Okay, first, let's see if we can condense into a paragraph some of that complicated background information that the networks and our local daily papers didn't have time to tell you.

Kurdistan, home of ethnic Kurds, was divided by colonial powers early this century into land now belonging to Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and a handful of former Soviet republics. Power in the portion of Kurdistan within Iraq's borders is divided primarily among two factions, hostile to each other and both hostile to Saddam Hussein. One faction got lots of arms from Iran recently and started to attack and overrun the other. Fearing for their lives, the other side asked their enemy, Hussein, to intervene and restore the original balance. Responding to a request from Iraqi citizens, who were under attack from a foreign-supplied army, Hussein moved some of his troops into the area, resecured it, and withdrew.

The United States responded, without help or approval from the U.N. or any other country in the world (save Great Britain's faithful lapdog, John Major), by bombing the hell out of military and civilian targets in a different part of Iraq.

The U.S. action would be absurd were it not so dangerous and tragic. There are nearly as many objections as there are U.S. media outlets refusing to list them. To name some of the more obvious:

Hussein had every right to do what he did;
The action involves the U.S. in a complicated Kurdish ethnic quagmire, ala Bosnia, for no particular reason;
The action escalates tensions in the area by introducing another non-neutral force;
The "message" the U.S. sent to Hussein would have in no way influenced his actions, nor will it change future ones - it just killed some hapless Iraqi civilians;
The U.S. ignored and refused to cooperate with previous chances to negotiate a non-military solution;
The U.S. has hung the Kurds (and pro-democracy forces in Iraq) out to dry so many times in the last five years that its claim to want to help now is transparently silly;
The air strike enters the U.S. into a defacto alliance with Iran. Remember Iran? They blew up some Marines in Saudi Arabia recently;
The cost of any of those cruise missiles the U.S. fired (45 that we know of) would have restored the school lunch program. The overall cost of this exercise in missile-wagging could have restored a lot of the welfare, education and human needs programs gutted in the name of fiscal distress;
What are we doing in that part of the world anyway?;
War is inherently evil; and
"Gee, I sure hope this doesn't hurt Bill Clinton's standing in the polls during an election campaign."

On top of this idiocy, one of those infamous "unnamed senior White House officials" announced over the weekend that while they'd gone north, Hussein's troops had also interrupted and put the final coup de grace to an already disintegrating, six-year-long CIA plot to overthrow and assassinate the Iraqi leader.

This leaves one with the distinct impression that Clinton's bombing of Southern Iraq had nothing to do with the Kurds, and everything to do with the U.S. throwing a temper tantrum because its expensive, secret, illegal conspiracy to assassinate the leader of a country of 20 million people got spiked.

Nearly as shameful as the bombing itself was the appalling chorus of unanimity that followed from virtually every elected official, network and pundit in the U.S. One doesn't even have to agree with any of the above points to concede that some are worth considering, but nowhere in any official circles was Clinton's attack debated. In crowing her approval, Sen. Patty Murray expressed relief that the Dole and Clinton campaigns had not turned the murder of Iraqi civilians for no particular reason into "a political issue." (You know, like it was in the rest of the world.)

To his partial credit, Slade Gorton cast the only dissenting vote against the Senate resolution endorsing Clinton's crime. Gorton noted, correctly, that the air strikes were a meaningless gesture. (His solution, predictably, is better bombing.)

A morning-after poll showed 80% U.S. public approval of the air raids. It sounds discouraging until you realize that virtually noone in the U.S. had heard anything but official U.S. government versions (back in the days of the U.S.S.R. we called this "propaganda") regarding the events; and still, 20%--that's some 50 million people--were skeptical. Their concerns were totally and completely excluded from both the halls of government and the media that covers them. So much for the two-party system, and the free unfettered press.

One more note: part of the reason the opposition didn't make news was not just that politicians weren't on board; the folks who were appalled weren't loud enough. There was a day-after demonstration at Seattle's Federal Building at which every major news operation in town was present--along with fewer than 100 people. If even a reasonable fraction of the folks pissed off at these events had shown up, it could have, at least locally, sent a powerful message that the politicos were out of touch and out of line. Instead, it made opponents of a random act of war look marginal and isolated; a truly lost opportunity.

What can we do? Murray and Gorton should still hear about their failure to offer even basic skepticism on the issue, and their support for sanctions that have already killed over half a million Iraqi children in five years (according to a U.N. report released early this year to deafening silence in the U.S. media); if the bombing resumes, there should be thousands at the Federal Building next time; and we need to become organized enough that when these things happen we all know how to find out when and where to go and what to do to have maximum impact. And then do it.

Oh, and about that assassination plot: it's long past time to abolish the CIA. And the entire National Security Act apparatus (the secret agencies and "black budget" that the CIA is only a tiny part of) along with it.