maureen dowd is not my favorite person in the whole entire world. in general, i find her columns unnecessarily poisonous and a little bit...easy...conceptually. she tends to fight the easy fights with overwhelming force. that said, the column i've linked to today is a good one. i seldom read dowd's columns lately, but the title of this one -- "dances with wolfowitz" -- drew me in.

the point here is a smart one: engaging in war in iraq has always meant winning a war in iraq, albeit with a number of casualties. there was never any (or rather, never truly significant) doubt on that score. the real danger in the situation at this point is our propensity to be battle-happy. wolfowitz, cheney, rumsfeld and bush, i think (dowd thinks, too), would be overjoyed if americans became so desensitized to american (not to mention foreign) casualties of imperialist wars that the wars themselves became commonplace. the attitude seems to be, think of all the places we could invade!

dowd begins this column with a long quotation from _lawrence of arabia_: lawrence tells about the men he has killed, and is brutally aware of the fact that there is "something wrong" with the experience. that something? "i enjoyed it." the bush administration is enjoying it -- it rushed in, it celebrates its victories without regarding their human costs -- but it hasn't yet figured out that there's something wrong with that.