues like Lindsay Lohan and Paul Wolfowitz have complained of being misquoted and beloved icons like Courtney Love and Paris Hilton blame the magazine for their subsequent vilification. Here, a look back in anger and occasional admission.

2007: Katherine Heigl was profiled Leslie Bennetts, and was quoted calling Knocked Up "a little sexist." She later said in a statement, "It's important to me to take a minute and clarify the quote about Knocked Up in Vanity Fair... I was responding to previous reviews about the movie the interviewer brought to my attention. My motive was to encourage other women like myself to not take that element of the movie too seriously and to remember that it's a broad comedy... Although I stand behind my opinion, I'm disheartened that it has become the focus of my experience with the movie."

2006: Lindsay Lohan was profiled by Evgenia Peretz and told of struggles with drugs and bulimia. She later said in statement, "The words that I gave to the writer for Vanity Fair were misused and misconstrued, and I'm appalled with the way it was done." Ms. Lohan eventually checked into rehab.

2003: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was quoted by Sam Tanenhaus in an article called 'Bush's Brain Trust' as saying, "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." A Pentagon source told CNN that, "Vanity Fair only used a portion of the deputy secretary's quote... Their omission completely misrepresents what he was saying."

2000: Paris and Nicky Hilton were profiled by Nancy Jo Sales. Paris Hilton subsequently told USA Today that Ms. Sales was "mean-spirited. We were 18 and 15 at the time. To do that to little girls is so messed up. It was really hurtful. That was the beginning of it all, of everyone trying to be mean."

1992: Courtney Love was profiled by Lynn Hirschberg, who quoted her admitting to using heroin while pregnant. Love later told Entertainment Weekly, "The things that Lynn Hirschberg did with lying and misquoting and just the portrait she painted of me — listen, I used to be really honest about things, but ever since Lynn Hirschberg I'm not gonna be honest about anything anymore. She painted a picture of a person who has no ethics, no discipline, does heroin (during) her pregnancy. Give me a break. I mean, I went to college. I'm not insane. Lynn Hirschberg is really obsessed with me and she's just, you know, really mainstream. She does celebrity profiles and puff pieces." According to The Independent, Love "admitted (but subsequently denied) that the story about shooting up in the early stages of her pregnancy was true."

Cronyism, neglect, corruption, rigidity and plain stupidity—perpetrated by figures who had billed themselves (and were billed by the mainstream media) as the geniuses of our time—have exacted an awesome toll on the inheritance we received from previous generations. Our heritage of world leadership in the last century was built not upon military power alone, but arose from economic, diplomatic and moral foundations that somehow survived despite many earlier mistakes and even crimes.

With the advent of the Bush administration, however, our luck has obviously run out. Neither allies nor adversaries pretend to believe that the ludicrous characters sent forth by the President to represent us are statesmen. Not only does nobody much care what we think, but most people are now inclined to distrust and oppose us on principle.

The latest example of American decline is, of course, the embarrassing little scandal that has besmirched World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. Always an overrated bureaucrat, he seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort in recent years fashioning literal sweetheart deals for his paramour—a Tunisian-born Saudi named Shaha Riza—at the bank, the State Department and the Pentagon.

Even while Mr. Wolfowitz was serving as Deputy Defense Secretary, he allegedly pressured a major defense contractor to hire Ms. Riza. For a month, she worked in Iraq on “democracy promotion”—a traditional American objective thoroughly discredited because of Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives.

Considering Mr. Wolfowitz’s monumental failure at the Pentagon, where he overruled wiser and more experienced staff in preparing for the invasion of Iraq, his own promotion to the World Bank presidency was mystifying. His vaunted brilliance notwithstanding, he may well be the single most incompetent public servant of the past quarter-century, with the only significant competition coming from his former boss, Donald Rumsfeld. Together, they ensured that the occupation of Iraq had too few troops and too little planning, while allowing Republican cronies and crooks to siphon away billions of taxpayer dollars.

It was all going to pay for itself with Iraqi oil revenues, or so Mr. Wolfowitz had testified in Congress with his usual confidence. By the time that particular bill came due, he had moved on.

When Mr. Wolfowitz showed up at the World Bank, he touted another worthy agenda. Like John Bolton, his fellow ideologue appointed to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he said that he intended to promote reform and fight corruption. But in both cases, those high-minded purposes were thwarted by personal inadequacies—while zealous certainty in their own moral purposes blinded them to those shortcomings.

In Mr. Wolfowitz’s case, that characteristic arrogance enabled him to inveigh against corruption and scourge bank employees while he simultaneously arranged an extraordinary sinecure for Ms. Riza. She was seconded to the State Department, with an enormous tax-free salary exceeding the compensation of the Secretary of State, where she worked under the supervision of Elizabeth Cheney (whose rank as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs was owed wholly to her father, the Vice President).

Under the deal set up by her boyfriend, Ms. Riza would automatically receive “outstanding” ratings, with a top position waiting for her on her return to the World Bank as soon as Mr. Wolfowitz’s term expires. Neoconservatives apparently believe fervently in merit and competition and hate affirmative action, unless their own careers (or the careers of their lovers) are at stake.

All this familial boodling proceeded happily while Vice President Dick Cheney whispered lies about the supposed “nepotism” behind former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s unpaid mission to Niger. The White House didn’t appreciate Mr. Wilson’s exposure of the truth behind the administration’s “mushroom cloud” fear-mongering about the perils of Saddam Hussein, so they exposed his wife’s C.I.A. identity to smear him. Hypocrisy is too inadequate a term to describe these people.

With its endless procession of tawdry scandals and buffoonish antics, the Bush administration often looks and sounds like a sitcom. In retrospect, as America and the world confront terror, disease, poverty and environmental peril, it will be recognized as a tragedy.

The guy's whistling in the wind, hoping against hope that the World Bank will somehow eclipse Iraq in the world's memory of him. It won't. We can chisel the epitaph now: "the Iraqis will welcome us as liberators". Wolfowitz should take a cue from McNamara, and start apologizing now, not thirty years on.

And the LATimes should extend its expiation services to all the other leaders who helped drag us into this disastrous war. How 'bout some journalists?

Aluminum tubes... Yellow cake from Niger....Chemical labs in train cars....All the warmongering claims duly parroted to the world by George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell, thereby damaging themselves forever.

The climax of the documentary comes when Paul Pillar, a former CIA executive, says that he regrets having signed off on a white paper he didn't fully believe and whose sole purpose was "to strengthen the case of going to war with the American public." He and George Tenet did something improper, and were buffaloed.

But the mystery the show raises and fails to answer is, Why did Cheney do it? We mostly see Cheney on "Meet the Press." After 9/11 he declares that we must engage the enemy in the "dark side" of warmaking. Thus the Frontline title. And yes, the program proves that Cheney operated in the dark side, outside of constraints. But why? To what end? Frontline cannot say, except to hint at megalomania and Ahablike desertion of Cheney's rational faculties.

I find myself actually sympathizing with Cheney. As I've written here before, Cheney is a blank. There is no intimate biography of him to describe his thinking. Frontline's answer is pat. It doesn't plumb his past much, say at American Enterprise Institute. It doesn't talk to his friends or colleagues.

I sympathize with Cheney because I don't think that in pushing us into a disastrous war, Cheney was unpatriotic or out of touch with reality. I believe he was doing his utmost to protect the nation, and came up with different answers to the clash of cultures than the CIA or the liberal Frontline audience (including me). Bad answers, arrogant answers, disastrous answers. But dammit, they were his answers.

This is where I accuse Frontline of ignoring its own reporting. Through the beauty of the internet, PBS has offered us fuller transcripts of many of the interviews on which it based its show. Again and again, what comes up in the interviews is the importance of neoconservative thinking to the Administration:

—An interviewer prods Pillar about the power of the neocons: "[Did] you feel that there was among this group, the neocons, that there was a real force out there pushing to overthrow Saddam?" Pillar: "It was there, but it wasn't until 9/11 afforded the opportunity by making the American public suddenly much more militant that the prospect of actually going to war became real. Before 9/11, they didn't have enough to hang on."

—Here is former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on the influence in the administration of Laurie Mylroie, a feverish neocon, whose dubious claims about Iraq Paul Wolfowitz imbibed hook-line-and-stinker: "Wolfowitz spouted that 'All of what you say is Al Qaeda must actually be state-sponsored, because no terrorist organization could do that without a nation helping them. And the nation must be Iraq, and we know this from reading the writings of this woman, Laurie Mylroie,' whom we had known about and checked out several times [and concluded to be unreliable]."

—Here is former CIA exec Michael Scheuer on Rumsfeld and Feith and Wolfowitz's view of the Mideast. "Syria is a perfect example. Syria, in my adult life, has always been tagged as an enemy of the United States and as a threat, but once you get inside the intelligence community, you find out that the Syrians are bankrupt, a police state that's riven with factions and couldn't threaten the United States in 100 years. But because Rumsfeld and [then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy [Douglas] Feith and Wolfowitz are so pro-Israeli, the answer needs to come back, "Yes, Syria is a threat." Over the course of a decade and longer, even back into the first Bush administration and into Mr. Reagan's administration, the enemies of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Feith, Mr. Wolfowitz were not necessarily the enemies that you could derive from the intelligence material."

—Here is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, describing the neocons as a cabal of "Jacobins": "Dick Cheney is genuinely concerned about the security of this country; there's no question in my mind about that. He's paranoid about it, I think. And you can say, "Well, the vice president of the United States and the president of the United States should be paranoid about my security," and I probably wouldn't argue it until it starts causing me to do things that violate my own code of conduct, ethics and so forth. Then I'm going to object. So how did they come to ally themselves [with] these Jacobins who are, above all else, intent on a messianic spread of the American way around the world at the point of the bayonet? And [how did] these ultranationalists, who during the campaign, for example, decried nation building, [start] going about the world slaying monsters and spending billions to do it? How did they come to form this unholy alliance, these Jacobins and these ultranationalists? ... FRONTLINE: This is what you meant when you called them a "cabal" "Yes. Because it uses the statutory process in which the entire bureaucracy has a voice to camouflage the real decision-making process."

Amazingly, Frontline did not once use the word "neoconservative" in its show last night. This was unfair both to its audience and Cheney. Frontline knew from its own reporting the importance to Cheney of neoconservative ideas of reforming the Middle East as a way to end terrorism. Myself, I think these are disastrous wrongheaded ideas. But they are genuinely Cheney's ideas, and deserve debate. How did he absorb them? How did his thinking evolve? Where did these ideas come from? To what extent were others mentioned in the show, from Wolfowitz to Judy Miller to Scooter Libby, adherents? What do these ideas say about the world?

If you want to explain the Iraq war, this is the investigation to be done. Frontline had this deeper and richer story about ideas and policymaking within its grasp, but chose to talk about bureaucratic infighting.

Edmund Morris, the authorized biographer, famously spent years trying to understand Reagan and wound up not simply adopting the techniques of fiction writing, but actually writing fiction—another guy who didn’t get it.

Although I’ve read a few of the 900 or so books about Ronald Reagan, I’m not deeply enough immersed in Reaganania to be able to say whether or not Mr. Reeves has succeeded where others have failed. But as a student of Mr. Reeves’ previous books on John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, I can say that he has successfully applied his formula to Reagan, which means that this book, like Mr. Reeves’ others, is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the man and the times.

This is not a biography; it’s a study of a Presidency, one of the most important Presidencies of the 20th century. And while Mr. Reeves acknowledges that he doesn’t share Reagan’s political ideology, his portrait of this President is devoid of ideological sparring. The author is interested in how power works, in how and why events unfolded as they did. He’s not looking to score debating points on issues most of us have forgotten.

As he did in his studies of the Kennedy and Nixon Presidencies, Mr. Reeves organizes his chapters to coincide with noteworthy dates. And so Chapter 2, for example, is entitled “March 30, 1981”—the day Reagan was shot. The technique sometimes leads to confusion, because some chapters seem to suggest a theme but wind up reprising months of backstory. The narrative thread remains intact, however, a credit to Mr. Reeves’ storytelling abilities.

The Ronald Reagan who emerges from these pages is a good deal more engaged, at least during his first term, than popular myth would have it. Mr. Reeves shows him working over Congress, especially Democrats, to get his agenda through. The President kept notes: After charming a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, Ron Mottl, Reagan wrote on a card: “Says he’s with us. Says he & I are going to be ­real friends.”

Mr. Reeves understands politics, which means he understands that this kind of touch can make the difference between a successful Presidency and a failed one. For an example of the latter, see Jimmy Carter, who, as the author points out, kept even his fellow Democrats in Congress at a distance.

There are more than a few cringe-inducing passages, particularly when Mr. Reeves is writing about the last couple of years of the Reagan Presidency. Readers inclined to believe that Reagan was little more than a front man, slightly daft and out of touch, will have their suspicions confirmed. For example, when CBS reporter Lesley Stahl arrived at the Oval Office with her husband and child for a courtesy visit in 1986, she was shocked by the President’s appearance and state of mind (or lack thereof): “He looked shriveled to her,” Mr. Reeves writes. “His skin was like paper, his hands dotted with age spots …. His eyes seemed milky and she wasn’t sure he actually knew who she was.” Press secretary Larry Speakes bellowed out her name and network affiliation, apparently to no avail. But when Ms. Stahl mentioned that her husband was a screenwriter, Reagan came alive, sat down with him and talked movies.

That’s the Ronald Reagan of his critics’ imagination. Yet for every story about Reagan’s short and sporadic attention span, there are others like this one, from the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. Mr. Reeves notes that the military officers conducting a final briefing believed the President wasn’t paying attention. But when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, was about to leave the Oval Office, Reagan took him aside and asked him how many troops would take part in the action. “Vessey gave him the number,” Mr. Reeves writes; the general was then startled to hear the commander in chief order him to double it. By way of explanation, Reagan reminded Vessey that if Jimmy Carter had used 18 helicopters rather than nine during the ill-fated hostage-rescue attempt in Iran, “you’d be briefing him now instead of me.”

That’s a glimpse of the real Ronald Reagan. He was not a ninny, nor was he a master of policy detail. But he had terrific political instincts.

There are hundreds of similar Reagan anecdotes which feel new or are worth revisiting. Even when Mr. Reeves is dealing with familiar issues, his use of diaries and conversations show his subject doing more than simply following stage directions—though he was pretty good at that, too.

What separates this book from so many others is that Mr. Reeves very subtly has written a post-9/11 assessment of the Reagan Presidency. The landing of Marines in Beirut in 1982, the capture of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro, the administration’s debates over pre-emptive action against terrorists—all this resonates in ways that it wouldn’t have six years ago.

The gang’s all here: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Reeves notes without comment the roles they played. There’s Mr. Rumsfeld, secretly arranging an American alliance with Saddam; there’s Mr. Perle, trying to block any negotiations with the Soviet Union as it nears its collapse; and there’s Mr. Wolfowitz, co-producing a drama (literally) on Middle East affairs for the President’s edification.

Much of this book focuses on Reagan’s forays into international affairs, from Central America to the Philippines (where he backed the odious Marcos regime until the bitter end) to, of course, the Soviet Union. Mr. Reeves notes—almost in passing—that it was during these years that the deindustrialization of America took place, an economic calamity for millions. I’d have liked to read more about Reagan’s complicity in that disaster, if only to figure out why so many steelworkers wound up voting for him in 1984.

Putting together a narrative of a much-chronicled Presidency is not for the faint of heart. Richard Reeves, one of the finest journalists of his generation, is made of sterner stuff, and our understanding of Ronald Reagan is the better for it.

Terry Golway, city editor of The Observer, is co-author, with Robert Dallek, of Let Every Nation Know: The Oratory of John F. Kennedy, to be published in April by Sourcebooks.

Next comes the prepositional phrase "in modern times." What are we to make of that? Are we to suppose that in ancient times, which begin at some unstated date, idealistic wars were often fought?

In ancient or modern times, are there examples of two sides fighting an "idealistic war" against each other? Since it's hypothetically possible that two nations might wage "idealistic war" against each other, it follows that a nation can fight an "idealistic war" and from a moral or legal standpoint still be in the wrong, since one idealist must be right and the other wrong. Or could both idealists be right (or both wrong) at the same time, fighting against each other in the same war?

Mr. Ignatius goes on to say that the Iraqi mess is "a war whose only coherent rationale, for all the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda terrorists, is that it toppled a tyrant and created the possibility of a democratic future. It was a war of choice, not necessity, and one driven by ideas, not merely interests. In that sense, the paradigmatic figure of the war is [Paul] Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and the Bush administration's idealist in chief."

The paradigmatic idealist in chief must be assigned at least partial responsibility for "the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction," for it was he who confessed as much when he said, "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everybody could agree on." Apparently, it is possible to be both an idealist in chief and a liar.

A couple of paragraphs later in the article, Mr. Ignatius writes: "I asked Wolfowitz if he ever worried that he was too idealistic-that his passion for the noble goals of the Iraq war might overwhelm the prudence and pragmatism that normally guide war planners. He didn't answer directly, except to say that it was a good question." Now there's a hard-hitting, incisive question: Oh, pray tell, sir, do you sometimes worry that you are too good to tarry long amongst us?

Mr. Ignatius also writes that the idealist in chief's "passion undercuts the widespread notion that Wolfowitz is simply a neoconservative tool of Israel." But does it? There is growing talk that the idealist in chief, over and above his remarkable paradigmatic qualities, is a "Likudist," a follower of Ariel Sharon, an Israeli Likud Party fellow traveler.

That such thoughts about Mr. Wolfowitz and his associate, Richard Perle, are being bruited about is reflected in a recent New York Times article by David Rieff. In discussing Ahmad Chalabi, the puppet installed by the Americans in Baghdad as the head of the non-Iraqi government there, Mr. Rieff suggested that Mr. Chalabi is little more than a thing the neocon cat dragged in. He also writes: "The Iraq Chalabi envisioned-one that would make peace with Israel, have adversarial relations with Iran and become a democratic model for (or, seen another way, a threat to) Saudi Arabia-coincided neatly with the plan of the administration neoconservatives, who saw post-Hussein Iraq as a launching pad for what they described as the democratization of the Middle East."

Phrases such as "democratization of the Middle East" are often slung around by neocons. From time to time, they use one which is revelatory of their inner thinking, or so I take it. Most recently, I heard a neocon columnist refer to the democratization of the region as "draining the swamp." It is a chilling expression, because it evokes some of the horrendous euphemisms employed by the gas-chamber fascism of 60 years ago.

It also gives a hint as to what neocons think about Arabs and the Muslim religion when the doors are closed and they are banqueting in one of those fancy think tanks of theirs. "Draining the swamp": It calls to mind swamp rats, scum, stagnant film on backwater, refuse, filth, corruption, foul pools, spongy green swatches, mosquito breeding grounds, 50-legged crawling things. "Draining the swamp" could also be interpreted to mean getting rid of the Arabs who live in the swamp. Drain them, drain their oil.

Odd that we Americans care enough to liberate these wretches, but not enough to count how many of them we kill, either intentionally or by accident. If the government does count Iraqi mortalities, it doesn't make its knowledge public. Iraqi ways, Iraqi people are not important enough to study. So far as I know, neither the idealist in chief nor those with whom he is most closely associated politically speak Arabic-which may explain the blank (if not hostile) expressions on Iraqi faces when the Americans come in and shout at them, "Free! Free! No charge! It's gratis! Send in your coupons for a liberty rebate!"

The neocons, who have shown indifference if not contempt for Iraqi history, culture, religion and accomplishments (save only the rugs), have taken the trouble, however, to liberate these people. Now they are in the process of being democratized. It will be interesting to watch democratization play out.

A glimpse of what may be in store can be gotten from Mr. Ignatius' dispatch from Iraq. "It was a classic Paul Wolfowitz moment," he writes. "He was speaking at a new women's rights center here nine days ago when someone asked for his advice on writing an Iraqi constitution. Wolfowitz, the professor turned Pentagon war planner, began quoting Alexis de Tocqueville's theories about democracy to the residents of this ancient city on the banks of the Euphrates River."

A Wolfowitzian moment! Imagine. Anyhow, it is classy to quote de Tocqueville-they do it at Harvard and Yale all the time-but it is classier yet to understand de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville explained that the American democracy which he had studied firsthand-he spoke English-was shaped by and grew out of the culture, religion, etc., of the Americans. He believed that democracy is not a collection of rules, laws and procedures which are pressed down on a people or a nation; that a political system needs to have organic unity with the society in which it operates. This being the case, four possible outcomes in Iraq spring to mind: 1) The Iraqis reject what Mr. Wolfowitz seeks to impose on them; 2) He destroys their culture, obliterates their past, decimates their religion and educes some kind of lame, twisted, Amero-Iraqi version of a democracy; 3) The Iraqis kick out the idealist in chief along with his ideals and, with pain and over an extended period of time, develop their own democracy out of their own cultural materials; or 4) The outcome will be something none can predict.

Mr. Ignatius calls the Iraqi mess "a war of choice, not necessity, and one driven by ideas, not merely interests." Yes, a war of choice which those who started it call "preemption" and those who are disturbed by it call "aggression." As for it being a war driven by ideas, Mr. Ignatius doesn't know the difference between an idea and a slogan. All slogans aside, whose interests does Mr. Ignatius have in mind: the oil interest, the Israeli interest, the Halliburton interest, or the interest of some gorgeously meaningless abstraction like "freedom"?

He closes his piece of political hagiography with a declaration that "[t]he idealists can win this war, but only if they act with brutally honest pragmatism." Someone should tell Mr. Ignatius that if the troops under the orders of the Supreme Paradigm kill enough Iraqis, the country will quiet down; a good dosing of "brutally honest pragmatism" should do it nicely. As for a neater definition of "brutally honest pragmatism," use Occam's razor-or please apply to the idealist in chief for clarification.

Consider the dimensions of the victory, still incomplete, that the coalition and its allies within Iraq can now claim: In the space of one week, they allowed a plainly confused citizenry to progress from obsessive worries about whether Saddam Hussein's fedayeen would be destroyed in anything resembling the short term to visual assurances that those squads were being cut down like the murderous, frothing animals they've always been. At the same time, the coalition forces put to rest the question of whether and where the vaunted Republican Guard units might be lying in wait by demonstrating that most of them had been transformed into a horrific collection of body parts that filled bomb craters, ditches and ruined entrenchments all over Iraq. The coalition's army, a force unsurpassed by any in history in bravery and daring, and unequaled in its attention to discriminatory tactics, silenced those critics who wondered if Saddam's regime might not in fact enjoy the grassroots loyalty of a majority of Iraqis: They boldly destroyed first the weapons and then the symbols of Saddamite power, and were cheered in their work by a civilian population that began genuinely to believe that the transformation underway in their country might be permanent.

The process of dispelling the deadly black magic of authoritarianism that has for so long enthralled Iraqis was capped Sunday by preliminary reports that caches of chemical weapons may have been found, and then by the news (of equal if not more importance to the fighting morale of Iraqi insurgents and Kurdish forces) that the official most closely associated with the use of those weapons, Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali," had been killed by coalition planes. Within a day, another electric rumor circulated: Not only Saddam himself but his brace of sadistic sons had been killed by bunker-buster bombs. In all, it was a week unlike any in modern American military history; and it may seem peculiar that one should encounter in this column anything but unqualified appreciation of and enthusiasm for the achievement.

But scheming politicians and businessmen can deflate the mood of any analyst, and the greedy plotting that has haunted, in the case of Iraq, can no longer be considered separately from the military campaign-not when it stands an excellent chance of tarnishing the great achievements of the campaign itself.

Who will be watching out for postwar Iraq? After the conclusion of hostilities, the focus of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will shift to other matters affecting American national security all around the world-that's his job. The problem is that Mr. Rumsfeld will leave behind a very confused picture, peopled by a cast of dreamy lieutenants and profiteers. It's easy to imagine how this situation could degrade the nascent security that has been won for the Iraqi people.

The working models for postwar Iraq are said to be Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kurdish free state created in northern Iraq following the first Gulf War. Bits and pieces-and, in some cases, officials-from each experience will be adopted and adapted for use in Iraq generally, in order to create a situation in which (so goes the litany) all Iraqis will eventually feel free to participate in a free, open, democratic government. Since we are talking about one of the oldest civilized regions on earth-one where true democracy has never flourished-this may take some time, but the schemers show every sign of trying to stretch that time out longer than is necessary or advisable.

They hide their work absolutely and loftily: We are, after all, a country that has always profiteered with a noble fig leaf; and the man whose job it is in this case to spin a set of philosophical principles that will serve as a cover for the potentially exploitative occupation of Iraq is Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Possessed of a powerful intellect, along with ideas that, packaged in the best sort of benign American wrappings, are nonetheless characteristically self-interested, Mr. Wolfowitz is thought of as the eminence grise behind the idea that a democratic Iraq is possible, desirable-and will take far longer to embody than did the rehabilitation of Afghanistan (where a pre-assembled government was in place within weeks of the liberation of Kabul and where-not coincidentally-the potential rewards to American business were far lower).

Mr. Wolfowitz has been analyzed and reanalyzed in the press, yet he is not generally paired closely enough with the American to whom he bears the strongest ideological and psychological resemblance: Woodrow Wilson. This is perhaps understandable- Mr. Wolfowitz is a short, unassuming Jew, while Wilson was a puffed-up, posturing Presbyterian-but it's also troubling. For whatever the superficial differences between the two men, they share one overriding quality: a belief in evangelical interventionism. This passion caused Wilson's eight-year Presidency to become the greatest single period of American interference in the affairs of other governments in our nation's history: He was a serial, unilateral interventionist, and one gets the feeling that Mr. Wolfowitz-who increasingly enjoys the ear of another democratic evangelist, George W. Bush-may be trying to duplicate the feat.

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!" Woodrow Wilson once railed; and although Mr. Wolfowitz's statements about Iraq and the Middle East are more soft-spoken and rambling, they often have the same sense of high moral purpose-and the same low estimation of the aspirations and abilities of the local populace. Like Latin Americans in Wilson's day, the people of the Middle East are generally people who have lived under post-imperial petty autocracies for so long that they have almost forgotten that any other type of government exists. And, again like those Latin Americans of a century ago, they look primarily to religion to ease the burdens of repressive regimes.

Indeed, there is entirely too much about the Middle East of today that might attract a Wilsonian missionary. The President-Who-Should-Have-Been-Preacher never did manage to "teach the South American republics" much of anything, except that they didn't understand what he was talking about-and, after enough harangues and bullets, no longer cared to even try.

Can President Bush, following Mr. Wolfowitz's ideas, do better with Muslims than Wilson did with Latin Americans? It seems unlikely, since neither man seems ready to drop the didactic tone, with its attendant belief that the native population in question is made up not of men and women, but of ignorant children. And whatever small chance Mr. Bush and Mr. Wolfowitz might have at success seems further doomed by still another factor that played a central role in giving the lie to Wilson's supposedly beneficent policies: the voracious appetite of international American corporations.

In early to mid-20th-century Latin America, the citizens of country after country heard the rhetoric of Wilson, but came up hard against the practices of American mining, agriculture and construction giants; and children though they may have been in the eyes of both the paternalistic Wilson and the far more sinister corporate magnates, those people understood the game that was being played out within their borders. Yet Wilson at least managed to keep the worst agents of corporate greed out of the White House itself; in our own time, by contrast, we have already seen the heavy, piggish hands of Vice President Dick Cheney and his multinational friends at work in the planning for a postwar Iraq. That Mr. Cheney attempted to secure a $600 million reconstruction package in Iraq for his own former company, Halliburton, without even a blush is almost as remarkable as the fact that, once that idea had been slapped down, he went right ahead and secured a smaller contract for one of Halliburton's subsidiary companies, K.B.R.

Shameless? Perhaps-but that word implies an initial understanding of what "shame" is, and there is nothing in the Vice President's career to suggest that he has ever embraced any philosophy more delicate than the belief that success in a corporate environment is what separates natural leaders from the rest of us. And for this reason, whether or not any company associated with Halliburton does end up biting off a nice, fat mouthful of the dripping Iraqi roast, there are a crowd of other Cheney cronies lined up to do the gorging. One way or another, Iraq is going to be good for those who have been good to the Republican Party-and democracy is not going to be allowed to travel abroad without toting the same cumbersome baggage it carried in Wilson's time.

Nor will Messrs. Bush and Cheney's Democratic opponents weep over this; or, if they do, it will only be because their dispenser of high-priced favors was not clever enough to wrest the great national prize from his opponent in Florida three years ago. Had the pillars of Big Labor known that they would be losing the reconstruction of an entire country in that process, they might well have pushed their Tennessee prince a little harder to play dirty; as it is, they still have such agents as Carl Levin of Michigan at their disposal in Congress, setting traps for the dispensers of Republican largesse in order to make sure that places at the trough are cleared for wealthy yet hungry Democratic interests (although Mr. Levin's constituents are already making out quite well, thanks to renewed defense contracts).

Cynics, of course, will groan and sigh and say that there's nothing new in any of this-and they're right.

But the threat posed to the lives and interests of Americans by Islamic terrorism is, by contrast, unprecedented, and in no way comparable to, say, the bandit raids of Pancho Villa into U.S. territory during Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. Characters such as Villa may have been capable of humiliating Washington, but they could not bring on full-scale crises: Wilson could ultimately afford to play his neurotic games of democratic nation-building in Latin America because they had no real cost to his own people (though he inflicted great suffering on Latin Americans). But the ventures of George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz may expose us to greater dangers than any we have known.

But it is to the memory of the military campaign still in its final phase in Iraq-and specifically, again, to the legacy of the men and women who have both fought in it and been killed and maimed as a result of it-that this venerable evangelical paradigm of American international behavior offers the greatest insult. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein has not been on a par with the wandering ashore of a detachment of drunken Marines-which was more than once Woodrow Wilson's method of insertion into troubled Latin American countries. Rather, the Iraq war has been (as this column has tried repeatedly to point out) that rarest of rarities in military history, a progressive campaign. In this campaign, we have seen innovative military principles and methods potentially change the political map of a region. Are we to sit back now and watch political and economic business-as-usual squander such momentous, such rare military achievements?

Perhaps. Or perhaps we will instead learn-for what would arguably be the first time in our nation's history-to value superior military methods over self-serving economic ends. Perhaps we will insist that our civilian leaders honor the achievements and sacrifices of our forces, and those Iraqis who have fought beside them, by rejecting the plan that Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are trying to railroad through Congress, even as various Iraqi opposition groups scream their protests. Perhaps we will recognize that "Iraqi Freedom" may not mean "Iraqi American-Style Capitalist Democracy"; but then, our commanders presumably chose the first name rather than the second because it had a distinctly better ring to it. This ought to tell them something: We have sacrificed and inflicted sacrifices in order to liberate Iraq, and let its people live as they wish-not to remake it in our image. That is the work we must now be about; that is the only work that can match what our troops have done in the field.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror (Random House) has been published in a revised and updated edition.

The problem stemmed from my friends' and my divergent views about what constitutes a successful ski vacation. For me, it's about (though not necessarily in this order) enjoying the scenery, getting exercise, working on my tan, keeping my skis together and making it to the bottom of the run without needing a blood transfusion.

For my friends Bruce, Mike and Pedro (and they can correct me if I'm wrong-preferably via e-mail rather than in a letter to the editor), it's about proving their manhood. If this sounds like sour grapes, it is. Bruce and Mike are better skiers than me. Pedro isn't, though he's probably in better shape than me, which isn't saying much. I don't know how else to explain his cheerful willingness to follow Bruce over precipices without first checking what's on the other side. And it's not as if he doesn't pay for his spontaneity. Pedro's typical vacation consists of skiing until he twists or breaks something, and then he departs prematurely. Come to think of it, Bruce and Mike aren't particularly in touch with their bodies either, at least judging by the amount of body odor they're comfortable living with-though perhaps I ought to save that thought for a follow-up column.

Our vacations are always a case study in machismo, with Bruce promising to pace himself-a vow shattered, often along with his telemark bindings, by the end of the first run. But this year ,the pace was even more frenetic. I think two factors probably tipped the scales in favor of risk-taking. The first, as I mentioned before, was the dearth of fresh powder: It provoked the boys to take extreme measures in an attempt to find any. The second factor was the presence of Mike, who had never skied with us before.

In addition to the fact that Mike is an excellent athlete, from what I gather, since he sold his family business last year, he has also spent much of the time working out. He and his wife have a personal trainer, he runs several times a week, and he recently took up yoga. Bruce, a computer-software designer who lives in Dublin, is no slouch in the fitness department, either; he currently leads the standings for the Irish Mountain Running Association's 50-and-over category.

While I don't think that Bruce and Mike were competing (at least not consciously) for leadership of our pack, Mike's presence certainly gave Bruce license to go for broke. As I said, there was no fresh powder, which is the main reason to come to Alta in the first place. So Bruce, our guide, spent an excessive and ultimately futile amount of time leading us across 10,000-foot-high traverses and hanging off the sides of cliffs in search of some.

My scariest moment-not to be confused with the run where I scraped half the skin off my left arm during a fall on what the operator of the tram at Snowbird, the resort next-door to Alta (where we also skied), described as "hard snow" (a meteorological phenomenon with which I was previously unfamiliar, apparently not to be mistaken for ice)-came after Bruce led us to the top of a trail that was so steep a parachute would have been more appropriate gear than skis. We found ourselves trapped on this promontory after asking some ski bum we encountered on a previous run what the area, known as the Cirque, was like.

"It's not too bad once you get past the rocks," he said. That may as well have been the mantra for our entire vacation, since the lack of snow had exposed geology that hasn't been seen since the Jurassic. However, he made the rocks sound no greater an obstacle than pebbles strewn across a garden path. As it turned out, they were the size of boulders. In fact, they were boulders.

Bruce and Pedro skied ahead looking for an escape hatch, while Mike made sure his crash helmet fit snugly and I rued the moment I met Bruce in college back in 1972. Some veteran Snowbird skiers came up behind us, pronounced the narrow chute over which we were standing the best way down, and vanished over the rim.

Since there was no going back, I followed them-there was no way they could have been any dumber than my own party-managing to avoid soiling myself on the descent and even making a couple of life-saving turns.

The trip, frankly, threw me into something of an identity crisis. On the one hand, I consoled myself that I had a satisfying career that provided opportunities to prove myself without rising from my desk. On the other hand, I felt woefully out of shape. How much of this was due to the altitude and how much to the breathless pace of our average descent, I can't say. In any case, I felt like a ball and chain around my friends' legs everywhere save the hotel bar, where I managed to be mildly amusing. "Speaking just for me, you were not an impediment," Bruce wrote in response to an apologetic e-mail I sent him after the vacation. "As you saw on the Cirque, you actually can ski down anything once you overcome your appeal to sanity."

For some reason, I couldn't stop thinking about George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz the whole vacation. Or, to be more accurate, Bruce, Mike and Pedro morphed into the President and his Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense.

What both groups had in common was that they were putting my body at risk without my permission, and for what seemed like dumb-ass reasons. They all seemed caught up in the testosterone-charged, competitive, macho momentum of the moment. The line between fun-or, in Bush's case, waging war-and irresponsibility masquerading as bravery was one I had no desire to cross.

The ironic thing is that after we got home, the tone of Bruce's e-mails became almost contrite, as if acknowledging that during our vacation he wasn't himself. Sort of like the drunk at the Christmas party who can't remember a thing-except that his poison wasn't Scotch, but snow.

If foreign-policy analysts are searching for an explanation of George W.'s behavior, perhaps they should be looking at the locker rooms and ski slopes of America rather than in the Oval Office or the wood-paneled suites over at State or Defense, though the distinction between the two may be lost on some. Bruce, Mike and Pedro were W., Rummy and the Wolfman-with me playing Colin Powell.

Except that now the Secretary of State seems to have rented a pair of demo skis and is tearing down the mountain trying to catch up. Is there anybody left to say the conditions suck, to say, "I'm heading back to the lodge for a hot tub"?

The June 10 announcement that the government had captured an alleged American-born terrorist who was conspiring to detonate a radiation-spewing bomb among us was as frightening as any summer-movie plot. The advertising message, articulated from Moscow by Attorney General John Ashcroft himself, is to be very, very afraid. The national media cooperated magnificently in this effort.

On closer examination, however, the dirty-bomb plot turned out to be less terrifying than advertised. Although Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al Muhajir, may well have intended some awful harm to this country, he appears to have had little if any means to inflict real damage. Although Mr. Ashcroft hyped the arrest of the former Chicago gang member and hotel banquet-waiter, and praised the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. for "capturing Abdullah al Muhajir before he could act on his deadly plan," it turned out that this petty criminal didn't really have much of a plan, deadly or otherwise. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, in fact, it isn't clear that there was any "plan" for a radiological attack at all.

"I want to emphasize again that there was not an actual plan. We stopped this man in the initial planning stages," Mr. Wolfowitz candidly explained. But if there wasn't an imminent plan-or any plan-why was this alleged evildoer picked up as soon as he landed in the United States? And if the evidence against him was so compelling, why has he been held for a month without being charged?

It's hard not to wonder about these questions, even at the risk of being deemed unpatriotic by Vice President Dick Cheney and other self-styled sentinels of acceptable opinion. While there's reason to believe that Mr. Padilla is a bad guy, there is equal reason to wonder whether arresting him without sufficient evidence to indict was the wisest law-enforcement decision.

News reports suggest that American intelligence officials have been aware of his existence and connections to Al Qaeda for weeks and possibly months. They knew enough to detect him well before he tried to enter the country. But that raises the intriguing question of the opportunities lost by seizing him so quickly. With proper surveillance of his movements and contacts, the F.B.I. might have rolled up not just Mr. Padilla, but also whatever Al Qaeda confederates he'd been instructed to contact upon his return to the United States. He might even have committed an overt act that would have permitted his arrest on conspiracy charges.

Perhaps those who gave the order to grab Mr. Padilla hope to coax (or coerce) important information from him now that he's in custody. Unfortunately, however, they'll be doing so under the color of authority that violates basic civil liberties and constitutional traditions.

Suddenly, an American citizen can be detained indefinitely without being accused of any statutory offense, and can be deprived of all the rights previously afforded him under those lawful traditions, which date back beyond the beginnings of this Republic. To hear the Attorney General describe this situation is to realize that under certain circumstances, a citizen has fewer rights than an alien, who would at least be given the opportunity to defend himself in a military tribunal. Suddenly, the United States looks a little more like Castro's Cuba or Pinochet's Chile than it did a week ago.

Abrupt as this departure from normal constitutional processes is, freedom won't disappear overnight in this country. In an atmosphere of terror, however, it can be eroded gradually, until the day arrives when critical viewpoints are delegitimized, important decisions are taken in secret, accountability is nullified, and democracy is eviscerated.

It's understandable that the government wouldn't want to take any chances in the Padilla matter. Law-enforcement officials may have worried that he would somehow slip his surveillance and then execute his plan (even if there was no actual plan yet). But their casual reliance upon unconstitutional methods is nevertheless disturbing.

Let there be no misunderstanding: The nation requires the best possible defense against the fanatical enemies who have declared their determination to destroy us. This may include the intensified surveillance of certain aliens and citizens as well as strong offensive countermeasures both here and abroad. But we do not need a Ministry of Fear that seeks political dominance by scaring the people, and that undermines the constitutional freedoms which this government is sworn to protect.