Moments like the present offer a strange sense of suspension on the edge of a precipice. War is 99 percent inevitable. Yet I keep thinking, what if? Surely… But…

Forty-eight hours offers a million opportunities to leave the road we are on. But it is a road that Bush and Cheney chose long ago, and these are not the sorts of men to suffer 11th-hour pangs of remorse for unnecessary bloodshed.

The nation — and the world — know that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous dictator. The moral or strategic logic that makes this precise moment the time to depose him remains obscure, however. And in that obscurity we are forced back on the suspicion that the timing, for Bush, is a matter of political convenience (first war, then 2004) and logistical efficiency (can’t have a quarter of a million troops sitting around idly, losing morale). And those seem like poor reasons to begin dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people.

The president’s speech tonight, full of the rhetoric of “liberty and peace,” was suffused with an almost millenarian triumphalism, an attitude of certainty in U.S. victory that is no doubt borne out by the superiority of American weaponry and power and that, yet, to anyone with a sense of the twists of history, seems fatuously arrogant. War is rarely easy; the speed of the victories in 1991 Kuwait or 2001 Afghanistan was, historically, the exception, and there is no guarantee that every future American campaign will be as fast or as painless to Americans. Overconfidence breeds disaster.

When you go in assuming easy victory, even the slightest setback feels enormous. President Bush has not prepared the ground for setbacks; he has not assumed the necessary burden of wartime leadership, whether through marshalling support for his plans overseas or through justifying his policies at home. Heaven help him — and us, the electorate that did not really elect him — if the road is longer or rougher than he and his team promise.

He has offered us a handful of weak words in place of a persuasive case; he has shuffled from one justification to another, shifting goals as the diplomatic climate altered; he has resorted to half-truths and outright lies and insulted the nations of the world by providing evidence that crumbled upon close inspection; and he has utterly failed to play a strategic game that looks beyond the next move. In the name of protecting the U.S. from terror attacks, he is launching us on a campaign of imperialism; in smashing open Saddam Hussein’s dormant nest of horrors, he will spread the seeds of destruction to a thousand new plots.

These are not just vague, eve-of-war fears. In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

In an op-ed, George Soros argues that the Bush administration’s overconfidence shares the characteristics of a market bubble: “I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable.”

It’s not the war itself we should worry about, but the aftermath, Soros argues: “Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Mr Bush counts on. But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.”

Interestingly, this view finds an echo in an extraordinary, overheated, fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Oriana Fallaci, who thinks Bush and Blair are right to fight but that they (and we) may ultimately, like the defenders of the Alamo, be doomed:

Upheld by their stubborn optimism, the same optimism for which at the Alamo they fought so well and all died slaughtered by Santa Anna, Americans think that in Baghdad they will be welcomed as they were in Rome and Florence and Paris. “They’ll cheer us, throw us flowers.” Maybe. In Baghdad anything can happen. But after that? Nearly two-thirds of the Iraqis are Shiites who have always dreamed of establishing an Islamic Republic of Iraq, and the Soviets too were once cheered in Kabul. They too imposed their peace. They even succeeded in convincing women to take off their burqa, remember? After a while, though, they had to leave. And the Taliban came. Thus, I ask: what if instead of learning freedom Iraq becomes a second Talibani Afghanistan? What if instead of becoming democratized by the Pax Americana the whole Middle East blows up and the cancer multiplies?

It seems odd that only now, with a quarter of a million troops in the field and war hanging by a hair, is the debate beginning to turn to that ultimate question of any military conflict: What happens afterwards? Scariest of all is the thought that President Bush, who has so far botched the peace in Afghanistan, hasn’t grappled with it at all.

Last week I started getting bombarded with nearly identical e-mails about an Ohio congresswoman named Marcy Kaptur, who, I was told, ought to be ashamed of the awful things she had said — something about comparing Osama bin Laden to the founding fathers. Why these correspondents thought I should be apprised of Rep. Kaptur’s need to be ashamed, I did not know. But I had a pretty good idea: whenever this sort of e-mail bombardment begins, Rush Limbaugh is usually behind it. And indeed he was.

The record suggests that in fact Kaptur’s argument was more complex and historical than the dittoheads are able to comprehend. Douglas Anders of the Agora offers links and two commentaries on the whole affair. [Links courtesy Rogers Cadenhead]

Read “Our Idiot Ottoman Sultan Problem,” by Brad DeLong. It’s about how we pick our presidents; why we seem to end up with leaders who have little experience in Washington; and how that leads to a situation in which the ignoramus president “picks his initial Grand Viziers. Other competing Vizier-candidates are jealous, and work to undermine them. The Viziers in favor flatter the Sultan, and try to strengthen their hold over him. Disasters happen. The Sultan’s temper flares. A coterie around the Sultan decides that somebody has to go, and policy shifts as a new Vizier takes the reins…”

We still don’t know who sent the anthrax. We’re still not spending the money on homeland security that was promised after 9/11. But hey, when the next terrorist attack leads to the next round of finger-pointing, the Ashcroft Justice Department can proudly remind us that it bravely rounded up the bong peddlers so they could no longer menace us.

James Schlesinger is a man with a long pedigree of government responsibility (Pentagon, CIA, etc.) that lends weight to his words. But someone should tell him to lay off the Bard.

On today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page, Schlesinger adds his voice to the “Don’t waste any more time with the U.N. — invade Iraq now” chorus. But in his final paragraph he unwittingly likens President Bush to a murderous assassin. How’s that?

Schlesinger writes that “The sequence of events, over the last six months, raises the question whether the president was right to take the issue back to the U.N. rather than move ahead early with the support of the willing…. It raises, perhaps underscores, the words from Macbeth: ‘If it twere done when ‘t is done, then ‘t were well It were done quickly.’ “

Uh, yeah. It doesn’t require an advanced degree in Elizabethan drama to recall that these are the words of Macbeth, who is vacillating as to whether to go ahead with his plan to murder his king. The “it” in question is a crime, one that will ultimately bring down those who commit it.

Now, I don’t think Schlesinger meant to suggest that the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a crime that will ultimately bring down those who commit it — did he?

A quote is a dangerous thing in untrained hands!