But you didn't plan for the divisions in that society being so deep. The country is steps away from a civil war that will make Lebanon seem like a walk in the park. Your armed forces are stuck in a situation where they are screwed no matter what. They are not trained as peacekeepers, and neither side trusts them anymore. One side sees you as the oppressor; the other side sees you as the incompetents who can't offer them any protection.

Mr. Bush, you've just asked Congress to approve a budget in the trillions of dollars, with most of it being eaten up by your Homeland Security and your non-war in Iraq. It's not a war anymore because you said the war is over, so what you'd call it now I don't know. An occupation, a police action, I've heard those words before even if you don't remember them being spoken.

While you were drinking with your National Guard buddies during Vietnam that's what they were calling America's last military defeat. Of course, this won't be a military defeat because you won the war, but oh Mr. Bush, you're losing the peace over there badly.

Why have you made the U.N. the enemy? You've convinced half the people in your country that the U.N. is against America because it wouldn't support your unilateral plan to invade Iraq. Why didn't it support your plan? Because it was afraid of what would happen if proper preparations weren't taken. It didn't want the horror that's happening now to occur.

What force in the post-World War Two period has had the most experience in sending people into situations and keeping peace? Well since it is the only one to even try it, the U.N. It has won two Nobel Peace prizes for their efforts, the first back during the very first implementation of peacekeeping, the Suez crisis back in the fifties.

In the eighties, the peacekeeping forces started to come under fire for their ineffectualness. Since most of this was being directed at them by the Regan administration, which seriously undermined the U.N.'s effectiveness by defaulting on its dues and demanding that the U.N. support American action unquestioningly, it shouldn't have been taken seriously.

But that was the first administration that had learned the real lesson of Vietnam and Watergate, how to manipulate the glamour of the office to influence the press and the public. Speak in simple, emotionally charged sound bites, which the press dutifully report verbatim, and it leaves no room for debate.