You know what I feel like? I feel like one of those passengers on those doomed jets that were hijacked on 9/11.

I don't mean to belittle that tragedy, or the fate of those passengers. I don't think I'm personally facing imminent death, and hope that doesn't happen, to anyone, until we're each good and ready.

However, I do very much feel like the unlucky passenger in a jet that has been hijacked, and piloted for over two years now, by religious maniacs who, I am gradually concluding, are on a path to kill us all -- along with a great many more innocents on the ground -- on the way to fulfillment of their obscure religious and political agenda.

That's what it feels like as all signs point to a massive United States military invasion of Iraq, possibly a week away, perhaps more, perhaps less, perhaps by the time you read this.

Should this attack takes place, there will without any question at all be at least four immediate results:

1) A great many Iraqis will die, probably more than we'll ever know. It is a number United States leaders have good reason to not be interested in, and for a long time nobody else will have access to count the bodies. The US is also likely to be uninterested in the number of its own soldiers who die in the coming years, irradiated or psychically wounded by their experience.

2) The government of Israel will launch a brutal new round of attacks against the essentially defenseless Palestinians in their bantustans. It scarcely matters whether the "crackdown" will be unprovoked or ostensibly in response to demonstrations or terrorist acts prompted by the U.S. invasion. The end result will be the same.

3) Hatred of the United States will sweep the world, among not just ordinary citizens but whole governments, composed of those countries' ruling elites. Alliances will become former alliances; business as well as political relationships will be irrevocably damaged. In the Islamic world, with relatively few exceptions, "fury" will be the moderate reaction; fuel for decades' worth of terrorist activity, against the U.S. and its corrupt, brutal puppets, lies at the other end of the spectrum. The patient groundwork that the Bush Administration has laid over the past two years to make the United States an international pariah will be fulfilled. We will no longer be one nation among many, but an empire, with vassals; often, what we want we will only be able to obtain by force, threatened or actual.

4) The economy, both globally and in the U.S., will also be badly damaged. It's already worsened dramatically in the last year (a fact obscured by all the Bush talk of Iraq); with investors horrified, international trade taking a backseat to global lockdown, and the world's biggest economy retooling itself for permanent wars it cannot possibly afford, things are, by almost every serious independent economists' reckoning, likely to be made far worse.

The economic fallout -- far more than any concern over mere human lives -- is why so many of the world's political and business elites stand opposed to the Bush folly. And yet, on this as on each of these other points, the political and media giants of the U.S. appear to be in a state of delusional denial.

How else to explain it when Bush himself can "speak to the nation," as he did last Thursday night (in only his third press conference in over two years); presume to speak for the world (without mentioning that that world opposes his folly with a unanimity rarely seen); and presume to speak of the entire nation of Iraq as "Saddam Hussein" (without acknowledging the 23 million disposable stage props also inhabiting the country)? Bush spoke of "rebuilding" Iraq, without mentioning how it might come to be destroyed; he vowed to "disarm" Iraq, in the name of "peace," without mentioning the massive death toll his methods entail. Bush can offer half-truths, distortions, and outright lies that have been repeatedly refuted. He can vow not to wait for that moment when "a terrorist unleashes his weapons of mass destruction," and nobody will point out that he George Bush, is the terrorist threatening mass destruction. This is arrogance beyond measure, and the passengers look out the window.

How else to explain the political and media response to a succession of "spy" stories in recent days: a plane intercepted by North Korea; a leaked document suggesting U.S. plans to spy on war opponents at the United Nations; reports that U.S. spies were told years ago, by the Iraqi defector who ran the program and who it has repeatedly cited as the source of its inside information, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed in 1995; the transparent manipulativeness of the timing of Iraqi diplomats' expulsion by the U.S.

Collectively, the response has been a shrug. It is as if, firstly, the United States is presumed to have the right to invade the privacy of political opponents anywhere and everywhere. Richard Nixon's bugging of political opponents in 1972 eventually brought down his administration. In 2003, it appears to be no big deal. And secondly, it is as if the United States, having had all its arguments for invasion refuted, is now simply taking the position that it is so militarily powerful that it needs no stinkin' reason. And nobody on the jet says a word.

How else to explain it when U.S. officials can talk openly and proudly about their "Shock and Awe" strategy of dropping at least 3,000 cruise missiles on Baghdad in 48 hours? This is four times the munitions used in the entire Gulf War, expected to create a collective oxygen-eating fireball over a city of five million inhabitants.

Such a firestorm was the result when the U.S. dropped 40,000 pounds of munitions, from 300 B-29 bombers, over residential Tokyo in March 1945. The resulting conflagration killed over 100,000 civilians. Most died from carbon monoxide poisoning when the firestorm replaced oxygen with lethal gases, superheated the atmosphere, and caused hurricane-like winds that blew a wall of fire across the city. Others died when, seeking refuge in the Sumida River, they were literally boiled alive.

The widely heralded, new "MOAB" bombs, touted by Pentagon flaks this month, also work by exactly the same principles -- using 60 years of newer technology -- and weigh 20,000 pounds each. Bush officials proclaimed all week that precision guidance systems will enable the U.S. to minimize civilian casualties. The very laws of physics render such a claim preposterous; one can no more steer a fireball than re-route an earthquake. It is the naked propaganda of an imperial power on the eve of war. Yet among the opposition politicians and the pundits, there is bland acceptance or silence.

Either we passengers have succeeded in deluding ourselves that this plane really is going to land, and everyone will be all right; or we have given up all hope of subduing the hijackers, and so pretend we don't care or sink into our private fate.

Let us not delude ourselves. The United States is not about to launch a war. Wars involve two sides fighting each other. This will not be a war; it will be an unprovoked massacre, probably of historic proportions.

There are a great many people in this country who have spoken out against this folly, this outrage, this war crime, this thing that defies language. Opponents hail from every conceivable ideology, background, class, race. Many would never have dreamed once that they'd be publicly criticizing their President. But there are also a great many more people in our country who should know better, but who have not spoken out. This includes powerful people important to the Bush Administration. They must, as the hours tick by, examine their own priorities.

Bad things will be set irrevocably in motion when this jet crashes. However, we passengers -- unlike a horrifying number of Iraqis -- will survive.

As indefensible as this massacre will be, and as dire as the consequences may be, never say it can't get worse. It can; history teaches us that worse is usually up to the challenge. Most of us in the U.S. lead comfortable lives, largely unimpinged upon by government or war; despite John Ashcroft's delusions, we still live more or less in a democracy.

Once the shock waves of outrage and horror and grief wash over us, we must use that privilege. We must take to heart what the White House empire- builders already know: that Iraq is intended as only one skirmish in a much longer "war." Much can still be changed by strong and determined public opposition to it.

The bottom line is saving lives. Between now and November 2004, the domestic political and economic cost to the Bush Administration must be raised so high as to hamper as much as is possible of its imperial agenda. Come that election, as imperfect as any Democratic challenger is likely to be, unseating Bush and the zealots around him assumes paramount importance. The rest of the world does not get a vote; we do, and we must vote, and organize others to vote, on the world's behalf as well as our own.

It is, realistically speaking, the only way to disarm the fundamentalist zealots who have hijacked and are now piloting this airplane. Ignoring them is no longer an option. And realistically, neither is a level of non-electoral opposition that would either force them from power or remove the tools of their power.

When each of these hijackers does, eventually, meet their Creator, they will need to answer for some unspeakable crimes. Any Divine Being worthy of the name will know what to do. In the interim, so must we.