Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a column by Daniel Henninger arguing that the war on terror is going to be as long a slog as the Cold War, and that we’d better create Cold-War-style institutions if we hope to win it.

Even as the ashes of the World Trade Center were raining down on New York, the right had begun piling long-cherished projects — like the neoconservative dream of regime change in Iraq — onto the new war-on-terror bandwagon. The essential maneuver here has been to take what could and should have been a very specific war the U.S. had to fight with the people who attacked us — a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida — and expand its scope and definition. The first step in this process was turning the “war with al-Qaida” into the “war on terror.” Never mind that “terror” is a notoriously ill-defined word; never mind that a “war on terror” is a war without clearly defined goals or well understood conditions for victory.

That’s the whole point: First, declare war on terror; then, label whoever you want to fight as a “terrorist.” That lets you keep the war going as long as you want; that lets you redefine it on the fly. It also helps you distract people from seeing that we haven’t done a very good job of prosecuting the real, specific war on al-Qaida, whose leader we still have not killed or captured.

Back to Henninger, and his definition of our new Cold War-style destiny: “The threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.”

This is an extraordinary paragraph. Why in the world is Henninger resorting to such convoluted language? “The proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction”? Is that what we’re fighting?

Note that Henninger’s definition — which seems practically tailor-made to cover historical events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki — bizarrely excludes the 9/11 attackers themselves: Their weapons were box-cutters, and it took no particular arcane technical knowledge (beyond some basic piloting lessons) for them to transform innocent jetliners into machines of terrible destruction.

But Henninger has to write this way if his definition of the war on terror is going to cover the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. And we now know with near-certainty that Iraq had essentially no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Ahh, but somewhere in Iraq was “the technical knowledge beneath” such weapons, and in time that could be turned against us.

It’s a slippery slope, Mr. Henninger. Once you leave behind the clear-eyed truth that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. and al-Qaida is who we should be fighting, there is no end to the mischief you can get the nation into. President Bush cast us in a global war with the Axis of Evil; suddenly, thanks to 9/11, we were fighting Iran, Iraq and North Korea, too. Now, according to Henninger, we are at war with nothing less than “the proliferation of technical knowledge”!

Alas, wars undertaken against the proliferation of knowledge don’t have a very good track record in human history — just ask the book-burners of the Reformation. You could lock away all the nuclear-bomb formulas and recipes for sarin, you could shut down the entire Internet, you could plunge half the world into the Stone Age — and angry, dispossessed or malicious people could still figure out ways to kill and destroy on a frighteningly large scale. The real war is against ignorance, not knowledge.

So now we know how President Bush and the Republicans plan to spend their obscene $200 million uncontested-primary-season war chest: By repeating lies.

Today’s New York Times reports on the first Bush campaign ads that are scheduled to run beginning this Sunday in Iowa. Predictably, the ads extol Bush for his “strong and principled leadership,” suggest that the Democrats are calling “for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others,” and “urge viewers to tell Congress ‘to support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.’ “

But the most outrageous claim — one truly Orwellian in its rhetorical sleight-of-hand — is a line that reads, “Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.” (So much for all the claims Bush once made that he would not play politics with the “war on terrorism.”)

Now, there are probably some people who have “attacked the president for attacking the terrorists” — meaning, criticized the president’s response to 9/11 in going after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But there aren’t many. None of Bush’s leading rivals among the Democrats are among them. Nor are the vast majority of Democrats. When “attacking the terrorists” really meant attacking the terrorists — when it meant trying to apprehend the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden and his sponsors — America and its allies were as close to united as they have ever been. (Bush’s postwar failures in Afghanistan are another story. And bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. Wait — I hope saying that doesn’t count as “attacking the president for attacking the terrorists”!)

What “some are now attacking the president for,” of course, is not for “attacking the terrorists” but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq. The president’s Iraq policy is now hurting him politically, given the utter collapse of the administration’s case for the war and the continuing carnage in the post-war war. So the Karl Rove prescription now emerges: (a) Revive the lie that preceded the war — the equation of Saddam Hussein with 9/11’s al-Qaida plotters; (b) ignore the many ways it has been discredited; (c) repeat until re-elected.

Rove’s thinking is cunning: After all, if the pre-war bluster was successful in persuading two-thirds of the American people that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, why shouldn’t the Republicans keep playing that card for all it’s worth? Turn “The Terrorists” into an all-purpose bogeyman: The President is attacking The Terrorists. If you attack the president, you’re helping The Terrorists. Case closed. Election won.

The scary thing is, it has a good chance of working.

Far be it from me to insist that politicians actually take positions before the election, but now that we’ve made Arnold governor, it will be neat to find out what he actually stands for and how he intends to deal with our various crises. It’s a little disheartening that his only campaign position with any specificity was to promise cutting the auto licensing “tax” (really a fee). We already have a budget gap in the tens of billions, so hey, what’s a few billion more?

As a California citizen and parent, I wait with great interest to find out how Schwarzenegger’s approach to the state’s cruel budgetary quandary is going to differ from Davis’s. Schwarzenegger is about to learn that funding a state’s schools and services is a different beast from funding a movie production.

Maybe what’s actually happened is that we’ve elected Pete Wilson as governor and Arnold as figurehead. Maybe Maria Shriver will call in the Kennedy brigade. One thing’s for sure: Somebody better write Arnold a good script, and fast, or all that telegenic flesh is going to ooze off him to reveal the metallic exoskeleton of greed and power-lust that actually shaped his campaign.

For my money, by the way, the absolute best piece of writing so far on this election is today’s piece in Salon by Cary Tennis. Here’s a taste:

As the Plame affair rolls forward, we are seeing an interesting split in the blogosphere — unsurprisingly, along liberal/conservative lines. You can find almost round-the-clock updates and thoughtful commentary from Josh Marshall (the independent journalist) and Brad DeLong (the economist and former D.C. insider). DeLong leads the way in reminding us that this story first broke over the summer, that Bush had many weeks to pursue this, and in fact, rather than being eager to find out who leaked Plame’s CIA status, he has done nothing to find that out, and instead waited until the CIA forced his hand:

A lot of people find this story dramatic and important. On the other hand, you have normally astute conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh admitting that they just can’t get excited about it and will not be posting much on the subject. Ed Cone chastises them for this. To me it seems to be entirely their their right. Still, the story isn’t going to go away, and ignoring it isn’t going to make it irrelevant — it might instead make them (bloggers who ignore the story) less relevant. Time will tell.

Just heard the president’s remarks on the Plame affair:

“And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Taken care of? Isn’t that, like, what Don Corleone or Tony Soprano says?

Or is Bush covertly signaling that the leaker will receive a fat brown paper bag of unmarked bills if he stays mum?

OK, that’s pretty farfetched. But how did we end up with a president who talks like a gangster?

As the Valerie Plame leak story balloons from footnote in blogland to major scandal, there are differing perspectives on the seriousness of the thing. Jack Shafer in Slate argues that the story is unlikely to have legs. But Brad DeLong thinks heads will roll: “This makes it very likely that before this ends there will be multiple resignations either from the White House staff or from the CIA — and the fact that it is the CIA that has initiated this tells us where they at least expect the resignations to be.” Meanwhile, if history is any guide, the worst pitfalls for Bush lie not in what happened but in how the circle-the-wagons coverup mentality may tempt him or his deputies into new lies.

Quick recap: Valerie Plame is the wife of whistleblower Joseph Wilson, whose finding that there was no basis for the claim of a uranium connection between Niger and Iraq put the lie to a key plank of Bush’s Jan. 2003 State of the Union address. After Wilson came forward to say as much, anonymous White House sources fed conservative columnist Robert Novak the tidbit that Wilson’s wife, Plame, worked undercover for the CIA. This casual exposure of a CIA employee’s identity for political purposes is a crime, and has the intelligence community seething. Now there is a Justice Department inquiry — but how can an Ashcroft-overseen investigation be trusted?

Josh Marshall has blogged up a storm on the story since its revival last weekend. In August, John Dean offered a tough-minded perspective on the legal aspects.

Given the nature of the story, it’s been fascinating to see how lackadaisically the White House is treating this sort of national security leak. Here’s White House press secretary Scott McLellan’s comment from the Monday press briefing: “I’ve seen the anonymous media reports. But like I said, there are anonymous media reports all the time. Are we supposed to go chasing down every single anonymous report?”

Actually, that is exactly what members of the Bush administration have done in the past. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been a notorious hard-liner on leaks. (Just Google “rumsfeld leaks” for a slew of stories.) “They ought to be imprisoned,” he said about whoever was responsible for leaking details of a Pentagon war plan to the New York Times last year. “And if we find out who they are, they will be imprisoned.”

When we find out who leaked Plame’s name, will Rumsfeld stick to those guns?

I think by now most Americans fall into one of two camps: Those who have already concluded that the Bush administration was either lying or duped in its pre-war assertion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were an imminent threat to the U.S.; and those who don’t care, either because they supported the war on purely humanitarian grounds (a defensible and noble position) or because they are among the hordes of Americans who fell for the FUD about the Saddam-Al Qaida connection (a preposterous position).

For anyone else who is still patiently waiting to see what might turn up in the WMD hunt, the news today was not good. Someone leaked to the New York Times information about a draft of the report (now dubbed an “interim” report) by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector whom the U.S. commissioned to lead the weapons search. The Times story suggests that after four months the findings are still meager: no weapons at all. None. Some “precursors and dual-use equipment that could have been used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.” And “one Iraqi security officer who said he had worked in such a chemical and biological weapons program until shortly before the American invasion in March.”

With reports like this, no wonder the Bush administration is frantically back-pedaling on the significance of Kay’s work. As Josh Marshall points out, only a couple weeks ago Secretary of State Colin Powell was telling us, “I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one.” But here’s Condoleeza Rice on Monday: “David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports.”

It seems pretty clear now that, even if down the line Kay does stumble upon a canister or two of poison gas, the line the Bush administration fed the American people before the war — that Saddam had tons of this stuff, that it was what he lived for, and that if the U.S. didn’t strike now he would threaten the American homeland with it — was at best a mistake and at worst a lie.

If it was a lie, Bush should be impeached yesterday — but it’s next to impossible that anyone will ever be able to prove it was a lie. So let’s give Bush and company the benefit of the doubt: Let’s say it was a mistake. Maybe Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi told his American contacts that Saddam was sitting on mountains of bioweapons, or that he was this close to building nukes. That doesn’t exactly make one feel better about the future pursuit of the war on terror: It means that, far from achieving a new level of alertness and smarts in the post-9/11 age, Bush and his advisers remain stuck in the same fog of bad information and bad intelligence leading to bad decisions that was their pre-9/11 norm.

There’s another report circling the runway that might illuminate what went wrong with our intelligence back then and what we should be doing now — the big 9/11 investigation headed up by Tom Kean. Yesterday the Times reported that the commission seemed likely to suggest a major overhaul of the structure of American intelligence — something Bush has resolutely opposed. Is it any wonder that his administration has done everything it could to delay, dodge or downplay that report, too? Just as it has done everything in its power to block release of a previous Congressional study of what went wrong on 9/11?

A cynic might even wonder whether the Republican strategy is to keep kicking all these issues down the field — keep withholding information from Kean’s committee, keep labeling Kay’s work “interim,” and so on — until Bush is safely past Election Day. And maybe the only thing scarier than a first-term George W. Bush fighting for his political life by endangering our national security is a second-term George W. Bush who doesn’t have to think at all about winning over moderates, and is free to let his Inner Autocrat run wild. You can bet that, if Bush wins in Nov. 2004, we won’t see many more reports of this kind. After all, as Bush has said, “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” It’s good he understands so well the way power and information should flow in a democracy.