The talk around the Catskills these days is mainly about Bears and Bombs our native black bears and Bush's bombs, that is The first is the easy bit. After thirty days of ninety-degree heat, we have a moderate drought, and so our thousand odd black bears are leaving their mountains and heading for town. There they find backyard pools and open garbage bins and the odd morsel they can walk off with. Last week it was a five-month-old baby lifted from its pram and eaten. But according to our local wildlife control officers this was a truly exceptional occurrence. They advise us that we have nothing really to fear from the bears in our woods and to leave them well alone. Had it been the Bush Administration advising us, I imagine that we would have been told that regional threat levels were intolerable and that the only response was to shoot the bears and clear-cut the forest.

A more typical event is the weekly peace vigil held every Sunday on the Woodstock Green by Families for Peace where a dozen, second generation flower children and their kids hold up signs that read "Bread Not Bombs" or " Make Love Not War" to tourists up from the City. The slogans of these peace campaigners, of course, are older than most of them. Recycled from the Vietnam era, they were first redeployed last winter to oppose our Afghan air campaign against the Taliban and Al Queda. Apparently the argument that our Jihadi opponents made war on us in the here and now only to make love in the hereafter was lost on most of us up here. The Woodstock Nation still does not belong to Bush country - that only begins about five minutes out of town.

Down by the Washington beltway this has been a summer of "phony war." That's how the New York Times describes the media barrage that's preparing us for the next campaign in the War on Terrorism the invasion of Iraq. Since early July we have been treated to a succession of leaks concerning competing war plans, (Will we attack Iraq with 300,000 men in a remake of Desert Storm, or only 12,000 special forces backed up by a massive air campaign?) conflicting invasion dates (Is D-Day set for mid-November or is it March?) and alternative sets of alliance partners (Is Tony with us or still sitting on the fence? Do we go with Sharon and the Kurds or do we go ourselves alone?). Almost daily we hear bellicose statements from Pentagon officials that serve to rattle the nerves of the Iraqis and our European allies; hike up oil prices, and confuse the Congress - leaving the public in the dark about what our leaders really intend. It really doesn't help that the war talk is invariably followed by denials by "official sources" in the same news cycle. We find ourselves lost in a fog of disinformation.

The jest in the press is that the difference between the administration and its democratic critics is that the Republicans have a war plan - preempting Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - while the Democrats only have a plan for a debate. But actually the Administration has too many war plans, all of them available on line, and it's the Republicans who having the real debate about what all of this possibly means. Republican Senators like Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel have been flashing yellow warning lights, whilst Congressman Dick Armey, the conservative whip in the House, has denounced the idea that "We Americans make unprovoked attacks." In a sign of how serious the internal divisions have become within the Bush Dynasty, an open family feud has broken out between the foreign policy advisors of George the Father and George the Son. In the past week, the senior partners of "Kissinger Associates," Snowcroft, Eagleberger and Henry himself, have all editorialized in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post against the risks of regional destabilization among the Oil States that might follow from the administration's march to war. Junior's response was to send out Condi Rice to declare that we had a "strong moral case against Saddam" that she then failed to lay out

In short, we now know more about the President's daily exercise program (he and his staff do a three mile run in the Texas sun) than his real war plans, while the man who most people assume is really running country, Vice President Cheney, remains sequestered in an "undisclosed location" with only an occasional foray for a Republican Party fundraiser. The most visible spokesman for the Administration is our jolly "Secretary of War," Donald Rumsfeld, who can be funny but hard to read. Last week, for instance, he made a public appearance where he assured the troops that the President had not taken the decision to go to war with Iraq, and then added with a nod and wink, " but he's thinking about it." That's all we're left with, a wink and a nod. So much, then, for showing "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," or for that matter, the opinion of most Americans.

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