America's Gone Mad

Since everyone else is linking to this John le Carré piece from the London Times, I might as well, too. It is a revised and expanded version of an essay I posted yesterday.

"America," le Carré writes, "has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War." The fact that "Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history."