By definition, victim rage is abandoned, luxurious, orgiastic: It wallows in its emotions in a kind of sexual frenzy. Not surprisingly, it rubs up against racism and tribalism: once all repressive constraints are thrown off, it is irresistible to indulge in forbidden thoughts, whose "truth" is only confirmed by the taboo that has been shattered. The usual litany: Black people are oversexed criminals; Latinos are lazy and stupid; Americans are corrupt, godless infidels; Jews are greedy and deceitful; Arabs are dirty, unscrupulous liars.

A tincture of genteel racism, usually though not always masquerading under the respectable cloak of a "clash of civilizations," is part of the crusade against Iraq. To describe this impulse as "Kill all the ragheads and let God sort them out" would be too simplistic, but a crude leveling impulse related to that kind of bigotry surely explains, at least in part, the inability of so many Americans to grasp the profound differences between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden -- or to mention the group upon whose fate the outcome of Bush's whole gigantic gamble may rest, the Palestinians.

The Bush administration's reactionary policies with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis have given this unacknowledged racism an official imprimatur. By framing the entire crisis in terms of Palestinian terrorism, rather than Israeli occupation and Palestinian terrorism, Bush has subtly equated the Palestinians with al-Qaida. In Bush's view, as in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's, the Palestinians have no history, no grievances, no claims of any kind on the world's conscience: Their acts of violence are completely evil, exactly like those of al-Qaida. All Arabs, it seems, must pay the price of 9/11.

Bush has done something no American president has ever done: He has pushed U.S. policy so far to the right on the Middle East that it is now virtually indistinguishable from that of Sharon, the father of the settlements, whose Cabinet includes Israeli politicians who openly advocate ethnic cleansing, aka "transfer."

That extraordinary fact, and its possible consequences, are only just now dawning on people in Israel and America alike. His empty recent speech about a Palestinian state notwithstanding, it is becoming more and more clear that Bush not only shares Sharon's vision of how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis -- slaughter and starve the Palestinians until they are prepared to accept whatever wretched Bantustan Israel offers them -- he intends to approach the Arab world the same way.

For those Israelis who dream of a way out of the hell Sharon and Hamas have led them into, the parallels have become too painful to ignore. In Ha'aretz on March 6, Gideon Samet wrote, "Sharon's continuing success also includes the enlistment of the American president in the cause to prevent any initiative for a peace process. Indeed, there's something hypnotic and almost horrifying about George Bush Jr.'s behavior. He's becoming a kind of American Arik [Sharon], leading his country, against stiff opposition, into a war for which seemingly there's no alternative."

An American Arik:Those words should send shudders down the spine of every American -- and every Israeli and every Palestinian. The nightmare scenario since 9/11 has always been that Bush, led by the rabidly pro-Likud members of his inner circle, guided by his fervent Christian affinity for Israel, plotting to strip critical Jewish votes and money from the Democrats in the runup to the '04 elections, filled with a genuine hatred for Yasser Arafat, ignorant of the history of the conflict, angry at traitorous, pro-Palestinian Europe, and supported by a public whipped up into an anti-Arab frenzy by war against Iraq, abandons the peace process and the "road map" (which last week he once again refused to accept, out of deference to Israeli sensibilities) and refuses to challenge even a single one of Sharon's repressive policies.

Coupled with the possible dire fallout from the Iraq war in the Arab world, this would have the effect of making the U.S.'s relations with the Arab world finally and definitively indistinguishable from Israel's -- an outcome dreamed of by hardcore Likudniks and their American supporters, but a nightmare for everyone else.

Despite these fears, and even accepting that Saddam poses no threat whatsoever to the U.S., the peculiar thing about the war we are about to undertake is that it could end up being completely successful and completely justified. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam is a worthy goal (unless we kill so many that the benefit is lost). The war could, as Christopher Hitchens predicted in a debate with Mark Danner, be "rapid, accurate and dazzling." Iraqis could greet us in the streets. And if the U.S. doesn't cut and run, postwar Iraq could become stable and prosperous, and help move the region toward democracy. The war might not serve as a recruiting tool for thousands of bin Ladens. The precedent established by the launching of a preventive war is troubling, but it could prove harmless. It might even deter rogue states from seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Despite the blow to its power and prestige, the U.N. could recover. Our allies could work with us again.

No critic of the war who reflexively denies that these outcomes are possible, on the grounds that America has ugly aims (or has an ugly history), can be taken seriously. Good results can follow from bad intentions -- and in this case America's intentions are not even uniformly bad.

But the war could also go completely wrong, in ways more horrifying to contemplate than it is satisfying to imagine the ways it could go right.

A reasonable alternative to war exists, and key elements of it are already in place. A beefed-up inspections regime should be installed, with a diminished but still significant military force offshore, paid for by the allies. The allies would reserve the right to use air strikes to punish Saddam if he fails to make sites available to inspectors or otherwise flouts the process. Recalcitrant neighbors like Saudi Arabia could be persuaded to sign off on using their territory, since the alternative is war. (The most cogent argument for war, Pollack's "The Threatening Storm," argues that containment has failed -- but Pollack does not discuss containment of this magnitude, backed by force.) This allied pressure would keep Saddam boxed up -- and could point the way to a new form of international conflict resolution along a kind of SWAT team model, stronger than police action but less catastrophic than war.

That the Bush administration is not willing even to try this approach reveals that it sees value in using its unparalleled military machine simply for the sake of using it. This approach may cow some potential rivals, but it will alienate more. Above all, it will open the ultimate Pandora's box -- war.

"September 1, 1939" is a great poem about history, a less great one about politics. This is why, in many ways, it sums up our present dangerous and ambiguous moment better than it did the aftermath of 9/11. For we have gone from being in a political moment to a historical one.

I use the words somewhat eccentrically, to distinguish between events that are simple enough to be fully explicable ("political") and those that are too complex to be defined ("historical"). The war against Afghanistan took place in what I am calling the political realm: It had a clear, limited and achievable goal, one understood by all -- and widely supported around the world. The impending war against Iraq, on the other hand, is a historical event. It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable.

The distinction also has a moral dimension. To exist in history is to have passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic: politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal.

The two great competing ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were both self-consciously historical movements. As Czeslaw Milosz brilliantly noted in his classic study "The Captive Mind," it was precisely the abstraction of communism, its claim to have attained the summit of morality and to have incorporated into itself all possible contradictions, that made it so meticulously horrifying. In similar fashion, fascism contained a kind of blankness at its core: the self-glorifying violence of the state simultaneously concealed and revealed the emptiness of its founding concept, the national tribe.

The lesson every government should have learned from the bloody 20th century, one written in blood across the tortured soil of old, very old Europe, is very simple: Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too abstract, too dangerous. Avoid men with Big Ideas -- especially stupid men with Big Ideas. Take care of politics: let history take care of itself. In a word, don't play God.

George Bush is a deeply religious man, and he deeply believes in the God-given mission of the United States to shed light -- Auden's "affirming flame" -- upon the world. But as we wait for the bombs to fall, we can only pray that he does not release darkness.

"September 1st, 1939"
By W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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