CHANNELING NIXON

CHANNELING NIXON

In his life, President Richard Nixon was an expert at reinventing himself and presenting various "new Nixons."

With an uncanny appreciation for the fact that politics in the media age had devolved in large part to brand management, and that consumers can always be persuaded to attach new meaning to old brands, Nixon regularly performed the political equivalent. In forty or so years, his personna moved from anti-Communist truth teller putting Alger Hiss behind bars; to domestic watchdog pointing out "pink ladies" as an inveterate red baiter; to press hater in 1962 leaving the scene with a contemptible "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference"; to calm statesmen promising to "bring us together" in 1968 with a secret plan to end the war; to the last liberal President, creating the EPA and OSHA, and proposing what today would easily pass for national health insurance but which then was not good enough for the Democrats in Congress; to lawbreaker covering-up the 1972 bugging of the opposition party and then resigning for it; to unapologetic ex-President marooned on the Elba he called Casa Pacifica (his San Clemente, California home, to which he recurred following his ignominious resignation); to slightly apologetic ex-President ("I screwed up," as he told the Oxford Union some years after his 1974 resignation); to elder statesmen writing books on foreign policy in the '80s and '90s and offering sage advice to political suitors who made the trek to Saddle River, NJ, his last home.

In his life, there were many Nixons. And in his death, we have been blessed (or cursed as the case may be) with another.

Her name is Hillary Clinton.

More than anyone else in politics these days, Hillary Clinton is the new Nixon. The reality is paradoxical -- her first job after law school was working as an aide in Congress to those who were trying to impeach old tricky Dick, earnest in her bell bottoms and granny glasses as the authentic representative of lefty baby boomers coming of age. But the reality is also undeniable. Her Presidential campaign has marched out different versions of HRC at a rate that not even Nixon could manage in the space of a lifetime. Indeed, by my count, we have at least six to date.

Here they are:

1. Inevitable Hillary. Her campaign began with the premise that no one could beat her. She was a financial and political juggernaut, heir to what Democrats (especially those who vote in primaries) think of as the halcyon days of her husband's presidency, collector of the IOUs on favors she and Bill had handed out with abandon in three decades of workaholic political glad handing (and of the one gigantic IOU she gets from him as he does penance for his peccadilloes).

And it was all working.

Until Iowa.

2. Experienced Hillary. When Inevitable Hillary tanked, we got experienced Hillary. She was the co-President consulted on "all major decisions" made by Bill, a sort of uber-First Lady who didn't let the ribbon cutting and library tours interfere with involvement in the heavy lifting of policy formation, an expert on health care cut up by those killer Harry and Louise ads but who knows where the bodies are buried and won't fail twice, the co-author of Clintonian success never responsible for any of its failures.

This wasn't working in the week after Iowa.

So we got . . .

3. Emotional Hillary. Faced with defeat in New Hampshire, the iron lady of American politics momentarily shed her Lady Thatcher visage and. . . cried. Well, she didn't quite cry, but she choked up a lot. Crying on the eve of the New Hampshire primary is a mixed blessing. When voters thought Ed Muskie did it (he really didn't, it was just melting snow, but political brand management then wasn't what it is now), they skewered him. So Hillary's wasn't an all out tear jerker, not even close. Just the welling up of emotion as she professed her consuming passion for the issues and the notion that the Presidency really matters (which W more or less proves by negative inference).

Some say this won her New Hampshire.

But it couldn't get her through Super Tuesday, which was a draw. Nor could it re-fill her political bank account, which by then was tapped.

So we got . . .

4. Ruthless Hillary. Close cousin to her Thatcheresque twin, Ruthless Hillary does what is necessary to win. She cans Patti Solis Doyle, her loyal campaign manager of umpteen years, and brings back Maggie Williams, who doesn't lose. She lets Bill demean Barack's win in South Carolina, as he becomes the first "black" President to. . . race bait. She tells us that the votes in Florida and Michigan should count after all, and after she previously said they couldn't and wouldn't. She tells us caucuses don't really count (actually, she more or less tells us that anyplace she loses doesn't count, and then gets the media to buy into this fantasy by making her "win states" Barack's "must win" states). She lends herself $5 million "of my money". Well, it's really hers and Bill's together, a part of the dowry we give ex-Presidents to, I guess, make up for the below market salaries we pay them, without worrying about conflicts of interest as the ex takes lots of cash from those who use to listen for free and others who claim with a straight face that he knows something about business.

But not even ruthless was enough. Barack trotted out that string of eleven straight victories.

So we got. . .

5. Combat Hillary. This is the Hillary who braved sniper fire in Bosnia, the Commander in Chief who'll be able to take that 3 am phone call and calm the waters of this turbulent world as we all sleep the sleep of the well protected relieved that we did not entrust such awesome responsibility to the skinny guy with a silk tongue; the only one who can go mano a mano with the war hero as voters compare her "experience" to his and not just to some well crafted oration for God's sake.

Alas, Combat Hillary was not enough either, mostly because all the other Hillarys together still have left her behind the skinny guy in the delegate count. So we get . . .

6. Boilermaker Hillary. This is the Hillary who downs the shot and a beer with gusto in a working class bar in Pennsylvania, the "I'm on your side and he's not" girl with guts (and a much better bowling score), ready to junk NAFTA (this is one of Bill's ideas she won't take credit for) while the other guy sends his surrogates to Canada to tell them he doesn't really mean it, the regular gal (never mind the $100 plus million over the last eight years) who would never admit to eating arugula (or to counting calories in a chocolate factory), the candidate who, with a straight face (this is critical in brand management), tells us that Obama should have disowned his nutty pastor sooner because, while we "don't get to choose our families" (apparently husbands don't count, but who's noticing), we do "get to choose our preachers".

Nixon was never this creative. He usually stuck to one persona for every half decade or so. But he also lost two campaigns, the Presidency in 1960 (to the then "orator du jour" JFK) and the California gubernatorial election in 1962. Maybe he just wasn't in Hillary's league.

It's no wonder Barack can't beat her yet.

So far, he's had to run against two Clintons and six Hillarys.

Nixon would be proud.

GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE

GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker returned from Iraq this week to report that "progress is real" in the post-surge world. So real, in fact, that we can't go surge-free any time soon. For, although "progress is real," it is also "fragile" and "reversible." Armed with this fragIle but reversible real progress, we are now advised to embrace a new policy of suspending troop withdrawals (part of what was promised post surge if only we agreed, pre-surge, to surge). The Washington surge gurus (McCain, Bush, the Washington Post editorial page, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, among others) tell us that de-surging can only be embraced if "conditions on the ground" permit it.

They don't. 

So we must . . . surge forward, or on, or upward, or somewhere for the foreseeable future. 

The Washington Post editors claimed today that "the reduction in violence [in Iraq] had been so great as to be undeniable," and then skewered Obama and Clinton for having been surge-resistent pessimists when W initially proposed the idea. This is like screaming at the coach whose team is down by three touchdowns because he fails to hand out "Attaboys" to his team when they go eight and out as opposed to their usual four and out. The progress was undeniable. It was also probably irrelevant. 

Violence, for now, is down. Progress, however, is only undeniable because things were so bad to begin with. We are nowhere near the end state Bush and Cheney forecast in 2003, and we are never getting there. That is why they keep changing the goalposts. First it was to get rid of WMD. Then when we found none of that, it was freedom and democracy for Iraq. Now that neither of these is likely (at least not without the sort of pro-Iranian resuilts we cannot otherwise endorse), it's stability. Slowly, that is giving way to a Nixonian sort of "peace with honor," which is how politicians frame losing, and this will itself be followed by a Rambo-esque hunt for the felons who refused to let us win (because patriots like Bush and Cheney and McCain never lose, they just have victory taken from them by those who refuse to "stay the course"). 

I now realize that the politicians really did learn lessons from Vietnam, though not the ones we thought they had leaned. The first lesson is never predict victory. This is a precondition for ceaseless surging, otherwise known as all war all the time. But you have to be careful how you sell it, or you won't close the deal. You can't admit that you will have to be there "for 100 years" (as McCain found out the hard way). Rather, you have to embrace the second lesson, which is to predict "devastating consequences" in the event of troop pull outs. This, of course, is not a prediction of victory if we continue to fight. Rather, it is a prediction horrific chaos if we do not. Combined, the astute practitioner of these simple rules freezes the debate. He or she neither gets caught in a Westmorland-like "light at the end of the tunnel" expectation of success nor in a "hanging on the helicopters" picture of ignoble retreat. Instead, he or she gets to . . . surge. 

Lesson three is never look back. This lesson is particularly useful to policy makers, especially those who (like McCain and Bush and Lieberman, and . . . Hillary) really blew it at the start of the game. By focusing, as Ambassador Crocker put it yesterday, on "what will happen [rather] than what has happened," those who fail get to keep on keepin' on. 

 And no one else gets to call them on their mistakes. 

Lesson three is the holy grail for the ambitiously incompetent. It would be nice if even one of them -- McCain, Bush, Lieberman, anyone -- resigned given their utter failure in 2003 to vote for and implement the correct policy. In a parliamentary system, there would have been multiple no confidence votes. Here, however, we just get spin --about patriotism, or chaos, or quitting, or the future. Personal responsibility apparently is very important when it comes to sex or drugs. But totally irrelevant when it comes to war. 

The truth is that no one knows when the so-called "conditions on the ground" will change and permit the troops to come home. So, whether we admit it or not, we are making an open ended committment to stay in Iraq. This is the latest lie we are being told by those we elect to tell us the truth, especially when it comes to national security. But they haven't and they won't, and maybe now they can't.

People who lie to themselves often enough end up believing the lies. This is why lying is a bad habit -- it's not just the mendacity, it's what the mendacity does to you after you repeat it enough. An erstwhile friend of mine (and graduate of Yale Law School) ruined his career and his life by lying. But long before he went to jail for his lies, he had already lost his self respect, and mine, along with any influence he might have had over his colleagues. The possession and exercise of power (political, financial, or emotional) can mask that loss for a time. But not forever. And not in a way that ever matters. 

Here are the real "conditions on the ground" in Iraq: 

1. We do not know when we will be able to get out. Positing what has to happen tells you nothing about when it will happen. 

2. Our current President, and at least one of the individuals who may be our next President (McCain), have, as a matter of policy, refused to say when we will get out. 

3. Most of the elites in our society are not calling them on it, or on their past failures. 

4. Consequently, the failure continues. 

The condition on the ground? 

Halberstam said it best forty years ago.

It is a quagmire.

SPRING BREAK

SPRING BREAK 

It's spring in the northeast but it still feels like winter. Although the sun breaks through from time to time and reminds us of what is to come, the defining color is gray. Some birds are chirping but the vast majority are not here yet. So the mornings are still fairly quiet. When you take the dog out for a walk, the ground has the feel of a sponge rung once -- not entirely saturated but still wet. In Maine, they call this the mud season. It's a "tweener" time of year. We are caught between frost and fun, overcoats and jackets, long nights and long days. 

So maybe it makes sense that the Democrats don't have a presidential nominee yet. 

Barack can't win yet and Hillary won't quit yet. Some pundits lament the growing negativity of the campaigns, but I think they are playing with us. The pundits like this stuff. It fills air time. On the day after Easter, which is what today is, what would Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough have said if Carville hadn't compared Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot? What would they have said last week, and the week before last, if Reverand Wright's rhetoric was not out there to be noticed? 

You pretty much know when campaigns have run out of issues to brief and town meetings to announce. It occurs when incendiary comments long a part of the public record are dusted off and You Tubed so as to appear to be new. The Wright comments which so engulfed the airwaves for the past weeks define that art. The Reverand made the comments shortly after 9/11, or a little less than seven years ago. Did they just become offensive? Or relevant to the kind of President Obama would be? Is it really the case that no one noticed them until now? 

The Wright stuff is perfect for the "tweener" season. It's of a piece with President Clinton's faux plea for a presidential contest between two nominees who both "love their country" (guess who he had in mind). Or Carville's Judas comments (made on Good Friday, in case all the Catholics in Pennsylvania weren't previously listening). Bored by their own wonkiness and realizing that going negative works even as they deny doing it, hell hath no fury greater than a candidate in a tight race. In fact, political handlers are the only people who embrace hell before their bosses are officially spurned. And at the end, the bosses -- that is, the actual candidates -- are too tired to stop them. 

That is where we are now. In between. East of our political Eden. Caught in a seasonal dust bowl where winners and losers both get dirty, but no one stops them. When this sort of thing goes on in school yards, adults intervene. But the political adults here are the remaining superdelegates, and their silence for the most part has been deafening. 

The "tweener" season never lasts. Gray becomes green. Sooner or later, that one bird sings a song in which others join. It is inevitable. So, Barack, rising in his great speech on race, and Governor Richardson, rising as his fellows remain seated, will not be alone for long. 

Even the Clintons will join them.

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE 

She has lost men. She has lost women, She has lost blacks. She has lost yuppies. She has lost the college vote and the high school vote. She is losing the union vote. She is in trouble. 

But we now know that Hillary in fact does have a firewall. 

It is the footnote vote! 

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Clinton has repeated the charge that Barack Obama is something of a plagiarist. This is because he has repeated lines given him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The lines skewer those who claim Obama's speeches are "just words," with repeated invocations of some of the American republic's more famous bonne mots, followed by sarcastic questions that mockingly wonder whether these past clarion calls were just words as well. The riff works its magic as the audience hears Barack intone "'We hold those truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words? 'I have a dream'. Just words?" There is a kind of game, set and match quality to this oratory, as there is with most of what comes out of Obama's mouth, before crowds larger than anyone else's and more enthusiastic by an order of magnitude. 

Alas, however, the "just words" riff was not original to Barack. It was Gov. Patrick's. To the Clintonistas, it is irrlevant that Patrick is one of Obama's national co-chairs, or that he specifically suggested that Obama use the lines, or that Obama admits he perhaps should have credited Patrick for them at some point along the way, however that is done on the campaign trail. No, Barack the policy neophyte now turns out to be, so they say, less than the Demosthenes we had all supposed him to be. And since, so the argument continues, words are so much a part of his appeal, perhaps he is less . . . appealing. 

Obama has pilloried this contretemps as "silly" and he is right. But apart from being silly, the charges being levelled say a lot more about his critics than they do about him. Over the course of the past few decades, we have collectively allowed our politics to be reduced to a sort of least common denominator sport. In that arena, the subtext is that smart doesn't matter and eloquence is phony. The current President touted his regular guy quality and C+ college average as evidence that he was the better candidate in both 2000 and 2004, disqualifying in one pass anyone who excelled in school or gave a syntactically correct speech. Words were a currency to be debased, not embraced, as W winked and nodded his way through malaprops while the ostensibly effete Ivy Leaguers "misunderestimated" him. He didn't care whether "nuclear" came out as "nucular," so long as everyone knew the regular guy from Crawford would kill the SOBs and not worry much about the sensitivities intellectuals had about things like, say, torture. 

There is a sense in which Hillary is stealing a page from this book. No one -- not even Hillary -- believes Obama is a plagiarist. He was given a line by a supporter and used it. From time to time, she has done the same thing, as has everyone else who has ever run for office. Plagiarists steal words and claim them as their own. No one stole anything here. Deval Patrick willingly gave them away; much like the legions of speechwriters who craft the eloquence most of our politicians claim as their own. 

For Hillary, the Obama problem is not where the words come from, it's that the words are so good. She cannot attack them. So she has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to undermine them. The "they are not his words" charge followed the "they are just words charge," and then was itself followed by her "why can't we be friends" caricature of a putatively naive Obama long on rhetoric and short on reality. The problem, however, is that Hillary is morphing into everyone she claims to oppose -- the master mocker himself is the current President Bush, who has made a career out of ranking out opponents (be they members of the media or suitors for the same job) for their brains and eloquence, and the GOP playbook this Fall, lacking a defensible record, will belittle Obama for his vocabulary and cadence because it won't be able to attack him for his plans and policies. 

 Et tu, Hillary? 

Hillary Clinton is a lot better than this and should rise to that level rather than sink to Rove's. The Presidential race is a political campaign, not the defense of an honors thesis. 

Footnotes don't matter.

BARACK ATTACK

BARACK ATTACK 

Now that Barack Obama has pushed ahead in his contest with Hillary Clinton and stands a reasonable chance of being the Democratic nominee for President, the fear is that he will not be able to take a punch. First, however, his opponents (all of them) have to throw one. And so far, either none are, or none are landing. 

Whether it's Hillary, John McCain or right wing pundits like Charles Krauthammer, the attack on Obama thusfar is numbingly similar, surprisingly superficial and stunningly ineffective. It's some verson of the notion that he offers promises but not solutions (Hillary), rhetoric but not reality (McCain), or the snake oil of messianic hope that "dazzles" crowds even as it arouses "skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media" (Krauthammer). Victory after victory, eloquent speech after eloquent speech, Obama is now pilloried for a campaign that is supposedly becoming "dangerously self-referential" (Joe Klein). 

Puh-leeze! 

All of this is sheer rubbish. Not to mention disingenuous and false. Obama is winning because, for much of the past thirty years, the establishment hasn't delivered. His crowds are large and his rhetoric soars because he hasn't invested in the past and doesn't need to (and won't) apologize for it. Whether it's a war he opposed, a surge he knows is just a bandaid, or an economy that comes nowhere near delivering the kind of middle class created by FDR and his followers, Obama admits and tells the truths that the others either ignore or are partially (and sometimes wholly) responsible for. His rhetoric is compelling because it is real. The "solutions" Senator from New York cannot get traction because, in the Senate on the mother of all issues, she helped create the biggest problem we now have (in Iraq) rather than solve the one we already had (in Afghanistan). Ditto for Mr. Reality from Arizona. John McCain is consistent and has the courage of his convictions. But as George W. Bush has proved beyond any doubt, one can have consistent convictions that are consistently wrong. 

There's also nothing "dangerously self-referential" or "messianic" about Obama's appeal. For starters, it's hard to get a grip on what, precisely, this charge means. The rugged individualists, rich entrepreneurs and devotees of Ronald Reagan (messiah, anyone?) who make up the Republican Party are self-referential to a man. They just call it individual responsibility. They also think that is a good thing, one that more or less ought to be the foundation of most public policies. Barack is just stealing their thunder, the first Democratic politician since JFK to "ask not." When Obama says "We are the change that we seek," he's offering Americans hard work and responsibility for their future, not salvation. When he tells crowds that he is relying on them more than they are on him, he is repeating an old lesson in democratic self-governance -- that change comes not from those in charge but from those who are charged; that we get the government we elect, not the government we deserve; that the people are more important than the President. None of this is self-referential. It's the precise opposite. 

 No candidate has yet issued a bill of particulars against Barack. Hillary allegedly refuses to "whoop it up" Barack-like in deference to her ostensibly more honest and humble devotion to tough choices and real solutions. And McCain denounces Obama's speeches as "platitudes" masking as policies. Neither sound bite has touched the Illinois Senator. Today, however, Charles Krauthammer tried a different (albeit related) tack. He wrote: Obama is "going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war". Krauthammer thinks this "spell" can last just past an Obama inauguration. Following that, he foresees a "rude awakening." 

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Obama hasn't promised to heal the world with negotiation. He has simply made the unremarkable observation that the world has never moved down that road without it. As for entitlement reform, the solution has eluded Krauthammer's generation, not Obama's. The kids at his rallies don't think they're getting Social Security or Medicare, they do not much like that, and they know that, with two reforms (increasing the earnings subject to payroll tax and moving the retirement age up slightly) Social Security could be sound. The solutions do not elude them. Nor do the costs. They are willing to pay higher taxes once they become millionaires. And they know a war that is off budget and cost billions each week is a source of funds if only it can be stopped. 

 The gig may not yet be up for Hillary. She has an almost infinite capacity for survival, and she will fight to the last. It's also hardly up for McCain. He will be the GOP nominee and in November, he will be strong. But neither one of them will beat Barack if what we've seen to date from both is the sum and substance of their argument against him. Anyone who wants 10-point plans on everything from health care to entitlement reform to Iraq can get it from any of these candidates. Just go to their websites. It's all there. All the reality, all the solutions, all the policy you could want. Obama's is no less detailed than Hillary's or McCain's. And if the websites are not sufficient, just replay the debates -- 18 of them with Barack and Hillary on the stage, covering the policy waterfront, which is why everyone now knows that he's for universal access and she's for a universal mandate. It's as real as it gets. 

But my wife -- who was the Legislative Director for a senior Congressman in the '80s and early '90s and has worked a half dozen campaigns -- says none of that will ultimately matter. And she may be right. 

Because while they keep telling us what they will do, Barack Obama keeps telling us what we can do.

CHEATER

CHEATER 

Hillary Clinton just lost my vote. 

Mrs. Clinton went to Florida last night to celebrate a victory that wasn't. More importantly, she went to Florida last night to proclaim a victory that she had no right to proclaim and should be embarrassed to assert. But that didn't stop her. 

Hillary is a cheater, pure and simple. I grew up on the streets and neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Cheating was not tolerated, not even by six year olds. We had no umpires or referees in our choose up stickball, punchball and touch football games. So if you were out on a close play at second or clearly caught a pass out of bounds (which was the sidewalk), you admitted it. Maybe, just to save a little face, you argued the call a bit or on a close play sought a second opinion from the shortstop (especially if he was your best friend, or better, a relative). But you didn't just stand on second base and assert your claim oblvious to the rules we had all agreed upon. You didn't try to move the line of scrimmage up to the place where you caught the out of bounds pass. 

But that's not Hillary. The rules for her apparently changed last Tuesday when Obama walloped her in the South Carolina primary. Desperation set in. She had to find a venue for victory to erase the sting of defeat. And she had to do it before Super Tuesday. So she chose Florida's faux primary and then imported an ersatz crowd to a ballroom off the interstate for a pseudo-victory speech. 

Although Hillary's face was straight, that was all that was straight about her performance last night. Months ago, she and the other Democratic candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida after that state changed its scheduled primary election date in violation of the calendar set by the Democratic National Committee and agreed to by all the candidates. Because of this conduct, none of Florida's would be delegates will be counted in the presidential balloting at the national convention this coming summer in Denver. Thus, the voting that occurred yesterday was for naught. Not a single delegate was chosen. There also was no campaign in Florida. No direct mail, no stump speeches, no debates, no rallies. No CNN, MSNBC, Fox, media hordes or other media big feet. And no delegates, the coin of the realm in nominating presidential candidates. Hell, the best evidence that there was absolutely no campaign in Florida is that Bill Clinton -- a human GPS when it comes to injecting himself into one of his wife's political contests -- was never anywhere near the place. 

But Hillary appeared last night anyway, a sort of political Caesar crossing an ethical Rubicon. She claimed that she was not violating the rules because she showed up after the election had ended and thus had not "campaigned" in the state in violation of her agreement not to do so. So what? The point is not that she showed up at a rally in Florida. It's that she claims to have won a contest that never existed and that she promised not to undertake. It's also that she now plans to have Florida delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention, presumably to vote for her. If she thinks either of those boneheaded plays do not amount to a broken promise, maybe it's because she is being advised by the master hairsplitter himself, the conjugator-in-chief. 

Given the obvious backdrop of dishonesty, Hillary's "victory" rally was itself a flop. The crowd was bussed in. The speech was flat. Even her thank you didn't cut it, probably because, as one voter remarked after the fact, the "vote" might well have come out differently had there been a real election campaign. She touts her four victories to date as evidence of strength going into next week's "national" primary. But two of them, Michigan and now Florida, were in contests that didn't count against either no-shows (in Florida) or uncommitted (in Michigan). Her answer to the politics of hope is the politics of hype. 

Unfortunately, however, the fact that Hillary struck out last night is only part of her problem, and the far less important part. On the streets of my youth, cheaters suffered a fate worse than death. 

They never got another game.

BENAZIR AND BEYOND

BENAZIR AND BEYOND

Less than a week later, it is difficult to determine the full impact of the tragic assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

The list of those potentially responsible seems to grow by the day, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to her political opponents in the Pakistani military and the Musharraf administration. Initial reports that she was killed by an assassin's bullet now compete with a supposed medical finding that she died from a fractured skull as she fell back into her SUV from the force of either shrapnel or the suicide bomber's blast. We will probably never know. The motives of those who investigate political assassinations in Pakistan are, to a man, suspect; much of the forensic evidence has been destroyed as a consequence of the immediate clean up by local fire officials; and the Pakistani government has in the past refused foreign forensic help from qualified scientists. That Benazir Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism cannot be questioned. But who or what groups or individuals are actually responsible will probably never be answered.

The tragedy of her untimely demise is matched only by the complexity of her courage. She was a conscious (and quite willful) paradox in action. Her western education (at Harvard and Oxford) was a counterpoint to her cultural moorings in a South Asian and thoroughly Islamic world. Her feminist commitment was as fervent as her commitment to an arranged marriage to a man she barley knew. Her inherited land based wealth stood in stark contrast to the poverty of her countrymen and women.

She preached on behalf of the rule of law in Pakistan but was held by a Swiss court to have violated the law on her own behalf. Though twice removed from office under questionable circumstances, the charge of corruption was not entirely without basis. She was imprisoned with her mother and father and in jail while authorities hanged her father. Her two brothers were themselves killed under questionable circumstances. And the day she returned from an eight year exile, she herself was nearly assassinated by a suicide bomber that killed over 100 of her supporters. That terrorist missed. Last week's, unfortunately, did not.

She did not plan a political career and did not want her children ever to have one at all. She wanted for them a safety she never demanded or expected for herself. She became a politician by accident and thus acquired that ineffable quality all non-accidental politicians covet -- what we, on this side of the world, in our media driven culture, call authenticity.

She would not have used that word. Her politics was complicated and complex. She truly respected the cultural and religious traditions of her land, which were her own as well, even as she led Pakistan through its own modernist emergence. On the occasion of her arranged marriage, she told reporters that she did not expect westerners to understand. I do not think she expected us to understand her politics either. It bridged the contradictions she lived and witnessed.

At the time of her death, the Bush administration was still trying to fashion an unlikely coalition, marrying her democratic bona fides to Musharraf's militaristic stability. The likelihood that such a marriage would ever work was probably always remote. It is now remoter still.

At some level, the US is still MIA in that part of the world. Our Iraqi mis-adventure poisons many wells, but none more than the well of democracy, such as it is, in a place called Pakistan. We had legitimacy, buckets of it, in the wake of 9/11. No one, not even the Pakistanis, questioned our right to go into Afghanistan and clean it out of AL Qaeda and Taliban, and had we remained focused there, we might have succeeded. We certainly might have captured bin Laden, and we would have been able to stop the Taliban from re-emerging and taking refuge in the remote tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But we didn't. Instead, we fought a war that needed no fighting, against an enemy that did not exist, in a country that was neither attacking us nor funding those who would. We fought a war planned at the desks of a handful of neo-cons long ago, and long before 9/11. And we fought a war that those same neo-cons did an abysmal job of planning. It's usually a bad sign when you declare victory before it has been won, but that happened in Iraq too.

The list of mistakes in Mesopatamia is long and painful. Unilateralism. No WMD. A silly coalition of the willing that was always small and has grown even smaller still over time. Insufficient troops. An inept Coalition Provisional Authority. De-baathification, which destroyed Iraq's administrative apparatus, and torture, which destroyed our own integrity. Ignored or minimized sectarian conflict. Until recently, not even a reasonable counter-insurgency strategy . And even today, an unwillingness to level with the American people.

Now we can add Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto to the list. Our Iraqi mistake did not kill her. But it sure did not help either.