Ah, Rummy. Evidence, civil liberties, debating before we go to war . .
                      it's all sooo 20th century.
 
                      Anyway, how can we have evidence when we learned last week that our
                      evidence-gathering snoozy spooks are even more aggressively awful than we thought?
 
                      The administration isn't targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It's exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq.
                      This new fight isn't logical — it's cultural. It is the latest chapter in the culture wars,
                      the conservative dream of restoring America's sense of Manifest Destiny.

                      The Bush hawks don't simply want to go back in a time machine and make Desert Storm
                      end with a turkey shoot. They want to travel back even farther to the Vietnam War and
                      write a more muscular coda to that as well.

                      Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft
                      when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975.

                      We can't prove it with al Qaeda. That's like grabbing smoke.
 
                      So former Nixon officials Cheney and Rummy are playing out their own Four Feathers,"
                      rescuing the lost honor of the American empire in the sands of Arabia. They want to stomp
                      on Saddam to exorcise the specters of Vietnam and Watergate — the ethical relativism,
                      the lack of patriotism, the postmodern angst, the loss of moral authority, the feeling that
                      America is in decline or in the wrong, the do-whatever-feels-good Clintonesque ethos.

                      Dick Cheney fought multinationalism and Lynne Cheney fought multiculturalism, defending
                      the dead white males who made the republic great. She has written a children's book, "
                      America: A Patriotic Primer," and urged that 9/11 be a day to remember the nation's
                      glories rather than its "faults and failings."

                      The Cheneys, who have been known to invite dinner guests at the vice presidential mansion
                      to sing along to "Home on the Range," think they can restore a sunnier, more can-do mood to
                      our society. Even if it takes incinerating Baghdad to do it.
 
                      Rummy is equally impatient with the post-Vietnam focus on imperfections and limitations.
                      He wants to yank the boomers by their collars and make them, if not the Greatest Generation,
                      at least a bit Greater.

                      This is fine with W., who stayed 50's through the 60's and stopped liking the Beatles when they
                      got into their "weird psychedelic period." He arrived at Yale and Harvard Business School just
                      as the white male WASP ascendancy was slipping. He was in that small coterie of bewildered
                      guys in wide-wale corduroy trousers, Izod polo shirts and Sperry Topsiders, surrounded by wild
                      and crazy hippies protesting the war and smoking roaches.
 
                      The Bushies want to bring back the imperial, imperious presidency. The pre-emption proclamation
                      had the tone of Cheney Caesar and Condi Ben Her. And the resolution sent to Congress seeking
                      authority to go after Iraq was the broadest request for executive military authority since L.B.J. got
                      the Gulf of Tonkin resolution rubber-stamped in 1964. At least L.B.J. had to phony up the Tonkin
                      Gulf provocation. Mr. Bush can't be bothered. "I cannot believe the gall and the arrogance of the
                      White House," Sen. Robert Byrd bellowed.
 
                      Things are getting dangerouser and dangerouser. Karl Rove's gunning for the Democrats.
                      Ariel Sharon's gunning for Arafat. W.'s gunning for Saddam.
                      And Al Qaeda's still gunning for us.