&#8220Grey’s Anatomy” has become television’s top show by transferring the &#8220all for one, one for all” mentality of the now-departed mega-hit &#8220Friends” to a hospital setting.

The problem is that in real life, friends don’t usually look the other way when crimes are committed and rules are broken – nor should they.

And, the show’s message that it is perfectly normal, and to some degree acceptable, for people in a position to decide who lives and who dies, to give preference to their personal emotions over the law and medical ethics, is profoundly disturbing.

Of course it is only TV. I became acquainted with the arduous process by which organs are allocated.

Organ transplants are the ultimate zero-sum game. For every patient saved, someone else is not. There are many more people needing hearts, livers, lungs and kidneys than there are available organs. Thousands of Americans die each year waiting for a transplant.

Everyone connected with the transplant process – doctors, nurses, donor families, or recipients and their families – understands this.

The United Network for Organ Sharing supervises U.S. transplants. It has set criteria for evaluating patients’ needs, primarily based on a recipients’ closeness to death, overall health and ability to thrive afterward. It decides who gets a transplant and who doesn’t.

In &#8220Grey’s Anatomy,” the intern makes her fiance sicker in order to move him up the list when a heart becomes available. Several fellow interns, instead of stopping her, aid in her efforts.

The patient dies after the transplant and the other interns don’t report what happened. Later, they refuse to finger the culprit in some kind of celebration of friendship. If coming attractions are to be believed, the hospital lets Dr. Stevens back on staff.

Arthur Caplan, the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, say what would then happen in the real world is this:

€Dr. Stevens would probably face murder or manslaughter charges, since she began a process that resulted in the patient’s death. She would face criminal charges for falsifying medical records. She would be dismissed from the intern program and almost certainly never get a medical license.

€The hospital, aware it could lose its accreditation to do transplants and have to pay a huge damage settlement (not just to this patient’s family, but to the family of the one who didn’t get the heart due to the fraud), would report what happened to the state medical board, UNOS and the police.

€The other interns could also face criminal charges. Their medical futures would be in doubt since they could be considered accessories to the crime.

In the show, no one calls the cops or the state medical authorities. Nothing happens to the other interns.

Now, television is, of course, entertainment. It is invested in hooking viewers on Dr. Stevens’ character. But it is also a business, hence their reluctance to write a popular character off the show.

You got the feeling when the tough resident doctor who supervises the interns began lobbying the big boss to take Dr. Stevens back that she is going to somehow return to the hospital and all her friends.

That is a shame. Television doesn’t have to replicate real life. But when a drama, not an obvious farce like &#8220Scrubs,” suggests crime can be without consequences, it is as dangerous to the public good as when it glorifies sex and violence.

Baker may save Bush face, but he won’t save Iraq

By TRUDY RUBIN

Waiting for Baker.

That may be the last, desperate Bush administration hope for rescuing its flailing Iraq policy. U.S. officials are anxiously awaiting the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State and Bush family confidante James A. Baker III, whose task is to reassess Iraq strategy.

The group’s report won’t come out until after the November elections, but, in a sign of how bleak the Iraq situation has become, Baker is being looked at as a sort of Houdini. Never mind that he has already warned &#8220there is no magic bullet” for the Iraq situation. He knows he will be constrained by the fact that the administration’s disastrous policy errors have foreclosed any good options.

Yet the Study Group has galvanized Washington’s attention by virtue of the fact that the president endorsed to its creation. The same president who has incessantly said he would &#8220stay the course” has anointed Baker to propose a change of course.

It’s worth pondering what this Bush concession means.

Jim Baker is hardly the man one would have expected the president to call on as rescuer-in-chief. True, Baker operated as the Bush family’s consigliere in the 2000 Florida election. But George W. was never fond of his father’s friend, who is a foreign policy realist with no illusions about the Mideast region. Indeed, Baker has harshly criticized Bush’s Iraq policy in his new autobiography, &#8220Work Hard, Study … and Keep Out of Politics!”

By endorsing the study group, the president is making a humiliating admission that he needs rescuing from his Iraq mess. In fact, the normally stubborn Bush made a stunning admission in an Oct. 11 news conference.

&#8220I think the characterization of ‘let’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right,” he said. &#8220Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working; change.”

However, finding a new course that will work at this late date will be a staggering task for Baker. Virtually every premise that the White House held about postwar Iraq has been proved wrong; the dire results leave the study group very little to work with. With Iraq convulsed by sectarian killing, and the Sunni insurgency unchecked, Baker will have to pick and choose among a list of unsatisfactory choices:

€Change the Iraqi government. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has proved incapable of the tough leadership needed to reconcile with &#8220moderate” Sunnis, stop the sectarian slaughter, and undercut the Sunni insurgency. But this is not Vietnam 1963; the gung-ho-for-democracy Bush can’t depose an elected Iraqi leader. The White House is stuck with an Iraqi government that can’t govern.

€Pull out immediately. Baker has already rejected this option. He fears a chaotic Iraq would become a regional battleground, as Iran, Syria and Sunni Arab states rush to fill the power vacuum left by the U.S. exit.

€Push for the division of Iraq into three federal states for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, in hopes this would stop the fighting. Baker says he can’t see how one could draw the boundary lines, since Iraq’s cities and towns are mixed. Sunnis and many Shiites bitterly oppose this idea, and I see no way U.S. occupiers could impose such a plan on Iraqis.

€Send more troops. This isn’t on because the U.S. military has run out of available bodies.

€Draw down U.S. forces, but insert more teams of U.S. military trainers inside Iraqi security force units. A good idea – but military experts say it will be hard to find enough additional U.S. trainers, since this requires stripping officers out of their units.

€Give the Maliki government a finite deadline to design a reconciliation pact with the Sunnis, and ratchet up the pressure by setting a timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. forces – say, in two years. Then convene a conference of Iraq’s neighbors and big powers to help stabilize the country. Such a conference would require the White House to deal with Iran (Baker supports negotiating with one’s enemies).

My guess is that Baker’s Iraq Study Group will propose some combination of 5 and 6, with no guarantees that Iraq or American policy can be salvaged.

Would Bush adopt such a radical course change? Already White House spokesman Tony Snow is cautioning that the president won’t hand Iraq policy off to Baker’s group. But Bush is drowning in Iraq trouble, and Baker offers the only life raft.

How tragic that George W. wouldn’t turn to the Mideast-savvy Baker three years ago when his advice might prevented disaster. At this point Baker may be able only to save Bush some face – but not to save Iraq.