Last week's newspaper headline said it all: "House Dems Line Up With Bush."

The geometry lesson, of course, was on the question of the desirability of a "preemptive" (a polite word for "unprovoked") invasion of Iraq, and a resolution endorsing same. Not surprisingly, Senate Democrats are proving their moral flexibility as well.

The news isn't surprising because this is something the White House wants very, very badly, and in a city where political policies are often traded among lawmakers like so many marbles -- "I'll give you three of my green low income housing ones for two of your defense appropriation one-eyes" -- the White House clearly has been willing to trade a lot, and probably has done so. How sad a commentary on the moral fiber of our great nation is it when a few hundred thousand (or whatever) Iraqi lives can be traded for a dam project in your home state?

It gets worse, though -- and I'm not referring to the lack of spine or significant opposition by Democratic leadership, though there's that. too. No, what's truly discouraging about this charade is that it comes while every congressional office on Capitol Hill is being flooded -- I mean INUNDATED -- with calls, letters, e-mails, and faxes from people literally pleading that their elected officials not start or endorse a war for which no compelling case has been made.

The objections come across the board and for a variety of reasons, all of them good. Offering them, and dissecting the daily fallacies offered up by war proponents (as Maria Tomchick does so brilliantly elsewhere in this issue), has become a grim parlor game.

All of the objections to war can be boiled down to one essential truth: war is not a game. One doesn't fool around with war for short-term political gain or the economic benefit of one's buddies or one's repressed desires to see big things go boom or avenge Daddy's humiliation. (Is the titular leader of this country a retarded man-child or something?)

A representative democracy can work one of two ways, both valid and each usually a factor in American politics. Either a leader is expected to represent the wishes of his or her constituents, or he or she is elected and entrusted to use his or her best judgment on the issues of the day, on the basis of information not apparent to most members of the public.

By raw numbers, polls show a fair number of Americans opposing an Iraq invasion, period, and most of us opposing it without international support -- which, excepting Tony Blair, is completely absent -- a unanimity almost unparalleled in world affairs.

This past weekend, thousands, even tens of thousands, marched on very little notice in cities and towns across the country; in some European cities, it was hundreds of thousands. And if depth of public passion is a measure, ask any Capitol Hill letter-opener this week. At Seattle's rally, local Rep. Jim McDermott, freshly returned from Iraq and (for him) atypically blistering anti-war talk that has made him one of the few Democrats way out in front on this issue, got a hero's welcome from as many as 10,000 marchers.

So the only conceivable legitimate reason for Congressional approval of these resolutions is because lawmakers know something we don't. With the seriousness of the issue we face, and the enormous chasm between apparent public opinion (moving steadily in the anti-war direction) and that of Congress (going the other way), we are at the very least owed an explanation, and at least a hint of what that missing information might be that would change the equation.

No such explanation has come forth, and plenty of lawmakers from allied countries -- who've heard the Bush Administration's best pitch for war -- say there is none. What we know is, more or less, what they know. They just want to whup Saddam hindquarters and take "his" oil.

It's not Saddam's posterior at stake, of course, nor his oil. It's not America's oil, either. The oil is a resource of the nation of Iraq and of its people, and its people -- not their extremely well-guarded dictator -- are the ones who will necessarily die in this exercise.

Hopefully, we don't have to go there. The public response has been loud and unequivocal, but it is also new; none of this was happening a month ago. And when you've got a bunch in the West Wing who are still acting as through the Soviet Union is around, it's a fair assumption that news does not travel quickly in their circles. Some persistence is called for. And perhaps, just perhaps, an escalation in volume -- before and after Congress loses its marbles and gives Dubya the war he wants. Congress isn't the last word, nor should it be. War won't start until at least the new year; the Pentagon isn't ready, and Dubya wants to draw this out so that it'll be his 2004 re-election trump card ("The Man Who Ousted Saddam!"). There's time. There's still time for the public to be reckoned with. And I reckon it's time for a regime change closer to home.