But as in Iraq, force, or the domestic equivalent -- the "preventive" politics of fear, manipulation, lies, and secrecy -- proved not quite enough and so at home, as abroad, the President's foes in Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the courts, and elsewhere, watching the opinion polls, noting his faltering performance, absorbing the sinkhole quality of Iraq, sensing that this administration was losing its forcefulness began pushing back or paying less attention. In turn, as with the recent Supreme Court decision on detainees at Guantanamo (or the NSA surveillance issue), the administration has been slowly giving way, twisting and squirming, parsing words and pretzeling meanings as it retreats.

If your religion is force, then showing weakness, not smiting your foes, only encourages the look of a woebegone commander-in-chief presidency. In that light, the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision of the Supreme Court was but another blow to the President's unfettered self.

And yet old faiths, and the habits that go with them, die hard. When the Hamdan decision came down, the President's reaction was an interesting (if hardly noted) one. He immediately said: "We will seriously look at the findings, obviously, and one thing I am not going to do, though, is that I am not going to jeopardize the safety of the American people." The findings? Was he under the impression that a Supreme Court decision was like the "findings" of a presidentially appointed commission, like the 9/11 Commission, offering advice to the President to be seriously looked at and considered?

Then again, that was just his first reaction. With time and further thought, here's what he said about the decision at a news conference in Chicago last week: "I am willing," he assured the assembled journalists and the American public, "to abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court." He was now willing to abide… hmmm. If that wasn't the imperial commander-in-chief of our nation hanging in there, I don't know what would be. He added: "They didn't [say] we couldn't have done -- made that decision, see. They were silent on whether or not Guantanamo -- whether or not we should have used Guantanamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantanamo, the decision I made." Aha…

And, of course, the acolytes of his fundamentalist faith haven't exactly gone away either. Last week, for instance, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department's office of legal counsel. Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy asked him about the President's claim that the Court's Hamdan decision "upheld his position on Guantanamo."

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRABURY: It's under the law of war --

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRADBURY: The President is always right.

The President's record in the Middle East and elsewhere tells us otherwise, of course. From Pyongyang to Tehran, Baghdad to Gaza and Tel Aviv, smaller powers -- or simply parties, militias, or mass movements -- are going their own way, considering their own narrow interests, and exploring just how far force can take them, while ignoring the words of the Bush administration. In this sense, they learned their new religious catechism well: If you can't impose it on me by force of arms, then to hell with you.

So here we are armed to the teeth in a hair-trigger world with a bevy of angry states happy to declare their own unilateral "wars on terror" and pursue their own armed solutions. They've all got the fervor and the faith. As for the rest of us, who knows what we're sliding into or how in the world to put on the brakes.

Out of the last Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon came both the fundamentalist extremism of Hezbollah and of Ariel Sharon. Who knows what will come from this round of the same -- certainly, nothing good as long as force is the only ruling deity in our world.

Oh, and there's one fundamentalist character I've left out of the mix, someone who definitely bows down to force. Call everything that's happened these last few years Osama's dream. It's hard not to think of William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming," and then wonder: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.

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