With the 2004 presidential election looming, I find myself recalling George W. Bush’s mantra four years ago, when he was a candidate, about bringing honor and dignity back to the oval office. Whenever he lost his way in public speech, he would lurch back to his narrowly circumscribed comfort zone, no matter what the topic at hand, with the honor and dignity set-piece.

Four years later his folksiness wears thinner than ever in his struggle to keep pace with the script on Iraq. It is hard not to be confused, considering the tangled array of rationales for the war. The administration has proffered an assortment of expedient explanations for its actions, each delivered with impatient disbelief that anyone could question its univocal and inevitable wisdom.

Keen to codify in the American imagination the link between the Iraq war and the war on terror, the administration has attempted to discredit its critics and assuage voters. Thus Vice President Cheney, who took the lead in the administration’s exaggerated equation of Iraq and terror: In Iraq, we took another step in the war on terror; Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz: Military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror; Secretary of State Powell: This was an evil regime.... Hussein would have stopped at nothing until something stopped him. It’s a good thing that we did; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: This was a regime that pursued, had used and possessed weapons of mass destruction, twice invaded other nations, defied the international community and gave every indication that it would never disarm and never comply with the just demands of the world.

Why did we go to war? The administration’s answer has been a rationale du jour that reveals its disdain for the international community and for the very honor and integrity that candidate Bush touted. The link between terror and Iraq being tenuous at best, Donald Rumsfeld employs a favorite theme of the administration by justifying the war in terms of humanitarianism and freedom: Our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation. Amazingly, the administration position is at once fixed and mixed: we went to war because of the safety and security of the American people; to topple an oppressive regime; because Saddam failed to fulfill United Nations sanctions; to give the Iraqis their country back; to combat terror; to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East.

The last is particularly sanguine, if not delusional. Citing U.S. attempts to transform societies in Central America and the Philippines, the historian Paul Kennedy urges Americans to have some humility about whether a Western-led crusade for democratization is a wise policy...in this troubled region.

The administration, however, with the subtlety of a Bill O’Reilly or Michael Savage, scorns humility in American foreign policy as feckless and effete. The way to lead is not by example but by force. The primary tools of this leadership style are pre-emptive war and the rhetoric of fear, tools best employed with a black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us brazenness.

Nicholas Lemann captured the administration’s dangerously oversized optimism in a recent New Yorker essay: The President’s rhetoric divides the world into those who have passion and courage and those who believe in nothing except a self-defeating caution. The willingness to make the gesture overwhelms whatever difficulties there are on the ground.

Such difficulties multiply daily. To increasing numbers of Americans it has become painfully obvious that national security needs did not require us to attack Iraq. Yet, ever more defiant and unrepentant, the administration has apparently learned nothing from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Trust us, they said before the war, and Trust us, they say now. We know what we’re doing. There’s a lot you don’t know. The lacuna left by such unsatisfactory arguments is staggering to all but the most partisan supporters, who dismiss all criticism as negativity.

This brash and blinkered optimism, along with half-hearted and ham-fisted diplomacy, got us into the war; manifestly poor planning makes the prospect of a satisfying outcome grim. The president egregiously rebuffed intelligence that did not fit his assumptions, repudiating the invaluable knowledge of the State Department’s Future of Iraq project, and seized upon reports that did. Whether one believes that the administration has been more hypocritical or deluded, on what basis should we take seriously its future pronouncements or dire warnings?

Ironically and tragically, terrorists are the biggest winner from the administration’s recklessly overconfident foreign policy. As Benjamin Barber, author of Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, puts it: Pursuing preventive war at a growing cost in American lives and money against regimes the Bush administration doesn’t like or countries that brutalize their own people may appeal to American virtue, but it undermines American security.

The wishful thinking that got us into the war persists. No one is happy about this except our sworn enemies. Allowing arrogance to pass for leadership and fiction to pass for fact only exacerbates the problem.

We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

It is hardly a secret that the American Catholic Church is in the news for reasons other than the wonderful work it does every day in communities across the nation. The church in general and its clergy in particular are suffering terribly from self-inflicted wounds that, regrettably, have served the

I had a disconcerting conversation recently with a former therapy client who was trying to decide whether or not to marry the woman he had been living with for some time. The woman in question possessed all the qualities he had already decided were essential in a life partner—except that she w

Comes another autumn and nature’s reminder that life is most authentically itself because of its impermanence. The cycle is indisputably natural, and yet much of it is tinged with irony, especially here in northern climes. Trees lose their covering just when they seem to need it most, the loons take their plaintive songwhich would have been so in tune with the season of loss and longingand fly, the overabundant tomatoes we’ve hardly kept pace with in their September ripening die with the frost, at the same moment we regret having given away so many. Death is life’s opposite and enemy, but also its most defining moment. It is the cessation of life and a metaphor for the implacable threat to the fragile beauty of what we hold most dear.

Friendship is the instinctive and defiant alliance we form against death. When that bond dies, then, the loss is at once cosmic and profoundly personal. Over the course of the past decade I’ve been losing my best friend. I have been watching him die a slow death, and he has taken part of me with him. Physically he is as fit as he was when we first met 23 years ago on a fall afternoon, tossing a football on the Washington Mall and nursing beers late into the night, trading stories of Jesuit high school, sharing our faith and doubt, and sculpting our vision of the perfect woman we hoped to marry someday. What I have seen fade in him is not his idealism but an emotional and psychological hold on reality. At every step along the way, despite being separated for most of the time by continents and oceans, we have stood together and stayed inside each other’s mind and heart, supporting and listening and telling the hard truths that no one else could know or would utter. Then came the day when the very honesty that cemented our uncommon bond drove a wedge between us.

When it turned out that the choices he was makingspecifically, staying in a physically and emotionally damaging relationshipwere harmful to him, I said so. Ever since that day 10 years ago, our friendship has been a frustrating dance of truth-telling and recognition and resolution and denial; it has become a threadbare string of incomplete conversations around the relationship I think is destroying him. The honesty that had always been the hallmark of our unconditional love for each other became a thorn in his side, another burden he had to bear in a life that had spun out of control.

While I was relentless in my assessment of his situation, he wavered between resolve to save himself from further harm and resignation to make the best of it. Faced with a Hobson’s choice between no relationship at all and a deeply painful one, in which I either broached the unresolved subject uppermost in both our minds or else assiduously avoided it, I did not abandon him. Or maybe I did. Years of walking the line between honesty and compassion, between nurturing our intimate bond and confronting an excruciating inability to see my friend through a crisis, left me dispirited and depleted. While his insight into the reality he lived may have been clouded, he never lost his keen insight into my character and feelings, so he knew at every point exactly what I would be thinking and how difficult it was for me. Finally, at some point last summer my sadness became overwhelming, and I walked away.

Knowing that friendship without honesty is unworthy of the name assuages all too little my feeling of having lost a friendship when I could have kept it. If the past is any guide, soldiering on would have been a painful and confounding roller coaster. Arguably such is the test of a friendship, to be solid and steady ground when the other has lost his moorings. Tough love wore me down, though, and I became incapable of trudging along any farther under the crushing sorrow and disappointment his choices brought me. On some levelperhaps on every levelI sacrificed friendship for principle. There was a time when the concept of being true to myself seemed pellucid and obvious and meant everything, when being true to my friend and true to principle were identical. Not any more.

The choices we make, however inelegantly executed, demonstrate our demons as much as our values. A loss of innocence and a death, a lost friendship is a rite of passage. But to what? However measured and inescapable the decision may be, turning away from a friend is a choice fraught with guilt and self-doubt. Unless one sets out to be either friendless or without principle, being unable to reconcile the unambiguous exigencies of principle with the untidy realities of friendship is a failure, no matter how manifestly inevitable it may seem. And while keeping a friendship in spite of one’s principles may be a poor friendship indeed, there may come a moment when standing alone with one’s principles makes one wonder if the price is too high. For, right or wrong, when we turn away from a soul mate in dire straits, we forsake part of ourselves and are thus torn apart.

While certain that speaking and hearing hard truths is divisive but necessary, nevertheless as I survey the ruins of a once noble and beautiful temple, I ruminate: Am I the friend I think I am?

The secret

I used to like the idea of placing all people into one of two groups: the brave or the fainthearted. I willingly put myself in the latter category and therefore felt justified in not doing many things that only “brave” people do: being a missionary, going to jail to protest some injustic

A few years ago, the cultural community of New York worked itself into a frenzy when the city’s mayor denounced a piece of art he deemed to be anti-Catholic. The piece in question was a representation of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung and decorated with offensive images, designed no