It all worked out symbolically in the end. President Bush huddles with the leaders of two previous global empires, Britain and Spain, in a US military base in the Azores on the weekend before St. Patrick's Day, and decides to give the little tin-horn dictator and his sons in Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge before the American-Anglo force invades. This after promising to put forward a new resolution before the UN Security Council authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. Sensing eminent defeat at the UN, the Bush-led War Party threw in the towel with the entire "diplomacy" bit, "diplomacy" meaning bow and kneel before US hegemony, or else, and declared its intention to defy world opinion and go ahead with the invasion of Iraq anyway. Thus, ended the most unpopular campaign for a war and invasion of another country in history.

The appropriateness of the Bush-Blair-Anzar War Summit being held on the Azores, a chain of islands in the Atlantic Ocean about 900 miles west of Portugal, is hard not to notice. "How fitting to choose an island chain originally settled by a Portuguese Crusader whose goal was to encircle the Muslim world with Christian armies," wrote syndicated columnist Robert Scheer on March 18. So much for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of France and Germany as representing "Old Europe." You can't get any more "Old Europe" than Britain and Spain, the granddaddies of European colonialism. Last, but not least, Bush and his "coalition" partners chose the occasion of an Irish celebration, St. Patrick's Day, to announce the return of a once independent Arab nation to its former colonial status.

Like with other past colonial wars, the conquering leader Bush characterized the coming invasion of Iraq as a war of "liberation" in his address to the nation the evening of March 17. Just like his father promised a war for "democracy" in Kuwait in 1991, and gave Kuwait the Sabah family monarchy back to rule the country after Operation Desert Storm. Last time I checked, Saudi Arabia was still a monarchy as well. Here we go again. Another colonial war promising to "liberate" the savages from themselves. Western civilization has been conducting these wars of "liberation" for nearly a millennium now. Will we ever learn? The subjects of our colonial domination don't seem to like being "liberated" by us, and protest very loudly their domination by a foreign power.

You can find a lot of similar rationales for colonial adventurism in the past. Like Pope Urban II's call to the First Crusade in the Holy Lands in 1095. Urban II noted the mistreatment of Christians in the Hold Lands by the Ottoman Turks and called on all God Fearing Christians to carry out "the extermination of this vile people from our lands." Henry II's invasion of Ireland in 1171 fits neatly into this historical narrative also. The English king's rationale for invading the country was a purported lack of morals and religion among the Irish.

The old British and Spanish empires look like 110 lb. weaklings when compared with the might of the US. It is this mighty military machine that is about to make an example out of an impoverished people with whom we have no quarrel. Next to the US-led military force now marching on Baghdad the Iraqi people look like a concentration camp inmates on the verge of death. Starved by a medieval embargo and repeated bombing for a dozen years, Iraqi society will quickly collapse under the weight of the American-Anglo invasion force. We can't know what the consequences of this invasion will be. Given the fire power at the disposal of the American-Anglo invaders and the fragile condition of the Iraqi people, the only thing left to do is count the number of dead Iraqis (See: http://www.iradbodycount.net). We can only hope the most dire predictions of up to 500,000 Iraqis dying as a result of the American-Anglo invasion don't come true.

As I write this on March 21 Baghdad is burning. Robert Fisk of the British newspaper the Independent is on hand in Baghdad and described the opening salvos of Operation "Shock and Awe," or what I call Operation Cowardly and Criminal. "Shock was hardly the word for it," writes Fisk. "The few Iraqis in the streets around me--no friends of Saddam I would suspect--cursed under their breath. Police cars drove at speed through the streets, their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching next to a block of shops on the opposite side of the river, I narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them." Fisk noted not just the military message this assault on Baghdad sends to the world, but the political message as well. "Well yes, one could say, could one attack a more appropriate regime? But that is not quite the point. For the message of last night's raid was the same as that of Thursday's raid, that of all the raids in the hours to come: that the United States must be obeyed. That the EU, UN, NATO--and nothing--must stand in its way. Indeed can stand in its way."

Words can't describe how surreal it is to watch the most powerful military in history rain down missiles on a people who have had their faces kicked in for a dozen years. Yesterday on Pacifica's Democracy Now! radio program Amy Goodman aired a taped interview with a distraught anonymous former Iraqi government official in Baghdad. When asked if he had made any preparations for the bombing he said, "What can we do? There is no way to prepare for this. We have nothing (to fight back with). All I can do is pray to God to save me."

"Isn't it the most cowardly thing you ever heard of in the history of the world," said a tearful Arundhati Roy, acclaimed author from India, after listening to the taped interview. "To disarm a country. To force it to its knees. And then to attack it It's the most disgusting thing I have ever heard of." Indeed, never in history has a nation under escalating attack and threat of eminent invasion been chided by the "international community," many well-meaning people in the peace movement included, to disarm itself like Iraq has for the past six months. This is truly the Coward's War. There is nothing honorable about pummeling a people caught between a brutal dictator and punitive embargo that has taken such a devastating toll. The Bush and Blair gang are nothing more than opportunistic gang rapists. Far from having anything to do with "disarmament," or "liberation," this invasion of a formerly independent Arab nation has everything to do with extending a permanent US military occupation of the Middle East.

US troops won't be leaving Iraq any time soon. Our memory hole society forgets why the little tin-horn dictator Saddam was hired on by Washington as an ally in 1980. He was hired to take out the fundamentalist government of Iran and he didn't get the job done. By occupying Iraq, US military forces will be well placed to eventually stage a two front invasion of Iran from both Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran will be the next "Axis of Evil" member on the Bush administration's hit list.

The rise of a global anti-war movement over the past several months has been a shining hour for democracy. Don't fret about not preventing the invasion of Iraq. We have not failed, but rather the Bush and Blair government's have failed to heed to voices of the world against this illegal and immoral war. We need to keep organizing and make this current administration in Washington pay the ultimate political price in 2004, just as British citizens are organizing to get rid of Blair. I hope this anti-war movement doesn't fade fast, like the movement against the first Gulf War. I think most people in this movement know that we must stay in this for the long haul. We clearly have a cabal of messianic militarists in Washington who must be stopped. We have long since passed the stage in our history when opposition to militarism are merely values to be cherished. Given the awesome destructive power of the weapons at our government's disposal, we have no choice but to oppose the Bush administration's belligerence. It is a prerequisite for our survival.