It is, after all, pretty weird that, having considered the elective surgery of invading Iraq for almost a year, we have only just now begun to think about what happens after we invade Iraq -- James Fallows's recent piece in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Fifty-first State?," is the first extended consideration. Nor was it that reassuring when the Bush people evoked MacArthur in Tokyo -- there's the sense that they saw it in the movies. ("I am viscerally opposed to a prolonged occupation of a Muslim country at the heart of the Muslim world by Western nations who proclaim the right to re-educate that country," noted Henry Kissinger with the force of great obviousness.)

And then there's the patriotism card. This may be played more by the media than by the man on the street -- patriotism is a prepackaged media theme. A patriotic story is more sellable (and easier and cheaper to do) than an analytic or reported story. Patriotism is soft news masquerading as hard news.

There is, too, as a further complication, the Israel card.

It motivates European frustration and fury (mixed feelings about Israel run deep there) and, in turn, puts clear constraints on the American discussion (where we are not allowed to have mixed feelings) -- we're forced to stifle ourselves.

But perhaps most of all there is the nobody-gives-a-shit factor. Who isn't annoyed by having to think about Iraq?

Iraq and what happens there is not just remote. It's bor-ing.

Whatever happens in Iraq or, really, anywhere in the way-distant world, is at most an atmospheric disturbance. It's a technological abstraction. (Just fire a rocket to smash the meteor or something.)

I think many people, perhaps most, if pressed, might suspect that the president has a screw loose about Iraq (which actually gives him an odd kind of idiot-savant nobility).

That it's all too obsessional.

That his view is too simple. (Not, however, that this in any way compromises the virtues of keeping it simple.)

It's foot-stamping.

He tried to kill my daddy . . .

And I'm pretty sure most people think Rumsfeld and Cheney are vastly unsympathetic and scary guys.

I also think it's likely that most people sense an uncommon lack of alternatives -- a weird dearth. We've been managing Saddam-size sons-of-bitches for half a century -- we must know some tricks. (We know how the Clinton people would have handled this: beefed-up sanctions, multinational task forces, calculated interventions, a few well-placed hugs and substantial payoffs to allies. Limit, contain, marginalize. What? We haven't done this before?)

But if the president wants to go to war -- especially because we've come to believe that only the absolutely unluckiest Americans get killed in a digital war -- what can we do?

Now, politicians, especially the Democrats, have been morally and intellectually execrable in all this -- and yet, in a sense, understandably so. To do it right, to oppose honorably, would require a level of didacticism that does not exist in American politics -- you'd not only be defeated, you would be ignored (and eventually medicated).

If you're a politician, you know the routine. We'll do the war. It will be a humdinger of a media event. We'll win, or appear to win, in some decisive, elephant-stomps-mouse fashion, which means that everybody in the nation and in the world (because everybody, no matter how anti-American, loves a winner) will be into it. And then, afterward, when it gets more difficult and complex and intractable, no one will notice -- because only big payloads make headlines.

Except that the economy will have been hopelessly ruined, so Bush the son, like Bush the father, will be defeated because of that.

Simple.

The New York Bookshelf
National Magazine Award winner Michael Wolff is included in the just-released anthology The Best American Magazine Writing 2002 (HarperCollins; $14.95), produced by the American Society of Magazine Editors.