If You Love Freedom, Resign, W, Resign

Not that this will happen. But it's a point worth raising - if the major figures of the administration behind this corrupt and regularly botched war resigned, America might just have a chance of political and military victory in Iraq. Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feit- OUT.

Bush's resignation from the presidency would create several conditions that might help. First, restoration of international respect necessary to form an global effort to replace the American occupation. It cannot happen now, because occupation was the primary neo-con purpose for the invasion. I am convinced that they will lose is this war before abandoning the idea of positioning forward American bases in the Middle East, and this obsession obscured competent political and military judgement from the begining.

Second, one major lesson from Vietnam had little to do with Vietnam itself: an American government, when dominantly cynical and corrupt, cannot indefinitely sustain an essentially imperial war in a democracy, at least not one of this scale. The hollownesss creeping into and cracking open the national psyche is identical in character to the Nixon years, for the same reasons, and then like now, it is attributable to the incessant dissembling and arrogance and ambition of the administration.

We can convince the world of nothing in this sorry political state. With the reason-a-day war and constant insistence of the truth of patent falsehoods, our credibility is totally shot - and the credibility of the dominant power is one thing absolutely necessary for rebuilding another nation. Resignation would make rebuilding our international credibility possible, though far from certain. And resignation might allow America to rebuild some kind of reasonable national political consensus.

Resign, President Bush. Resign now and Iraq might avoid civil war. Resign now and we will save American and Iraqi lives.

But to W., of course, it's most important that he get on with his life.