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For a supposedly "liberal" newspaper, the Washington Post sure trots quite a coterie of right-wing op-ed writers across its masthead these days. Of late, the Post has also come out in favor of war with Iraq. But I guess this shouldn't be too surprising. Those who remember the independent Post of yesteryear — the one that uncovered Watergate — doubtless have trouble recognizing today's capital paper. Now part of a corporate behemoth that involves Newsweek magazine as well as MSNBC, My Washington Post Version 2.0 is every bit as amenable to public relations pressure as CNN, USA Today, or any other arm of the media conglomerate.

And what a lot of pressure there's been, lately. A PR blitz has swept the US, all part of the Bush administration's effort to wheel and deal its way toward a green light for a deliciously profitable new war. Talking heads hustle from one Sunday talk show to the next, we are treated to the most panicky State of the Union speech in living memory, and administration officials from Paul Wolfowitz to Colin Powell are placed before gaggles of accommodating reporters, where they warn us that Western civilization is likely to come to a fiery end if we don't let the administration whack Saddam Hussein, and fast.

The Post has been helpfully contributing to this PR barrage. Typical of the newspaper's recent mood is Michael Kelly's frothing vituperation "Marching With Stalinists", which blighted its pages four days after the 18 January 2003 peace protests in Washington, D.C.

In "Stalinists," Mr. Kelly climbs over George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Novak and sundry other hard-liners to fling bitter bile at the growing antiwar movement. His main way of doing this is to associate International A.N.S.W.E.R. and other protest participants (including, I assume, the various combat-veteran and church groups that took part) with authoritarian Communism. He cites not a single document or quote to support his claim, but no matter. As the hawk contingent continues to roam freely and more or less unopposed over the mainstream American media circuit, such right-wing conspiracy theories of Cold War vintage are liable to get even more outlandish. After all, who's going to tell Mr. Kelly he's wrong? Bill O'Reilly?

In a similar anti-antiwar polemic for the previous day's Post, fellow columnist Richard Cohen expresses confusion over an article by John le Carre, in which the spy novelist-turned-elder peacenik calls America's current state of psychosis "worse than the Bay of Pigs". Cohen hasn't the foggiest idea why le Carre would bring this up. But the Bay of Pigs is actually a pretty good example of what America looks like when it takes leave of its senses. This botched attempt at regime change in Cuba in 1961 came about largely thanks to Commie-spotting proclivities much like Mr. Kelly's, which gradually morphed into mass hysteria during the 1950s. By the time Castro came to power, many rightists were seeing subversive Communist agents everywhere, except perhaps in their morning coffee.

But Mr. Cohen doesn't get it. "Maybe le Carre means the Cuban missile crisis," he says. He goes on to protest when le Carre compares today's America with that of Joe McCarthy's time — but in the process he makes le Carre's point, calling the novelist "pernicious" and "anti-American." Such House of Un-American Activities Committee-like epithets are hot items these days; they're helpful when you want to tar a critic of US foreign policy without addressing any of his or her concerns.

Le Carre's worries, though, are worth taking more seriously than this. After all, it's impossible to wonder why Iraq, why now, without mentioning many of the issues he catalogs; such as the administration's cozy relationship with the industries that will profit from Bush's war, and the US government's curious history of support for Hussein and regimes that rival his abysmal human rights record.

According to Cohen, such issues are beside the most important point: the looming threat from Iraq and North Korea, on which we must be continually fixated. Nowhere does he mention that Iraq has been starving under sanctions for 12 years, or that North Korea's $22 billion GDP is significantly less than Rhode Island's. "If there is an argument to be made against a war with Iraq," he writes, "then what is it?" Le Carre's refusal to answer this question, Cohen insists, signals "the intellectual collapse of what is called the antiwar movement." According to him, the left has "simply stopped thinking" because antiwar activists, by and large, do not indulge the current vogue to obsess over Iraq and overlook everything else — including the conduct of Cohen's, and my own, government.

On this topic, Mr. Cohen makes only one observation. "What's truly disturbing," he explains, is that "le Carre's America is unrecognizable to me." Well, at least we can all agree on something. To anyone weaned on American history textbooks, there is indeed little to recognize in the nation le Carre describes. In school I learned about the flag that guided George Washington across the Delaware River to do battle with the Crown, but now I look on — kept, along with the rest of the nation's taxpayers, at a discreet distance — as Old Glory flies over the palaces of a naked empire.

While the presidential mansion in the nation's capital was gradually being ringed in concrete jersey walls and armed police during the 1990s, the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld were elsewhere busily formalizing the global pre-eminence of American firepower in their defense policy reviews. Now, any nation with the hubris to build up an army that could potentially rival the US — theoretically, somehow, someday — is subject to unprovoked attack. Cohen quotes le Carre, who describes the war on Iraq as a "colonialist adventure". Cohen calls this a "rant". But these days, US policymakers' designs on world supremacy are in fact a lamentable matter of public record.

This isn't the only thing I have trouble recognizing. Among those raised to value the individual's claim on privacy and freedom, who foresaw that the American public would one day cast off its Fourth Amendment rights with hardly a whimper? Because of the USA PATRIOT and Homeland Security acts, the property of American citizens is now subject to "sneak-and-peek" clandestine searches without their knowledge. An ever more right-wing court system has taken to throwing three-time shoplifters in prison for life, and has deemed it acceptable for the police to use thermal imaging to peer inside your home. As I write this, meanwhile, the Beacon of the Free World is holding captives incognito in Guantanamo Bay, outside any system of accountability or rule of law.

In my high-school textbook, America fought its wars with basic respect for human decency and international standards, even when its enemies lapsed into atrocity. But in the real world, faith is now all that separates the US from a totalitarian regime. We can only hope nothing too sickening is going on at Camp X-Ray; pictures of blindfolded prisoners strapped to canvas gurneys do not help in this hope.

Neither does the fact that America's military partner in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, "stores" its POWs in unventilated, coffin-sized metal boxes and is dogged by allegations that it engages in systematic rape. The History Channel would have us believe in an America that picks its allies with greater care than this: standing alongside Churchill's determined Britain, dying on the beach at Normandy to aid the courageous French underground, supporting postwar Germany and Nelson Mandela's South Africa in their struggles toward democracy.

But the America I see on the evening news teams, instead, stands with a nationalist military government in Pakistan, while our long-standing friendships in western Europe are left to wilt. When the administration tries to use South Africa in an argument for war, Mandela retorts that Bush "wants to plunge the world into holocaust".

That's not all. About a year ago, the FBI was hammering out the details of a process for lending the bureau's prisoners to countries where torture is legal. Meanwhile, lawyer Alan Dershowitz did the talk-show rounds with an argument designed to make such practices seem more acceptable here at home. He accomplished this using a hypothetical situation straight out of Die Hard: With a Vengeance: If a terrorist had set up a nuke to explode in a major city, says Dershowitz, surely we'd be okay with torturing him to learn what he knew (5).

Which torture methods would we use? Dershowitz isn't terribly specific on this, so we're free to let our imaginations roam; the possibilities are endless once the gloves come off. Prolonged, sub-lethal electrocution, say. Or mind-ravaging drugs like BZ, a little-known DoD concoction that sparks panic and delirium and doesn't wear off for three days.

Do I recognize this? No. My guess is Mr. Cohen doesn't, either. But it's easy and natural to turn away from such troubling things, and instead believe in the Hollywood fable cooked up for cable news: heroic, straight-talking President confronts Rogue Madman in a high-tech conflict directed against people halfway across the world — people about whom most Americans are pretty uninformed. Le Carre conjures the picture of a father putting his daughter to bed, sometime in the perpetual-war future being shaped for us in the US. She wonders whom our bombs are killing. "Nobody you know, darling," is the answer. "Just foreign people."

If the administration is allowed to go ahead with its bloody invasion of Iraq, such scenes as le Carre describes are likely to play out in many American homes. The alternative is just too hard to bear. How do you explain to your child that her government is about to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians — among them other kids, like her — on pretexts having less to do with evidence than the well-financed exploitation of fear?

In spite of this, le Carre's pessimism isn't quite as well founded today as it was when his article was written — and I bet he knows it, and is glad of it. He glumly asserts that 88% of Americans support the unilateral invasion of Iraq, but the polls actually show that the public is waxing much more ambivalent. The persistent peace demonstrations that Cohen and Kelly so detest are another reason to hold out greater hope than le Carre could when he put pen to paper.

This is why Mary McGrory, another Post writer, is much lonelier on her newspaper's pages than in her city's streets. Above Cohen's attack on le Carre and George Will's umpteenth pro-war column, to the left of a highlighted piece by Robert Novak, McGrory tells of a peace march much different from the one we usually hear about in the Post, or on CNN. In place of "Stalinists" she describes September 11 families, church council representatives, college students with a passion for social justice, all of whom converged on the US capital in search of an alternative to what they're being given. Among the demonstrators McGrory mentions is Andrea LeBlanc, widowed in the attack on Manhattan, who first found solace from her grief in the "river of peaceful people" on the Washington mall.