As with most people who have opposed the Bush Administration's breathtakingly fraudulent and obstinate drive for war, now that it is defying all precedent, the UN charter and international law, and the wishes of the vast majority of the world's people, I'm flooded with different feelings and impressions. In these first few days, the feelings are a mixture of sadness, grief, rage, a desire to pull the sheets over my head and make the world go away, a desire to shut the country down. (News flash: it won't, and we can't.) Here are a few of the thoughts.

Let me start off with a bit of heresy.

I don't support our troops.

If, by "supporting our troops," war's opponents are expressing the hope that US soldiers are not maimed or killed, absolutely. But I feel the same about Iraqi troops, too, and the larger number of Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire. They are all human beings that do not deserve the fate their leaders are exposing them to.

But if we mean that we hope "our" troops do their job well, I won't go there, I don't hope that at all. For given the vastly superior firepower of the United States, what that job has meant in practice, from the Gulf War through the invasion of Afghanistan, is that a relative handful of American soldiers--dozens out of hundreds of thousands--die, while large numbers of faceless "others," many of them civilians, do. And our government then ignores, lies about, or distorts what has occurred; the truth can take years to piece together, forgotten in the rubble of lies. The sad truth is that a majority of American deaths--probably, in this war, an overwhelming majority--will be from accidents or friendly fire. And the physical and mental effects later--from cancers caused by exposure to radioactive munitions through the inevitable suicides--are also a form of friendly fire, and also an arena where government will fail to "support" them. But the risk to American soldiers of battlefield casualties is actually rather small; the risk of death for any Iraqi civilian is probably quite a bit higher.

At this writing (Sunday), it appears that if the Pentagon has, in fact, unleashed some version of its "Shock and Awe" scenario, it hasn't been as bad as was feared, for which credit can go either to precision bombing, the moral horror of the world (and the peace movement), or both. However, there's still plenty of sickening reports coming out of Baghdad of flames and death, and we're under a relentless media campaign in the US and Britain that is carefully shielding us from any mention of, let alone images of, what's going on underneath that light show. So let's reserve judgment until some less embedded voices are heard.

While many of the battlefield casualties will be of civilians, many more won't, and this raises another matter. Many of the hapless young men pressed into uniform in Iraqi's brutal dictatorship are conscripts, young men faced with either enlistment or being shot (or worse). But for all his other faults, Saddam Hussein is correct to call American soldiers mercenaries. They are, showered with benefits by the US in exchange for their increasingly unnecessary and risk-free presence in helping to run computer-run massacres.

There is the poverty draft, of course, and that is the stick to the US government's carrot; in poorer communities, youth are often being deprived of many of the non-military roads out. But in a generation where the US is by far the world's most bellicose nation, invading a new country every year or two, signing that recruiter's contract is, in fact, a voluntary offer to help kill people in far away places, people with whom they have no other quarrel, because our leaders say so. And the word of our leaders, we are coming to realize, does not mean much.

If we "support our troops," does this mean we support their decision to help carry out our leaders' consistently violent, and now dishonest and illegal, policies? Are we supporting their decision to follow indefensible, clearly illegal orders? Are we absolving them of any awareness of, or responsibility for, their actions? I have more respect for soldiers than that.

By saying we hope this war ends quickly, we are also being both hypocritical and unrealistic. The "end" people have in mind is of the bombing and shooting against essentially defenseless targets; that will, in fact, go quickly, due to overwhelming US military power. But save the improbable death of Saddam, the march to Baghdad will be deadly no matter how "quickly" it does or doesn't go. My hope is for minimized casualties on all sides, not speed. Dropping a nuke or two would be "quick," and the lunatics running our country are just sick enough to do it.

More to the point, that's only the first phase of what will necessarily, due to how this has come about, be a protracted war no matter what our military does. It's delusionary not to expect that tens or hundreds of millions of Muslims, from Morocco to the Philippines and beyond, consider this unprovoked invasion to be an attempt at re-colonization and a declaration of war against Islam, and to take that personally. Americans, in uniform or not, are now targets thanks to Dubya. We attacked without any genuine threat to our security and with little more than rhetorical concern for civilian casualties; faced with a much more blatant threat, why wouldn't Muslims respond in kind?

Bush has managed, with one cowardly stroke, to endanger the peace in scores of countries where Christian and Muslims live in relative peace; threaten the relevance of the United Nations; given every nation in the world ample reason to plunge into arms races; and then given them precedent for using the results to invade a neighbor. Oh, and Bush has also managed to render Americans paeans to democracy stunningly hypocritical, both at home and abroad.

This invasion, less war than one-sided massacre, is deeply anti-democratic, both abroad and at home. Abroad, America is now less a beacon than a pariah, a muscle-bound North Korea, a rogue state best shunned. It's been telling to listen to virtually everyone in Washington--both in government and in media--dismissively referring to "the publics" or "the streets" of the many countries that oppose this war, and the rest whose governments have bucked popular opinion. In both cases, popular sentiment was something necessarily to be overcome, not something to be democratically respected. The focus has always been the prospect, or lack of it, in getting the rest of the world to agree with America's leaders--not on why America's leaders were and are out of line with the rest of humanity.

(On that score, did anyone notice that the administration's list of "30 countries that support us" included allies like France ("freedom" fries?), Canada (sending no troops), and any number of countries who agreed only to not object too loudly? And that that still left 166 countries out?)

The same anti-democratic principles apply at home. For reference, we need look no further than Sen. Patty Murray, part of the Democratic Party leadership, who on Tuesday drowned her unexpectedly courageous anti-war vote last fall with the "I support our troops" line, as follows; "We had an amazing democracy on this issue in the last six months. The president had the majority of votes, and in a democracy he can take that and go to war."

Of course, that would mean that the last six months--the time elapsed since the Senate's vote, when public concern and opposition surged--was irrelevant to the outcome. In other words, Sen. Murray left out her concluding sentence: "The time for democracy is over."

But it's not; nor is the time over for the Constitution, due process, the consent of the governed, fiscal responsibility, a Seattleite's right to stand on the sidewalk, or a US government that uses its vast resources not on weapons of mass destruction but on programs that help all of us. (A more educated populace is still susceptible to the kind of orchestrated fascism we're now witnessing, but it's a lot harder sell.)

Saving all those necessary ideals can only happen, however, if the public sentiment against war becomes stronger and better organized. On that score, Seattle's response has been disappointingly behind much of the rest of the US, which in turn has lagged behind much of the world. We've got work to do. Lots of it.

Instead of responding to crises, any movement to block and reverse American Empire must become permanent--like the current propensity of the US for waging war. We must nurture resources that can help talented people turn peacemaking into a career, rather than something relegated to nights, weekends, and impoverished student days. We must learn to use and control media; we must learn to craft messages that resonate beyond the committed core. We must model, beginning at the local level, a better, more life- affirming alternative to current political priorities. We must learn to not just protest policies, but change them. And we must make common cause with similar, already thriving movements around the world.

We must, in short, set our sights higher: not on particular foreign interventions, but on taking back our own country. We start today. And the major, looming task, right at the beginning, is to use next year's election to send George Bush and the lunatics he's hired out to pasture--and ensure their necessarily Democratic Party replacements are, in fact, an improvement.