The U.S., in short, is "the essential defender of today's global security order." Allies are unnecessary; world opinion is irrelevant; potential competitors must be crushed early. And, in the eeriest moment in the report, it imagines "some catastrophic event," a "new Pearl Harbor," that will be the catalyst for the U.S. to decisively launch its new Pax. (Small wonder that, on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld insisted we immediately invade Iraq and, shortly after, Condoleezza Rice convened senior members of the National Security Council to ask them to "think about ‘How do you capitalize on these opportunities?'" )

The Sleeper Cell has awoken. After successfully engineering a judicial coup d'etat to install their genial figurehead as President, they now control the U.S. government. Led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, Khalilzad is Ambassador to Afghanistan, Libby is Cheney's chief of staff, Abrams (after having been disgraced in the Iran-contra scandal, and after years campaigning for a law to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in every government building) is now chief White House adviser on the Middle East. A half-dozen others from PNAC hold important posts in the Defense and State departments. Their goal has been cheerfully described by Condoleezza Rice (who believes that Bush is "someone of tremendous intellect"): "American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest. There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect." Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, is more honest: "This is total war... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

In ways that Ronald Reagan would envy, the Sleeper Cell is masterful at manipulating the new forms of mass media, particularly the hyperbolic television news and radio talk shows. It officially began the rhetorical invasion of Iraq precisely on September 1 (in the words of Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, "You don't launch a new product in August") and was relentless in creating frightening stories until the November elections. Endless reports of atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein (some of them, of course, true) were combined with assertions that, as Rumsfeld put it, there is "bulletproof evidence" linking Saddam and al-Qaeda (none of which has ever been produced), which in turn were combined with frequent warnings from Ashcroft and the FBI and the CIA of new "spectacular attacks" from al-Qaeda "that meet several criteria: high symbolic value, mass casualties, severe damage to the American economy and maximum psychological trauma."

It is dizzying trying to keep up with the news, to remember what happened the day before—which is precisely their intention—but let two examples suffice: In December, a few days after Iraq turned over a 12,000-page list of their weapons to the U.N.—an act first demanded by the White House, and then ridiculed when Iraq complied—the media were suddenly flooded with a story that Iraq had given al-Qaeda the nerve gas VX, an odorless, colorless oil that causes death in minutes. This story, needless to say, fit all the criteria for sensational news: Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, gruesome death, and terrorist threat. A few days later, those omnipresent and anonymous "senior officials" were telling CNN that there was "absolutely no intelligence" on this matter, "zero confirmation of evidence." Obviously the story had originally come from the government, and it followed the classic pattern of what was, during the Vietnam War, called "disinformation": leak false information, wait until it has its effect, and then deny it, knowing that assertions remain in the collective memory longer than their negations.

Far more serious is the current frenzy over the possibility that Iraq will somehow release smallpox, either among American troops in the projected war, or in the U.S. itself through its imagined terrorist surrogates. This has led to the mass-production of smallpox vaccines—to the delight of the drug company executives in the Bush inner circle—ambitious plans to vaccinate the entire country and the predictable "lifeboat" debates on television of who should be vaccinated first.

The smallpox panic largely comes from the assertions of Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, that unnamed "intelligence sources" are "investigating" whether a scientist named Nelja Maltseva from the Russian Institute of Viral Preparations visited Baghdad in 1990 and sold Iraq a vial of a smallpox strain that caused an epidemic in Kazakhstan in 1972.

Dr. Maltseva died two years ago. Both her daughter and a laboratory assistant claim that she only visited Iraq once, in 1971, as part of a global smallpox eradication effort, and that her last trip abroad was to Finland in 1982. Furthermore, the Russians have always claimed that the Kazakhstan epidemic never happened, but was merely Cold War propaganda.

Edward Said attacked Miller years ago for her "thesis about the militant, hateful quality of the Arab world." Among her many books, she is the co-author of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf with Laurie Mylroie, who is the author of Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, which expounds the theory that Saddam personally orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—a theory that only Richard Perle seems to believe ("splendid and convincing"). Like almost everyone on the White House Team, Miller is associated with two right-wing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (the latest issue of its magazine features Oriana Fallaci on the "moral superiority of Western culture") and the Middle East Forum, which has been posting the names of university professors critical of Bush on its website. The Forum is run by Daniel Pipes, who is famous for his comment about the "massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene".

The general hysteria about smallpox, in other words, and the very real possibility of mass vaccinations with its statistically inevitable corresponding deaths, is entirely the result of unsubstantiated rumors published by someone with a clear agenda.

Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has created 2POG, the $7 billion Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, whose "super-intelligence support activity" will combine "CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception." Along with the usual boys'-magazine fantasies of high-tech espionage (including something about "tagging" the clothes of terrorists with DNA samples that can be perceived by laser beams from satellites) the "proactive" component consists of "duping al-Qaeda into undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby exposing its personnel." That is, encouraging terrorist acts that will provoke an American response. If this seems unimaginable, or paranoid, it is worth remembering Operation Northwoods, which the Pentagon proposed to Kennedy a few months before he was assassinated. The idea then was a project of bombings, hijackings and plane crashes that would kill American citizens and lead to popular sentiment for an invasion of Cuba. (Kennedy—even James Bond-addicted Kennedy—rejected that one.)

Around another bend of the Pentagon, the Defense Research Projects Agency has created the Information Awareness Office, whose mission is "Total Information Awareness" (TIA). The Office is run by former Admiral John Poindexter, who in 1990 was convicted of five felony counts for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra affair. TIA, according to Poindexter, will
create "ultra-large-scale, semantically rich, easily implementable database technologies" that will allow the Pentagon to access "world-wide, distributed, legacy databases as if they were one centralized database." Which means: every possible computerized record in the U.S., on which an individual's name appears, will be copied and collated by the Pentagon: credit card purchases, library books, police records, automatic toll collectors on bridges, university course enlistments, membership lists, and on and on—as well as all e-mails and logs of Internet surfing. They have received $200 million for a pilot program. Over the door of Poindexter's office is the motto "Scientia Est Potentia," Knowledge Is Power. (George Bush presumably being the exception that proves the rule.)

The Sleeper Cell has awoken, and there is nothing to stop them. The Democratic Party, afraid of being branded "unpatriotic" by the Republicans, has gone into hibernation. The tattered remains of the Left is—as the Left always is—more preoccupied with fighting among themselves. With a few individual exceptions, there is almost no opposition in the major media. (Powerful anti-Bush articles by, among others, Gore Vidal, Harold Pinter, and John Berger, are published in England, but not here.) The only forum for criticism is the Internet, which, though still uncontrolled, remains the one point in the PNAC program that has yet to be (openly) addressed by the Bush Team. As we enter Bush II Anno III, anger has turned into a kind of sullen resignation.

Perhaps the problem is that there are no words to describe this Administration. All the pejoratives, however accurate, that might be applied-- "warmongers" and "imperialists," "corrupt" and "bloodthirsty," "fanatical" and "criminal"—have been drained of their meaning by decades of propaganda. They are as banal as the rhetoric of the think tanks. Small wonder that American writers have generally been either silent or bathetic ("9/11 reminded me of the day my father died") on all that has happened in the last two years. We no longer have the words to even think about what is happening, about violence that is not "just like a movie," about people like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Ashcroft and Bush, who are not Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler, who are lesser forms of evil, but evil nonetheless. To begin to talk about them is to relive the old nightmare of the scream with no sound.