(Not surprisingly, a not-so-mini-version of this embassy is being built in Afghanistan for our other failing war on terror. In 2003, it was already being constructed under a $100 million contract with Halliburton -- which specializes in bases, prisons, and now fortress embassies for the Bush administration. Much of it is now finished, though little has been written about it, and it too, as someone who has seen it tells me, is an enormous fortress-like compound with very few windows (all probably easily convertible into gun emplacements), guarded by Nepalis -- wouldn't want to let the locals too close -- and well supplied from the U.S. right down to the heads of lettuce.

Of course, as the early post-9/11 adventures of our Vice President indicated, the Bush administration has long been hunkered down with a bunker's-eye view of the world through those gun-emplacement windows. For its top officials, the rest of the planet exists outside Green Zone walls, a place you never venture without your full contingent of security guards who shoot first, ask questions later, and never, never (unlike the Australians) apologize. Beyond those walls, it should never be surprising to find mayhem and horror on some version of the old American frontier (where you take people "dead or alive"), because out there is where you find the savages and barbarians.

The Green Zoning of History: One of the things you need to do when telling Green-Zone stories to the American people is "Green Zone" history. Historical memory (if you're not remembering the glories of World War II -- "'The president understands people's impatience…,' [Tony] Snow said on CNN. 'He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, "Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?" But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.'") is generally to be avoided. For instance, the history of American support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s would, in the pre-invasion period, play no part in all those stories about Saddam's "killing fields" and his acts of horror.

When our enemies (even if once our friends or allies) commit horrors, they are, of course, the brutes, the barbarians. In telling any such story, if the enemy is barbaric that automatically makes you "civilization." Saddam was a barbarian, big time (but skip the years when our satellites were helping him pinpoint Iranian troop concentrations to gas). Only last week, out in the Red Zone, two American soldiers were brutally slain, their bodies mutilated and evidently burned beyond recognition, and one of them was beheaded (probably after death); the bodies were then booby-trapped with IEDS.

As New York Times correspondent John Burns put it, "The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world." National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley offered the following version of the same: "I think it's a reminder that this is a brutal enemy that does not follow any of the rules. It attacks civilians for political gain, it provokes sectarian violence, and it really follows no rules of warfare. It's a very brutal enemy, and it's a reminder to all of us about what we're up against." And those were typical comments in our world.

Mind you, in Red-Zone Iraq, mutilated bodies -- including many with holes from power drills (very twenty-first century), often tortured, it seems, by militias connected to our Shiite "allies" -- have been pouring into the morgues for god knows how long. However, when a largely Green-Zoned American public is suddenly shocked by the horrific deaths of American troops and wonders what century the brutes we're up against are really in, it helps enormously to lack all historical memory. I don't mean memory of eighth century or even "medieval" brutality, but simply of the last decades of the previous century when the CIA ran the largest covert operation in its history, aimed at turning Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam.

To accomplish this, the Agency entered into an alliance with Pakistani intelligence and the Saudis to fund a range of extreme Islamic jihadists, including one by the name of Osama bin Laden. They were to take guerrilla war to the USSR by any means imaginable and make them pay -- and that they did. Back then, hailed as "freedom fighters" by President Ronald Reagan and as a "resistance movement" in our press, our jihadis committed a wide range of terrorist acts (including using car bombs, bike bombs, wheelbarrow bombs, even "camel bombs," as well as roadside IEDs) -- and were hailed for it. Moreover, when they captured Russian soldiers, they made a point of torturing, mutilating, and beheading them. (Soviet atrocities were also legion.)

These were the well-funded predecessors of the jihadis (or in some cases, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, they were the very same jihadis) fighting us today. Now, they are the barbarians.

As a point of comparison, the same week those American bodies were mutilated in a barbaric fashion, reporter Ron Suskind came out with a new book, The One Percent Doctrine in which, according to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, he describes the President's special interest in a captured al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who turned out not to be a leading terrorist but a complete nonentity and literal madman.