Allowing a clique of like-minded individuals to run foreign policy behind closed doors risks autism and loss of contact with reality. Right-wing ideologues who identify with the Administration fret incessantly about "moral relativism." But they pay little attention to the opposite and more treacherous failing: false certainty. The obstinate refusal of Administration officials to confess their mistakes, that is, their implicit claim to infallibility, has by now become a national embarrassment. It is also a slap at the Constitution, which established various mechanisms of self-correction (such as judicial and legislative oversight of executive action) on the premise that even the wisest men are sometimes wrong and need, precisely when they find it discomfiting, the benefit of an adversarial process.

The Administration's leading hawks, as Mann shows, have long been devoted to America's military predominance. "The defeat in Vietnam," he says, led them "to a preoccupation with first regaining and then maintaining American military power." They are also well-known for their scorn of arms control and impatience with what they considered to be Henry Kissinger's coddling of left-wing tyrants. Whatever the threat, they consistently preferred, and still do, confrontation to engagement. Speaking of Rumsfeld's tour of duty in the Ford Administration, Mann remarks: "As secretary of defence he did more than anyone else to block détente and to stiffen American policy toward the Soviet Union." Stiff-arming opponents has consistently defined their shared approach.

The principal architects of the current calamity, in Mann's account, are Cheney and Rumsfeld, with Wolfowitz playing a strong supporting role. Having treated Powell as arm candy during the 2000 campaign, dangling him before the public to reassure moderate voters, they quickly sidelined him once Bush took office. They have a reputation as radicals, ready to shake things up, with no reverence for the status quo. But the reality is not so straightforward. For they are also prisoners of the past, hostages to outdated preoccupations and to habits formed decades earlier, when they first wielded power. Mann calls them "backward-leaning." What he means is that these old men cannot stop fighting the cold war. Their struggle with the Soviets, moreover, led them to imitate the enemy to some extent, making them shockingly at ease with lying publicly for a higher cause, eternally ready "to galvanize the nation into rapid action before it was too late."

A few days after 9/11, Wolfowitz declared defiantly that "dictators underestimate America's strength" (my emphasis). This phrase bespeaks a dismaying numbness to lived experience. Mann refers to Wolfowitz as "the leading conservative foreign policy thinker of his generation." But with the country reeling, his immediate reflex was to strike a Churchillian pose, revealing his psychological, or perhaps ideological, fixations. As Richard Clarke reveals in his scathing memoir, Against All Enemies, Wolfowitz showed himself wholly unable to bring the new threat into focus. Faced with terrorists, he could see only "dictators." And this is but a minor example of a more general degradation of public discourse. The Administration's corruption of thought and language appears not only in its deliberate blurring of Al Qaeda and Iraq but also in its often-repeated claim that we are now engaged in "a conflict between terrorism and democracy." This is a highly confusing manner of speaking, because Al Qaeda terrorists have attacked not only the United States but also, for example, Saudi Arabia. Since Saudi Arabia is not a democratic country, it is impossible to make sense of the current worldwide struggle by depicting it as a war between terrorism and democracy. Those who describe it this way confound not only the public but also themselves.

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