If Bush and his top officials arrived on the Iraqi scene believing that the force was with them and only them, the last three-plus years have offered (if not taught) a rather different lesson. After all, they now find themselves in a roiling crowd of medium-sized and smaller states, stateless movements, and extremist grouplets, all passionately devoted to the same principle of force as them. The fundamentalist belief in force, once let loose in this fashion -- once (you might say) modeled by the globe's reigning hyperpower -- turns out to be a distinctly pagan faith. From the streets of Gaza to the slums of Baghdad, from the mountains of Afghanistan to Beirut International Airport and the halls of the Pentagon, this is a religion open to one and all, ready to embrace many contradictory gods into its pantheon.

And here's the irony. The hyperpower that loosed this singular round of force on our world seems strangely sidelined, while others move boldly to apply its most essential principles profligately, every one of them emboldened both by our example and by our dismal failure. Talk about Pandora's Box (without Hope anywhere in sight)!

What force has done, thanks to the Bush administration's utopian foolishness, is to tie the region's many competing groups, movements, and states into an ever-tightening, Gordion-style knot -- and that knot, in turn, has been ever more tightly hitched to the global economy, so that every tug on any loose end now sends oil prices up another disastrous notch and trembling stock markets into convulsions. (Call it stock-and-awe!) Just Friday, the Dow Jones completed a three-day, 400 point shuddering drop, while oil, not so long ago hovering in the vicinity of $30 for a barrel of crude, managed to hit a staggering $78.40 a barrel by the end of last week -- and remember, this was just based on "nerves," not on more oil supplies actually going off the market, as would certainly happen, one way or another, in a widening conflict in the region.

In fact, the oil heartlands of the planet look to be heading for further rounds of violence and turmoil and, potentially, the American and global economy with them -- and the only tool imaginable to anybody is still: Force.

The Bush administration had no wish for other tools -- that was the meaning, after all, of "unilateralism" -- and so now it has no other tools in its "arsenal." It lost most of its allies while in its unilateral dream-state. Focusing all its attention on the Pentagon and on military-to-military relations globally, it also lost whatever modest capacity might have been available to it not just to head down another path, but to deploy the most basic tools of diplomacy. What it has left is, of course, force; but its own on-the-ground forces are dangerously depleted and it's evidently no longer obvious to top administration officials exactly where American force (and forces) should be applied (much as they may loathe the Iranians and Syrians).

They launched a force party in the Middle East. Now it's in full swing; the club's pilled high with dancers; many of the exits are bolted shut; the bouncers are no longer at the front door; and, on stage, the performers are brandishing blowtorches, while the Earth's last hyperpower and its hyper-commander-in-chief President are watching, helplessly, from the sidelines. As Dan Froomkin, the fine Washington Post on-line columnist, pointed out this week in a column headlined Bush the Bystander, "stopping off in Germany on his way to the G-8 summit in Russia," as the Middle East caught fire, "Bush reserved his greatest enthusiasm for tonight's pig roast -- technically, a wild-boar barbecue -- bringing it up three times. ‘I'm looking forward to that pig tonight,' he gushed."

Conceptually, what else could he do but offer his support to the Israelis (with but polite demurrals about "restraint" from his Secretary of State). After all, what are the Israelis doing but fighting their own hopeless "war on terrorism" American-style?

As journalist Warren Strobel summed up the regional situation: "Virtually every president faces a plethora of global crises, sometimes simultaneously. What's new is that the United States' ability to influence events has shrunk, largely because U.S. troops and treasure remain mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Iraq war has diminished foreign confidence in American leadership, according to foreign policy experts and some U.S. officials." Former Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin made a similar point to Haaretz. "The worsening conflict in the Middle East is a blatant reflection of the weakness of the American partner,"

Everywhere this administration is being less attended to. Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives, loading their weapons, and preparing to smite their enemies, inspired by the American example, liberated by its failure.

Hair-trigger World

Oh, and while I've been mentioning the international face of the two-faced religion of force, I've forgotten to mention how it's been playing out at home.

After all, in the Bush years the Pentagon and the military have been fully elevated to the role of first providers (of everything) -- a role for which they are visibly unprepared. Nation-building and diplomacy have largely become military, not State Department, matters, as has intelligence-gathering of every sort. For the first time, a permanent, peacetime North American Command (Northcom) has been established for the continental U.S., while the military, not the civil government, is now to be the initial, and possibly main, responder in situations ranging from disastrous hurricanes to a potential Avian flu pandemic.

But for overwhelming force to be effective at home or abroad, it must be, in the minds of fundamentalists like, say, our grey and secretive Vice President, or his own eminence gris, David Addington, not to speak of eager force-hounds like "torture memo" author John Yoo or former Former General Counsel for the Pentagon William J. Haynes II, now up for for a federal appeals court judgeship, applied in a timely fashion and effectively. Democracy, officially to be spread to the world, turns out to be such a messy contraption in "time of war" at home. If you're a believer, then you don't want anything, certainly not congressional oversight or an informed public, to get in the way of that necessary, firm, and preventive application of force in a time of crisis -- and what time isn't?

Of course, what you really need to concentrate force effectively elsewhere -- consider this to be the unwritten part of the Bush Doctrine -- is a concentration of power at home in a single figure, not the President (a peace-time title describing a fettered office), but the President as "commander-in-chief" -- a military man, freed in "wartime" of all those nasty checks and balances, and so able to act decisively in any way necessary to make force utterly effective, whether in a distant, recalcitrant foreign land or in a nearby prison.

That summarizes, of course, the now-infamous unitary executive theory of government, a creative form of not-exactly-strict constructionism, which essentially was aimed at reinventing the Constitution (like the wheel), neutering Congress, and sidelining the American people in favor of… a single commander-in-chief preserving democracy for the rest of us as he sees fit -- essentially, when you come right down to it, an autocrat or king. And we know how our present commander-in-chief saw fit. In fact, he -- they -- came so very close, even managing to get two new justices on the Supreme Court who were, above all else, believers in the most extreme theory of the presidency ever proposed.