While millions of Americans are celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Peace the way we know best--by buying things--the Bush cabal was doing so, too, by quietly ramping up the already long-running war against Iraq. But there's also the rest of Earth, all of which, according to official US foreign policy, is now required to toe the US line or face the wrath of the Pentagon.

The list of regions where the US is flexing its military muscle at the moment is without precedent, both for its length and the lack of public attention. An arbitrary list of the dozen most significant includes: Afghanistan, where US troops present themselves as daily targets in their newly established bases across the country, bases ostensibly devoted to hunting Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants, but instead mostly focused on protecting themselves from rival warlord armies and gangs who resent their presence and who completely control the entire country save the immediate area around the capital city, Kabul. Meanwhile, the daily lives of women--whose fate became the propaganda focus of pro-war cheerleading in the US once leaders realized producing bin-Laden's head on a stick was neither likely nor desirable--have been no better in the last year, and remain no better today, than how Afghan women fared under the Taliban. That was the conclusion of an exhaustively and sickeningly detailed new report by Human Rights Watch [www.humanrightswatch.org], released last month and ignored in the US.

While the usual headline fare is how Iraq may or may not be attacked soon, US and British warplanes have been routinely bombing Iraq since 1998 on a weekly, and more recently near daily, basis. These bombings raise a host of questions--for example, why are they news everywhere in the world but here? Or, what happened to the Bush concern for weapons inspections, or are they just waiting for a UN rubber stamp?--but perhaps the most obvious was raised in these pages by Maria Tomchick earlier this year: If the Bush Administration knows that Iraq has facilities producing and/or storing Weapons of Mass Destruction, why haven't we bombed them, and announced it to the world?

Meanwhile, of course, the death-dealing economic sanctions also continue. While it isn't a direct action of US armed forces, most of the Islamic world, and a lot of the rest of it, consider the United States to be the force that makes the ongoing brutalization of Palestine possible. Israel is the largest recipient of US aid, most of it military, even though Israel, with the world's fourth-largest military, hardly needs it. Much of the year's military action by Israel has focused on the civilian population of Palestine, attacks on every major West Bank city, town, and refugee camp, and the systematic dismantling of its elected government, the Palestinian Authority. Israel continues, with solitary but unquestioning diplomatic backing from the US, its willful disregard of UN resolutions, of demands for inspection of its (covert and illegal) nuclear arms program, and of the American-brokered Oslo accords. Oslo in particular demanded a moratorium on further expropriation of Palestinian land for the grotesquely misnamed "settler" neighborhoods. (Hey, mind if I tear down your house and "settle" there?) Israel instead continues to expand them. Virtually every piece of shrapnel in every West Bank refugee camp has "Made in USA" on it. Literally.

Meanwhile, the US military continues to quietly expand its support of and direct work with the military (and paramilitaries) responsible for the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere: Colombia. While support was until this year generally under the cover of War On Drugs defoliation campaigns, US advisors, weaponry, and private (and CIA) companies and mercenaries are all lending support to the new far-right government there.

And in neighboring Venezuela, where the US was by most accounts the force behind the barely unsuccessful military coup attempt against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez, another attempt to unseat him is underway through a weeks-long strike led by business leaders, especially in the oil sector. Not that the Bush Administration cares about oil.

This past year, the US has also quietly expanded its military presence in a number of other countries, such as: the Philippines, where Washington wants to link a homegrown secessionist movement to Al-Qaeda because it is Islamic; ditto in Indonesia, a country whose military is still run by the same unpunished folks responsible for mass killing fields in Timor (West and especially East), Aceh, and other independence-minded parts of the archipelago; Uzbekistan, a central Asian dictatorship (also with an Islamic opposition movement) that the US hopes will be a linchpin against not just Central Asian terror groups, but also against neighboring China; Georgia, another ex-Soviet republic with a dubious human rights record, that the US announced a military partnership with this year--just as Georgia also announced cooperation with Russia in Moscow's genocidal campaigns against civilians in nearby Chechnya; Pakistan, the military dictatorship, supporter of terror groups, and cozy new ally that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in its confrontation with India this summer; and Yemen, where US anti-terror cooperation with Yemeni authorities included the recent, little-noticed Israeli-style assassination of a suspected Al-Qaeda aide, convicted of no crime--and the killings also of the four other low-level opposition activists that happened to be in the car. All died when the US fired a Predator missile at the car as it sped along a desert highway. Earlier, the US had almost fired on another car before Yemeni authorities convinced the Americans, correctly, that the US had misidentified the car's occupants.

All told, the US military is now active in some 60 countries around the world. These dozen examples are among the most egregious--and what are we doing fighting people in even a dozen countries?--but they have several factors in common:

* No war has been declared against any government in any of them;

* None are on the same continent as the United States, and 10 are not in the same hemisphere;

* Ten (the exceptions being Iraq and Palestine) represent either new conflicts or new or significantly expanded US involvement in the last two years;

* All target Third World, civilian populations;

* In none (save, arguably, the Yemeni assassination efforts when they're linked to Al-Qaeda) have the targeted people, let alone the governments, actually attacked the United States;

* In few of these cases have serious attempts been undertaken, especially by the US government, to find a just and peaceful resolution to the situation; and most Americans know very little about any of them, and national corporate reporting is generally either uncritical or, more commonly, nonexistent.

Can It Possibly Get Better?

With such an imposing and grim recitation, these can seem like dark times indeed. However, the solstice has just passed; days are getting longer and brighter. And so it is for the prospects for challenging, and eventually changing, the government and corporate priorities which make such reflexive American warmaking possible, in 2003 and beyond.

The most obvious of these is the enormous movement, opposing a preemptive invasion of Iraq, which in the US has materialized seemingly from nowhere in the last three months. Its coming-out party was the Congressional vote authorizing force against Iraq, which looked like a unanimous kiss-kiss session until the cards, letters, phone calls, faxes, visits, and e-mails started pouring in--millions of them, running in congressional offices anywhere from 80 to 99+ percent against the war.

Most remarkably, no single organization, ala the NRA, was orchestrating this flood; it was unprecedented and truly grass roots.

Then there were the demonstrations: tens and hundreds of thousands of people in major cities in Europe, Asia, and around the world; tens of thousands, repeatedly, in major US cities, thousands in smaller ones, hundreds in the most improbable of small towns. In greater Seattle, there are peace vigils and events on a literally daily basis, including that hotbed of radical activism, the Eastside. In every large and small and liberal and conservative part of the country, among young and old and counterculture and buttoned-down alike, opposition has been substantial, and when you add the numbers that support invasion only with international support or few casualties--both highly unlikely conditions--it becomes what in any national election would be called a landslide majority.

Most of these opponents are neither reflexively anti-military nor anti-Bush; they don't want to think of their country as a permanent enemy of peace, freedom, or common sense. And this is tremendously encouraging--because it is happening while we are all under an enormous and highly effective propaganda barrage and an almost complete absence of contextual information from our national media, and because it suggests that when basic, fundamental questions are raised, our purportedly apathetic society does, in fact, care.

The Internet has made much of this possible. While the networks serve up shallow soundbites, disinformation, and trivia, the gaps are filled by alternative sites like workingforchange.com, alternet.org, zmag.org, anti-war.com, commondreams.com; more mainstream sites like salon.com and yahoo.com; Internet versions of major newspapers across the country; and the Internet availability of foreign media outlets like the BBC [www.bbc.co.uk], British newspapers like www.dailytelegraph.co.uk (Daily Telegraph); www.guardian.co.uk (The Guardian); www.independent.co.uk (The Independent, home of Robert Fisk, the single best English-language Middle East reporter in the world); and the www.ireland.com (Irish Times). In every region of the world, national newspapers generally have English-language daily or weekly editions on the Web. All of this makes available a bonanza of information and perspectives for those seeking it, and in no previous era or conflict has this been true. And it was also the Internet that helped make the sudden Congressional lobbying blitz and other high-speed organizing possible.

Where to go from here? There are, to be sure, more mass street protests in the works--major national ones are now slated for Jan. 18 in Washington, San Francisco, and other cities, with "Potlucks for Peace" across Seattle that day--but an encouraging number of other examples are being generated by a generation almost entirely unaware of and uninterested in "What They Did In The '60s." For numerous conflicts, citizen peacemakers are offering nonviolent presence and accompaniment in the actual countries where conflicts rage, particularly to great effect in Palestine. New groups like the Nonviolent Peaceforce are organizing on the principle that committed peacemakers should and can have the same self-discipline and take the same personal risks in the name of peace that soldiers do for war. Sister-city groups (now staples of local governments) and other church and community initiatives help people travel to other countries--both from here to there and from there to here--to describe and put a human face on the terrible effects to real people that euphemisms like "collateral damage" obscure.

Here at home, alternative media--not just the Internet, but video and community access TV; community, low power, and pirate radio; zines and community newspapers; and political music, dance, and art--are flourishing under the radar. New and revived forms of organizing are energizing people not interested in traditional petitions, lobbying of Congress or the White House, marches, meetings, and the Same Old Chants. The phenomenal early December turnout at Garfield High School, where some 2,000 activists turned out specifically to sign up for volunteer work, is an obvious example. So was the euphoric student walk-out and march that week, organized and led almost entirely by high school students.

Is evil afoot these days? Yep, and the omnicidal bipartisan stampede in Washington (and the greedy bastards they work for) have a corner on the market. But that has the advantage of letting us know where our work lies. There's lots to do, and plenty of reasons to believe it can and will matter; the outcome is clear only when we choose to stand idly by. Here's to regime change at home in 2003.