A year ago I wrote about an overtly crisp, autumnal September 10 that gave way to a blustery, cloudy September 11. The weather was a fitting metaphor for the occasion. Not so today.

Today it was just hot, a welcome little riposte of summer after a mild three months of abundant rain and sparing heat. Even if recycling the weather theme wouldn’t be tiresome, there’s just nothing there that fits our circumstances. It’s been an on again/off again summer in Iraq; no cool, damp respite there. Last week brought unspeakable horror to Beslan–call it the Children’s September 11–and I don’t know what kind of weather that could possibly be like. A hurricane? A tornado? Both at the same time, with an erupting volcano thrown into the mix? I have no idea.

Whenever I look at a picture of the burning towers (image courtesy of Fox News), I remember the way I felt that morning: violated, enraged, stunned. Utterly unable to believe this was happening. Stupefied that those two proud buildings that had stood there at the start of the day were now gone. I think the survivors in Beslan have some idea of the feeling: an inability for the moment to grasp how this could possibly be.

It makes a guy want to shout defiantly Never again! but I know I can make no such promise. A meek not since would be nearly accurate, but Madrid, Jakarta, and Beslan make it plain that now is not the time for any such bold oaths. As raw as these wounds really still are, we live yet with the reality that new ones could be opened tonight. We live one radiological suitcase away from our next unspeakable horror.

Living that life, but usually forgetting that we do, we are continuing a low-level war in Afghanistan and slowly making good in Iraq. Maybe we’ll bag Osama soon. Maybe the insurgency will die down in Iraq, elections will go well, and peaceful economic growth will take root there. Maybe the thousand covert battles waged every month will attrite our enemies to some strategically significant degree. And whether the admission appeals to your political instincts or not, maybe the results of our own November election will reflect our continued political will to finish the war begun in earnest three years ago today.

And maybe soon I’ll be able to get my mind out of the details and the policies of the war and get some perspective on the thing. Which would require it being, well, over. I look forward to that part, but for now, I am eager to see where we are in another year. This has not been a bad year, but the next can always be better.

You’ve probably read it, or at least read of it, but in the off chance you haven’t, let me direct you there now. It’s long–4,300 words long–but well worth it. A snippet:

Moore has announced that he won’t even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He’ll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that “fact-checking” is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers–get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let’s redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let’s see what you’re made of.

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It’s only a movie. No biggie. It’s no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It’s kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out “the youth vote.” Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a “POV” or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your “narrative” a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don’t even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft.

…

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

I don’t exactly memorize every word Hitch writes, but this at least needs to be read.

I think I have this Ahmad Chalabi thing figured out.

Before I begin, let me grant that he has been a controversial figure all along, loved by the Pentagon and hated by the State Department. Of course, this tends to improve my estimation of him, but then you probably would have guessed that. His past doesn’t matter, though; what does is the past month.

Rewind to two weeks ago, when David Brooks wrote a piece arguing that we needed to find circumstances in which to “lose” some conflict with the new Iraqi government. This gives the new Iraq the credible appearance of being opposed to American interests, which in turn devalues the next best anti-American option, the violent insurgency. By losing something, we win much more: popular support for the new Iraqi government and popular disdain for the insurgents–something I think would come naturally for Iraqis if they felt they weren’t cuddling up to America too much in the process. (Lametably, the Gray Online Lady is a bit hasty in archiving her columns, so you can’t read the full Brooks. The column is aready in pay-three-bucks-for-a-permanent-link mode, and I’m too cheap to pay it. However, the abstract is sufficient for my current purposes.)

So on Thursday, we bust into Chalabi’s place and break some picture frames and stuff. Iraqi judge Hassan Muathin insists the action was to serve an arrest warrant on several member’s of Chalabi’s entourage who were accused of stealing state vehicles. U.S. forces were reportedly only present as backup. The Coalition Provisional Authority makes it own accusations of fraud, extortion, and false imprisonment. Whatever.

Then on Friday, the Governing Council denounces the U.S. for the raid. Nobody on the Council seems to love Chalabi–who actually does, come to think of it?–but they seem hopping mad that we woke him up at an ungentlemanly hour and broke that one framed picture he had of himself. Later in the day, the Pentagon says they have an open-and-shut case that Chalabi has been spying for Iran. Never mind the parking tickets; this is serious, and we’ve got the pictures. (Note that Chalabi-as-Iranian-spymaster was not news as of May 21, 2004.)

So if I were a conspiracy theorist–and I should pause to remind the reader that I am not–I’d see an interesting chain of events here: an influential op-ed writer suggests we find some way to lose in order to win; we break into a prominent, but controversial Iraqi leader’s house and rough some guys up; the Governing Council gets all up in our face for it; we dredge up a month-old pretext of espionage. Does any of it matter? Probably not much. Chalabi was never going to hold significant office in the new Iraq anyway, since everybody seems to hate him. Did we look like brutes in the process, and do new Iraqi leaders get to denounce us for it? You’d better believe it. This stuff is solid gold.

If the whole scheme involved Halliburton or somehow reflected very poorly on the Bush administration, this conspiracy already would have been floated and discussed at length at Democratic Underground. Maybe it already has, but I haven’t checked. (I don’t read DU at all, as life is too short.)

At the end of the day, I don’t believe for a second that this was deliberately contrived as a means of answering Brooks’ suggestion. Even if in that case, though, it still might serve the purpose he suggested, which was a very good purpose indeed. This little chain of events could work out very well. Let’s keep our eyes on it.