A U.S. Marines officer came up to me after I gave a lecture at the University of North Carolina last night to tell me he was departing from his young wife and child in three days time to go to Central Command in Tampa for the start of a longer journey. It's the same all over America....

A vast American armada is slowly taking shape – huge quantities of armour and ordnance are being moved around the world right now from the United States – and most of America doesn't even know it. "See you there," I said to the marine last night as we parted company. "Oh, are you going to Central Command?" he asked innocently. "No," I told him. "You're going to Iraq."

"Saddam's Merry Dance Cannot Hide the Sad Inevitability of Events"

Robert Fisk, London Independent, 11/13/02

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA in the United States seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief last week as Saddam Hussein announced he would accept the United Nations Security Council resolution and allow arms inspectors free access to Iraq. But behind the scenes, almost everyone with any sense thinks the U.N. inspections are just a cover for what President George W. Bush has already set in motion: a full-scale United States invasion of a sovereign nation for the purpose of deposing a ruler the White House doesn't like.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the antiwar movement is already large and growing, a far broader and more sophisticated coalition than existed in the early days of the Vietnam War or the first Gulf War. Think about it: the war hasn't even begun, and already as many as 100,000 people jammed Market Street a few weeks ago to protest the looming invasion.

But as we also report this week, the issues involved in this war are complicated – and with the Republicans in control of not only the White House but also the House and Senate, the peace movement needs to be as savvy as any mass movement has ever been if it wants to prevent a disastrous war and long-term occupation that would forever damage the United States, the United Nations, and the concept of international law.

That's not to say the situation is beyond salvation. Daniel Ellsberg, the prominent 1960s peace activist, is fond of reminding people that the antiwar protestors did, in fact, stop the Vietnam War. Already the visible, active work of thousands and thousands of people around the nation has had an impact – on the major media and members of Congress. An Oct. 31 poll by the Pew Research Center found that support for war in Iraq had fallen from 62 percent to 51 percent in the month of October alone. And only 27 percent supported a unilateral U.S. invasion.

In other words, as bleak as it sometimes seems, resistance is not futile.

• • •

The case against invading Iraq only becomes more compelling as time passes and the march to war continues.

On the broadest level, by invading, the United States would be violating one of the most lasting, consistent doctrines guiding U.N. policy, one that has been a working consensus among most nations for at least half a century: you don't invade another country with a full-on military force just to change how that country is governed. The impact of such an action on the part of the United States would be profound: if the world's only superpower can't respect the fundamental tenets of peace and international security, what sort of moral authority will this nation ever have in the future – and what sort of respect will any other potential aggressor nation have for world opinion?

Bush has tried repeatedly to convince Congress and the American people that an invasion is necessary for domestic security – but the evidence just isn't there. At this point, there is no convincing link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (quite the opposite – as Stephen Zunes points out in the Web site Foreign Policy in Focus Project, the radical Islamists hate Hussein, and he hates them. The largest supporters and participants in al-Qaeda come from Saudi Arabia – a U.S. ally). Even the evidence that Hussein has significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction is shaky – as Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute notes in a report for the Institute for Policy Studies, former U.N. weapons inspectors and even the Central Intelligence Agency says that it's highly unlikely Hussein has a nuclear warhead and that most of his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed. And while he's almost certainly rebuilt some stockpiles since inspections halted four years ago, he most likely lacks the technology to deliver those weapons in a way that would threaten neighboring states (much less the United States).

In fact, while the Bush administration has attacked the U.N. inspections process as slow, unreliable, and ineffective, the truth is that the process has, to a large degree, worked.

Then there are the most basic, practical problems with going to war. Invading Iraq will be a long, messy process: the city of Baghdad, for example, where many of the elite Iraqi troops will mass for battle, is roughly the size of Los Angeles; either the United States will have to bomb indiscriminately (killing tens of thousands of civilians) or troops will have to fight house-to-house, not knowing which residents are civilians (who won't be happy with the invaders' presence anyway) and which are soldiers. It could make Vietnam look like a cakewalk.

And if Hussein does still have chemical and biological weapons, he's most likely to use them against invaders.

The war will cost billions, devastating an already weak U.S. economy and cutting into spending for desperately needed services at home. (Remember the recession of 1991-92, which was directly related to the first Gulf War?) And suppose the invasion is successful? Then what? There's no effective internal opposition ready to take power. Will the United States impose a military government on Iraq – with a hostile population, in a hostile region? For how long? How much will Bush be willing to spend to rebuild the country?

Or is the real goal to seize control of the world's second-largest proven oil reserves – and allow the people of Iraq to die of malnutrition and disease?

The antiwar logic is inescapable. The antiwar movement is growing. If protesters can keep filling the streets, keep thousands of letters flowing into Congress, keep bombarding the news media with images of Americans who don't think Bush's war makes any sense, maybe it's possible to stop this conflagration before thousands and thousands of body bags start arriving back home.