After the election George W. Bush was so obviously in the service of the plutocracy that he could have been mistaken for a lawn jockey in the parking lot of a Houston golf club.... On September 11, like Pinocchio brushed with the good fairy's wand on old Gepetto's shelf of toys, the wooden figure turned into flesh and blood. A great leader had been born, within a month compared to Abraham Lincoln.—from Theater of War

In the two years since September 11, finding skeptics in the battle against evil has been a rare achievement. Unpopular opinions seldom make an appearance on the network news, and voices of dissent have been few and far between. Lewis Lapham is an exception. Almost alone among mainstream political commentators, he has had the courage to question the motive and feasibility, as well as the imperial pretension, of the Bush administration's infinite crusade against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.