Much remains up in the air as I write this: Will the Bush administration barrel forward with its Iraq invasion timeline in the face of international opposition and domestic uncertainty? If it does, is the war a blitzkrieg or a quagmire? Either way, does the U.S. have the will or the interest to commit long-term resources to rebuilding Iraq afterwards?

One thing, however, is now beyond dispute: President Bush has shattered whatever popular consensus he forged or inherited in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The press, which tends to discard conventional wisdom only slowly and under duress, is still suffering a hangover from the grim autumn days of 2001 — a notion that Bush has achieved wide popularity and deep respect as a leader able to pull the nation together at a moment of crisis. One look at the latest polls shows just how fully that vision of Bush now lies in ruins.

The New York Times/CBS poll released today show’s Bush’s approval ratings now down to almost exactly where they stood before 9/11 — a moment, let’s remember, when the Bush presidency seemed rudderless and statureless: 54 percent approve, 38 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing. These numbers have dropped nearly 10 percent in the last week. Even worse for Bush are the “is the country on the right track” numbers: down to 35 percent “on the right track” versus 56 percent “on the wrong track.”

The other headline here is that, though the American public continues to support war against Iraq by about a 2/3 margin, and supports “the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq” 53-42, the majority also continues to feel that the U.N. and inspections should get more time: When the poll asks, “Should the United States take military action against Iraq fairly soon, or should the United States wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time?” 59 percent support the latter choice. (That’s 10 percent more than voted for Bush in the first place.)

Dear reader, what this means is that the majority of the American people agree with the “perfidious” French and Germans and disagree with their own administration.

Somehow this little fact does not bubble to the surface of most of the press coverage of the current crisis. The media are locked into a template established in the wake of 9/11: International crisis looms; President Bush proposes resolute action; the American public rallies. That worked in the months after 9/11 because the resolute action proposed (a war upon al-Qaida’s Taliban sponsors) made sense to the public as a response to the World Trade Center attacks. As Bush tries to repeat that performance today, the public is not going along — probably because the response does not make a whole lot of sense and does not seem to accomplish what should be our central goal, reducing the threat of terrorism and making the United States a safer place.

Now, polls are fickle, and one doesn’t want or expect a leader to make decisions based on them alone. But when an American leader pushes a risky and potentially difficult war, he needs more than a thin and confused margin of support — support that isn’t even really support once you look at it closely. That was the lesson of Vietnam.

Oh, I forgot — Bush wasn’t there.

Today’s NY Times features an interesting piece by David Sanger about the contortions the Bush administration is going through in trying to decide what evidence about Iraqi arms violations it can declassify for Secretary of State Powell to present to the U.N.. I can understand not wanting to reveal stuff from informants for fear of blowing their cover; but apparently they’re reluctant even to reveal satellite photos, because somehow they might reveal details about the satellites’ capabilities to our rivals.

So where does that leave us? If you can’t use the intelligence you have to sway world opinion it’s not much use — unless the world trusts you. And this is where the Bush team’s habit of twisting the truth has got them in deep trouble.

Things would be much simpler if we could take what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have to tell us about Iraq at face value. But their record — whether on the economy or their tax plan or the budget deficit or the environment or virtually anything else that’s really important — is awful. On subjects where we have good intelligence, we know that this is an administration ready to disregard facts and say whatever it thinks will sway listeners to its side. So on a subject where we don’t have good intelligence — like what’s going on inside Iraq right now — I’m afraid I must default to a position of distrust. That’s what Bush has earned.

Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

I’m not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I’ve had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush…

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about.

I have been scratching my head all afternoon trying to understand the latest wrinkle in Iraq-WMD rhetoric.

“WARHEADS FOUND,” screams the headline on MSNBC’s home page. The story page, slightly more soberly, is headlined, “Empty chemical warheads found.”

The New York Times, even more carefully, has a headline now that reads: “Inspectors Find Empty Warheads Able to Carry Chemical Agents.”

Now, technically speaking, a “warhead” is the part of the missile, typically the head or tip, that gets loaded with whatever weaponry payload the missile is supposed to deliver. So an “empty warhead” is not a weapon at all but a delivery system.

Presumably what has been found in Iraq is a kind of warhead that is specially designed for chemical weapons. That’s certainly worth paying attention to, and we’re told that the U.N. inspectors will next try to determine whether these warheads show any evidence of having ever been loaded with chemical weapons.

But in the meantime, the media frenzy conveys the distinct impression that today’s news represents a smoking-gun finding of actual chemical weapons — when the truth seems considerably more complex. But then blurring these complexities has been a part of the Bush war plan from the start.

Look closely — you may find “empty warheads” in the White House, too.

Confirming evidence that our government is now taking its rhetorical plays directly from the pages of “1984” comes with this CNN report from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s press conference yesterday:

The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction “could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation” with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday…. The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council last week that his teams had found no “smoking gun” in nearly two months of inspections but urged more “active cooperation” from Iraq. “The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation,” Rumsfeld said.

Commentary seems almost superfluous. Iraqis! If we find evidence of your WMD program, we will invade you! If we do not find evidence, that is evidence that you have not cooperated — so we will invade you!

What’s really going on here, I suppose, is that Rumsfeld never wanted inspections to resume in the first place, always wanted to invade first and ask questions later, and is now trying to exploit the situation by closing a Catch-22 pincer upon the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately for him, Rumsfeld’s contortions wind up painting himself as a purveyor of paradoxical doublethink more worthy of “Dr. Strangelove” than the real world of geopolitics.