There will be no CNN town meetings with administration officials this time. For that matter, there has been virtually no media debate at all, no coverage of dubious lawmakers or skeptical generals. So it falls on us once again, as the U.S. scratches its occasional itch to bomb the dogshit out of Iraq, to provide a small sampling of the arguments you, the faithful ETS! reader, can use with friends, co-workers, neighbors, relatives, and crazy people on the street, as to why the U.S. is engaged in a grotesque parody of international warmongering, a brutal crime, one outstripping even the crimes Saddam Hussein commits against his own people. Why, in short, the U.S. simply can't be trusted. Let's review:

* Not three months ago, the U.S. was caught in a flat-footed lie regarding an alleged chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. Why should we believe them now? In eight years in which U.S. satellites have been able to photograph the hairs on the asses of every flea in Baghdad, the State Department has yet to provide any actual definitive evidence that Iraq is assembling weapons of mass destruction--let alone completing them, let alone possessing the capacity to transport them beyond Baghdad's suburbs. The alleged threat to security--that of the U.S. or anyone else--is laughable coming from a country that has literally been bombed from oil-induced prosperity into widespread famine, disease, and crippled infrastructure. Repeatedly.

* Even were this not the case, there is no evidence bombing will solve the problem. There is no clear military objective to bombing haystacks in hopes that a mythic needle will melt, nor any way to tell whether that objective has been achieved.

* This military blank check will be borne, like every U.S. policy there since 1990, by the civilians of the region. The U.S. has undermined Kurdish aspirations for independence; stonewalled Iraq's endangered democratic reformers; and, of course, in a cold and calculated fashion, created the conditions (sanctions) that have killed over 1 million Iraqi civilians, including at least half a million children.

* In doing so, the U.S. has created a generation of enemies in the Islamic world and beyond, who have witnessed the brutality and hypocrisy of the U.S. approach to combating tyrants.

* Why does the U.S. not care? Why is it insisting on kicking the downtrodden, halfway around the world, while the region's neighbors look on aghast? Oil, of course. But even more basically, because it can. Every third grade class had a bully, an extorter of lunch money, who would make an example of some weak kid in the class just to underscore his reign of terror, so that the rest of the class would fall silently into line.

This is the amoral logic of Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and the U.S. State Department. It is no apology to the behavior of Saddam Hussein to state that the U.S. has no right to do it; and that those of us who live here have a special responsibility to oppose it. Seattleite Bert Sacks left for Iraq late last week (with the heroic and aptly named relief group Voices in the Wilderness), carrying food and medical supplies for Iraq's embargoed children. He's got the right idea. Here at home, we must raise our voices as well. We're a lesser people if we don't.