I am at the Aspen Institute along the Wye River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Think of tidy fields with picket fences, Georgian brick houses, placid reaches of salt water at every turn, great flocks of starlings on the mowed fields, bald eagles, neat rows of trees aflame in red and gold against the wide pale sky. The last time I was here–for an entirely different meeting–was May 2004. The Abu Ghraib torture story was breaking, and something about the classic American landscape and the bitter news from Iraq prompted me to write these lines, which came back to me today.