This week, Seymour Hersh reports that, according to anonymous military and intelligence sources, during the run-up to the Iraqi elections, George Bush signed a "highly classified Presidential 'finding' authorizing the C.I.A. to provide money and other support covertly to political candidates in certain countries who, in the Administration's view, were seeking to spread democracy." The context in which this finding was made was Iraq and the political candidate who was supposedly "seeking to spread democracy," was none other than the Paul Bremer-appointed strongman Ayad Allawi, whose democratic record includes general thuggery, vicious crackdowns from the Iraqi security forces, attempts to intimidate and suppress the media, and approval of the murderous assault on Fallujah in November - although it's true he has shown no less respect for democracy than his successors.

It's harder and harder for anyone to justify any aspect of the Iraq war unless, like most of the right wing, he takes the position that facts don't matter or, really, don't exist. You simply can't argue that Iraqis are better off - the violence far exceeds that of Saddam's later years, unofficial militias intimidate everyone and restrict basic political freedoms almost as much as Saddam did, and, indeed many basic rights that Saddam guaranteed, especially women's rights, are gone now.

You also can't argue that the United States wanted any real democracy in Iraq. The presidential finding may or may not have been fully implemented and it certainly made little difference - Allawi's list only got 14% even in the official figures - but the intent to manipulate the election was there. And even the election itself represented a capitulation to Ayatollah Sistani, not any American plan.

You get the point. And yet, this same week, Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote an opinion piece in which he excoriates the Iraq war as an absolute fiasco but says we can't just leave, that we're "morally obligated" to stay until the Iraqis can elect a government and establish a "means of self-defense."

This would mean little - it is, after all, the conventional view - but Jay Bookman is the same man who wrote, in the fall of 2002, that the reason for the impending Iraq war was dreams of a new militaristic American empire and referenced the plans of the Project for a New American Century, at the time largely unknown but now a staple of left analysis.

Now add to all of this the analysis developed over the last few weeks in these commentaries, that the Iraq war is now significantly weakening American imperial hegemony, directly through bogging it down and consuming the administration's attention, and indirectly through hastening the collapse of the international legitimacy of America's role.