Christmas Critics.

Much of my reading of late has been absorbed in a game effort to keep up with the vast out-pouring of reportage, memoir, history, and commentary produced by the ongoing war in Iraq. This, it turns out, is a full-time job (at least), and I cannot pretend to have canvassed it all, but I have churned through a great deal of it. One book stands out: Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Henry Holt, $26, 424 pp.).

One of the few American reporters in Iraq blessed with fluent Arabic, Shadid, a correspondent for the Washington Post who deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, opens our eyes to the devastating consequences of the war for the people of Iraq and the complicated resentment that the American occupation of their country has engendered among those who have not the least regret that Sadaam Hussein is no longer driving nails into the skulls of leading Shiite clerics. Shadid takes his readers where other American reporters have not done: inside the apartment of a poor Baghdad widow besieged by American bombs; inside the stern rituals of retribution that govern the peasant tribes of the heartland of the Sunni insurgency; inside the explosion of Shiite piety that followed Sadaam's fall and the populist movement led by the uncertain but fearless Muqtada Sadr. And everywhere he finds an Iraq that is "variegated, contradictory, endlessly confusing," and, above all, "ambiguous." Alertness to ambiguity is not, of course, the strong suit of the Bush Doctrine, and though Shadid refrains from overt judgments, he leaves no doubt that this shortcoming is the nemesis of the American occupation.

Whenever our leaders see fit to put blood on the tracks of American foreign policy, I find myself rereading Simone Weil's extraordinary essay on Homer's Iliad. First published in France in 1940-41 and then in English translation shortly after the end of World War II in Dwight Macdonald's Politics magazine, it is now available in the estimable New York Review of Books Classics series (War and the Iliad, $14.95, 121 pp.). It is coupled there with Rachel Bespaloff's less familiar, but no less moving, meditation on Homer's poem, which she began writing in Paris about the same time and published three years later, in part as a counter to Weil's reading of the epic. Not least of Mary McCarthy's distinguished contributions to American letters was her translation of both these remarkable essays.

For Weil, "the true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force." And force is "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, force turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him." For her, the Iliad was simply the "poem of force," an "absolutely undiluted" spectacle of the disasters war wreaks. In it, "the cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised," and inspires "only regret that men are capable of being so transformed."

Bespaloff, a less famous writer and philosopher, offered a more complicated, less single-minded reading of the poem. Her hero was not Achilles but Hector, "the guardian of the perishable joys," whom "the zeal for glory exalts but does not blind." Whatever their differences, Weil and Bespaloff were agreed that force not only objectifies its victims in the Iliad but eventually undoes those who wield it. "Force revels only in an abuse that is also self-abuse," Bespaloff wrote, and "it becomes plain that Achilles is just as much Achilles' victim as Priam's sons were."

Among the critics of the more recent disasters of war southeast of Troy you don't often see on television, there is none finer than Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine. Month after month, his "Notebook" column in that journal reliably delivers a fierce, and fiercely comic, philippic against the dire state of our politics and culture. With the onset of the "war on terror" ("an unknown enemy and an abstract noun"), his bile and wit have risen nearly to the champion's level established by Mark Twain in the face of the American occupation of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

Though at his best in the essay form, Lapham is not too shabby at the middle distances either. His recent book, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (Penguin, $19.95, 178 pp.), worries productively over the muting of dissident voices that has followed the disasters of September 11. Although he skewers all the likely suspects (the New York Times, network anchormen, congressional Democrats, celebrity pundits), Lapham does not spare those intellectuals satisfied with "the corrupting consolation of cynicism," who, "finding themselves suffocated by a climate of opinion in which dissent was disloyalty and disloyalty a crime ... acquired the habit of looking at the national political scene from the point of view of spectators at a tenement fire or a train wreck." This detached attitude, Lapham admits, "is one that I've encountered often enough in myself to recognize in other people." We may be grateful that he has not succumbed to it.

Not the cheeriest of holiday fare, I admit. But let there be hope. Before too many seasons have passed, we may rescue the republic from its leaders and their timid critics. We may even realize that, as Weil put it, "the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul."

Robert Westbrook teaches history at the University of Rochester. His most recent book is Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Cornell).