Let me break that down for you:

1. Wrong.

During the past few days we've seen a number of hate crimes committed against people living in America who are or are perceived to be Muslim or of Arab descent. Bush and his cronies have been telling Americans not to punish entire ethnic groups for crimes committed by a few individuals who belong to them, and that's nice. I'm sure things would be worse if they weren't doing that. However, the bottom line is this: they can tell Americans not to be racists all they want, but as long as they continue to loudly repeat that the only appropriate response to a crime committed by individual Muslims is to wage indiscriminate war on half of the Muslim world, I don't think it'll work. The state-sponsored violence currently being planned against Afghanistan--and, the rhetoric implies, any other Arab or Muslim state the boys in Washington can make a plausible case against--legitimates the individual acts of violence being committed on our streets.

Americans have already been killed over this in Arizona and Texas. An Indian friend of ours from Austin writes that she's considering telling her mother not to wear a sari in public any more. At a mosque in Chicago, the imam distributed a list of suggestions on how to avoid anti-Muslim violence, which include not gathering in public and not going outside unless it's absolutely necessary. What will happen to people in Muslim dress or with 'middle-eastern-looking' faces who try to board planes in this country in the coming months I can only imagine. I hear a lot of debate about "whether we should agree to restrict our civil liberties"; well, for a significant portion of the American population, that's already a moot point.

Even if our government manages to restrain the tide of hate crime in this country, that will do nothing to mitigate the moral repugnance of the military action it is about to take. By invading Afghanistan, we will be punishing its already suffering people for crimes committed by a Saudi exile who is being sheltered by a totalitarian regime over which they have no control. In essence, we are planning to show the world that killing innocent civilians is wrong by killing innocent civilians. I would laugh at the irony, if I weren't sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

How about we stop and ask ourselves what it is that attacking Afghanistan will actually accomplish, before we decide to go ahead with it? Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, it was.

First of all, the example of Iraq has proved to us how effective it is to try to get a dictatorship to do what you want by making its subjects suffer. If the Taliban gave a shit about the sufferings of its subjects, it wouldn't be the Taliban, would it. So no amount of 'collateral damage' that we do will make any difference in terms of whether we get Bin Ladin. In order for this war to have any practical effect, we would have to send ground troops in to kill off the entire Taliban, prop up some oppositional regime that's friendly to us, find Bin Ladin, put him in a sack, and mail him to the US. I'm quite sure that the Bush adminstration is totally psyched to kill off the Taliban. The question is, can we do it.

The answer is, well, yes and no. We have indeed made short work of the Taliban. Propping up an oppositional regime has turned out to be trickier than we thought, since the chaos and destruction we have wrought have been seized by the warlords and ex-mujaheddin as a golden opportunity to bring back the good old days of rape, pillage, and lawless violence.

However, as we see from this little time capsule, toppling the Taliban was supposed to be a means to an end, and the end was to get Bin Ladin. Do we have Bin Ladin? No. Not only do we not have him, but we've given up on looking for him. So what exactly is it that we've accomplished?

Again, we look into the magic 8-ball of history, and it tells us, "Outlook Not Good." Because of its convenient central location, Afghanistan has long been attractive to imperial powers vying for global domination. England and Russia fought for it in the nineteenth century; both had cause later to regret their infatuation. The Soviet Union and the USA went head to head over it in the 1980s, which incidentally is when our Central Intelligence Agency used American tax dollars to train Osama Bin Ladin, who was in Afghanistan organizing opposition to the Soviets. As you will notice, neither the USA or the Soviet Union really won that one. But this will be different, see, because now the American people have the will to support a long, brutal foreign war which will involve massive American casualties.

Well, I have to fess up: I was completely wrong about this one. As a matter of fact, the boys at the Pentagon have seen to it that there are no massive American casualties. One American soldier has been killed in combat since the bombing started. This excellent record has been achieved, primarily, by relying almost solely on air bombardment while getting the Afghan allies to do the more dangerous ground fighting. Naturally I'm pleased that so few Americans are dying. I'm less pleased about what this war is saying to the world about how highly we value our own lives, and how little we value the lives of Afghanis.

Well, there's the will, and then there's the way. Vietnam taught us something about the difficulties involved in sending ground troops to a remote location with unfamiliar terrain surrounded by hostile nations and expecting them to topple a government. In Vietnam at least the opposition we were propping up still controlled part of the country, something which is not true in Afghanistan. Even supposing our military is better prepared for this than they were for Vietnam, I don't think much of our chances. Wasn't that one of Vizzini's classic blunders? "Never get involved in a land war in Asia"?

I freely admit that I overestimated the difficulty of toppling the Taliban. However, I would submit that we continue to underestimate the difficulty of replacing the Taliban with something that will do less harm.

And finally: suppose by some miracle we succeed in ousting the Taliban. Will that stop terrorism in America? Oy vey. Let's just go on to

3. Dangerous.

I admit I'm not a Middle East expert. I do know something about Northern Ireland, and one of the things I know is that it wasn't until the British government started using the police and the army against them that the IRA became a force to be reckoned with. Israel provides an equally compelling demonstration of what you get when you take the "you killed one of our guys, so I'm killing fifty of yours" approach to counterterrorism. In every location I know anything about, it's the same story: violence used by a hostile state to quash terrorism creates more support for terrorist organizations--which means more civilian deaths. So from what I can tell, the harder we hit Afghanistan and/or whoever's next on the list, the more extreme terrorist violence against American civilians is going to get. When Bush talks about "American casualties," folks, he's not talking about the military. He's talking about you and me. Our asses are on the front line as much as any of theirs are.

So far, here, we've been very lucky. The subsequent anthrax scare turned out to be the product of our own home-grown lunatics. There has been no reported terrorist activity on American soil since September 11. So I was wrong, perhaps, about the fact that this course of action was dangerous. Then again, perhaps everyone else who wanted this war was also wrong about its being necessary in order to prevent further acts of terrorism.

We won't ever know, of course; or more accurately, we'll never be able to prove it one way or another. If there is another terrorist attack on US soil while this war is going on, the hawks will claim that this simply proves that we need to keep fighting the war, or else we'll have more terrorist attacks. The doves can try to suggest that perhaps the war was what provided the motivation for the attack; but of course nobody will listen, because we're the Empire now, and the Empire only has one way to play.

If all we want is revenge, then war makes sense. If we actually want to stop things like the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks from happening again, war is the worst thing we could possibly do.

I still believe that war is the worst thing we can possibly do. I'm less and less certain that we will face some kind of material consequences. It looks to me--as it must look to everyone else--as if the US is big enough, strong enough, and ruthless enough to crush anyone or anything that tries to get in its way. So maybe it's time to abandon the policy argument. Maybe we will never experience any kind of retribution for the death and destruction we are dealing out right now. That doesn't change the fact that it's dangerous. Look at what's already happened to civil liberties, privacy, and freedom of speech and thought in this country. We can't rule the world without using a little of that rule at home; and the more of the world we try to rule with an iron fist, the heavier that fist is going to come down on dissenters at home. You may look forward to living in the new century's version of the Evil Empire. I don't.

It's hard to abandon the policy argument, even though I become more and more convinced that it's necessary. It's hard because I have so little hope that we will ever stop this war just because we realize it's hurting other people. I suppose, deep down, I don't believe that Americans will pull the plug on this war until it starts to hurt us. I think it is already hurting us--morally, psychically, politically. But our leaders don't change their policies to prevent that kind of hurt, any more than our fellow-Americans will mobilize or march or protest to prevent it. If this war never makes us suffer the way it makes its victims suffer, than it will probably go on for as long as we have the money to fund it. Unless there comes a time when people can understand the value of not waging this war simply because it's wrong.

So please, don't just accept the line that Washington is feeding us. Get out there and tell your representatives, your neighbors, and anyone else you can find that not all Americans are on this bandwagon. And please, do it before we start killing civilians in Afghanistan-- and before any more Americans die at the hands of their fellow-citizens.

It's too late to save the people who have already died. But that does not absolve us of responsibility for the people who are still in danger. This war has money, power, inertia, and the media behind it. Unless we try to stop it it will never end. Talk to people. Find other people who understand what this war really is. Stand united with them. And help stop us from doing any more damage, to the world or to ourselves.