Bob Herbert calls a surge an escalation (nice to know somebody is actually using the word) and then there’s Bobo nattering on about his snit. He must have eaten a bad cocktail wienie.

How long can this go on?

Saddam is dead. The weapons of mass destruction were a mirage. More than 3,000 American G.I.s and scores of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Voters in the United States have made it clear that they no longer support American involvement in this exercise in sustained barbarism. Incredibly, the U.S. military itself is turning against the war.

And yet the president, against the counsel of his commanders on the ground, apparently is ready to escalate — to send more American lives into the fire he set in Iraq.

In a devastating critique of the war, the newsweekly Army Times led its current edition with the headline: “About-Face on the War — After 3 years of support, troops sour on Iraq.” The article detailed a Military Times Poll that found, for the first time, that “more troops disapprove of the president’s handling of the war than approve of it.”

Only a third of the service members surveyed approved of the president’s conduct of the war, while 42 percent disapproved. Perhaps worse was the finding that only half of the troops believed that success in Iraq was likely.

The service members made it clear that they were not attacking their commander in chief personally. His overall approval rating remained high. What has turned them off has been the wretched reality of the war. In the article, David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, said, “They’re seeing more casualties and fatalities and less progress.”

In other ords, they’re seeing the same thing everybody else is seeing — except, perhaps, Mr. Bush.

On New Year’s Day, readers of The New York Times could see the excruciating photo layout of the latest 1,000 American service members to die in Iraq. As in all wars, most of them were young. Many of them were smiling in the photos. All of them died unnecessarily.

The war has een an exercise in futility and mind-boggling incompetence, and yet our involvement continues — with no end in sight, no plans for withdrawal, no idea of where we might be headed — as if the U.S. had fallen into some kind of bizarrely destructive trance from which it is unable to awaken.

And who is paying the price for this insanity — apart from ordinary Iraqis, who are paying the most grievous price of all? The burden of the war in the U.S. is being shouldered overwhelmingly by a contingent of Americans whom no one would categorize as economically privileged.

As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren wrote in Monday’s Times:

“The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment.”

There is no way that this can be justified. It is just wrong.

I’ve said many times that if a war is worth fighting the way to do it is to mobilize the entire country, drawing the arriors from as wide a swath of the population as possible and raising taxes on everyone as part of an all-out effort to defeat a common enemy.

This war is not worth fighting. And if there were ever erious talk about enacting a draft or raising taxes to fight it, you’d see quickly enough that the vast majority of Americans would not find it worth fighting.

There must be a leader somewhere who can shake the U.S. out of this tragic hypnotic state, who can see that it is beyond crazy to continue our involvement in this war indefinitely, to sacrifice another 1,000 young lives, and then another thousand after that.

All of the tortured, twisted rationales for this war — all of the fatuous intellectual pyrotechnics dreamed up to justify it — have vaporized, and we’re left with just the mad, mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter.

Shakespeare, in “Henry VI,” said: “Now thou art come unto a feast of death.”

We should end our participation in the feast of death in Iraq. It is criminal to continue feeding our troops into the slaughter.

If there were politicians here at home with some of the courage of the troops in the field, we could begin saving lives rather than watching helplessly as the Bush White House continues to sacrifice them. Three thousand and counting is enough.

And now Bobo will regale us with his “I have a dream” which, believe you me, has nothing whatsoever in common with Dr. King’s.

I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream that we are approaching the day when a ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush will make peace with a vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the
opposing party.

Furthermore, I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Hffington with O’Reilly.

I have my dreams, but of course, I am realistic too, for I am aware that at present there is no peace among the secluded island villas. I look out across the second homes of America and its surrounding tropical regions and I see polarization among the Kate Spade devotees and bitterness among the Rolexes. And I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife.

Some people believe that Pelosi is an airhead, but that is wrong. Some people believe she is a radical San Francisco liberal, but that, too, is wrong. The main fact to know about Pelosi is that she is a creature of the modern fund-raising system. Some politicians rise because they run political machines. Some rise because they are great communicators. Pelosi has risen because she is a master of the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising circuit.

Living amid a web of investors, venture capitalists and West Coast technology tycoons, she raised heroic amounts of money for the Democratic Party before she ever thought of running for anything herself. In 1984, she was the state party chairwoman. In 1986, she was the national fund-raising chairwoman for the Senate
Democrats.

Since coming to the House, she has discovered what many a savvy pol has discovered — that the fastest way to ascend in Congress is to raise a lot of money and give it to your peers.

She paid her dues selecting party favors, arranging seating charts (after that, legislation is easy), and laying thick dollops of obsequiousness on cranky old moguls and their helmet hair spa-spouses. She has done what all political fund-raisers do: tell rich people things they already believe, demonize the other side, motivate the giving with Manichaean tales of good versus evil.

It is no wonder The Los Angeles Times calls her a “rabid Democrat” or that Time magazine calls her “hyperpartisan.” It s not a surprise, as The Washington Post reported this week, that despite campaign promises about changing the tone in Washington, Pelosi has decided to exclude Republicans from the first burst of legislation — to forbid them to offer amendments or alternatives.

She is part of the clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas, causing upper-class strife that even diminutive dogs, vibrant velvets and petite salades can’t fully soothe.

It pains me to see plutocrats fight, because it sets such a poor example for those of us in the lower orders who fly commercial. It pains me even more because politicians from the rival blueblood clans go to embarrassing lengths to try to prove they are most authentically connected with working Americans.

Think of John Kerry visiting a Wendy’s or Bill Frist impersonating a Bible thumper. This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick.

So I harbor my dreams of reconciliation, but in the meantime, why oh why can’t we have a decent overclass in this country — a group of highly attractive dimwits who spread bland but worthy stability over our political scene. Why oh why do we have to have this endless canapé war — the people of the vineyard against the people of the ranch.

Why oh why is Bobo still in the Times?