It is wrong to say much of this tragedy is the fault of Iraqis. Prior to the US invasion, Iraqis were not massacring Iraqis. Across most of Iraq, Shia and Sunni lived side by side. They intermarried easily, with no bad repercussions. Certainly they suffered under the repression of dictator Saddam Hussein, but nothing like what they suffer today.

The reality is that the Bush/Cheney regime tricked the nation into becoming a terrorist aggressor, invading a nation by claiming falsely that it had, or was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the process our military became what it was allegedly trying to find: a weapon of mass destruction that has wreaked devastation upon Iraq as far-reaching and incomprehensibly destructive as any atomic bomb.

I have great sympathy for those Americans who have lost loved ones in, or whose loved ones have returned broken to them from Iraq.

But I do not want us to forget the incomparably greater suffering that has been brought on Iraqis in our names and thanks to our tax dollars and our political naivety and gullibility.

We now have a new, comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of the prize-winning classic "Politics and Vision" (1960; expanded edition, 2006) and "Tocqueville Between Two Worlds" (2001), among many other works.

His new book, "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism," is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States - including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Götterdämmerung are remote, but Wolin's is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.