I am 81, and I have never before been so worried about our country.  This is a different America. We are led by a president, who uses war as a personal instrument of U.S. policy, but I fear that most Americans have not yet faced that grim reality and its implications.  Most focus instead on the inspiring skill, fortitude and determination of our soldiers and the power of the war machinery they command in Iraq.

          The 24/7 television coverage of the war by CNN gives viewers only tiny glimpses of the true human impact of war.  Rarely reported are the innocent people torn to shreds, thousands of lives blighted, homes and villages and cities turned to rubble.  To paraphrase a line in Mark Twain’s “War Prayer,” the thunder of the guns drown out the unavailing shrieks of unoffending widows. 

I welcomed the front page of Saturday’s Journal-Courier.  It gave a true glimpse of war: graphic details of the butchery of innocent people of all ages; streets and alleys littered with decomposing bodies; hospitals without electricity or medicine; parents grieving over their children, some dead, others missing arms or legs.

I may have seen more of “war’s desolation” than most readers.   When our Seabee battalion landed on Guam in World War II, the air remained foul for days with the stench of decomposing bodies.  At Nagasaki, I toured the rubble where weeks earlier a single bomb killed 60,000 civilians.  In Congress, I visited many grieving families of sons killed in Vietnam.  In 1991, touring the “highway of death” between Kuwait City and Basra immediately after the Gulf War, I glimpsed fly-covered dead bodies in vehicles along the roadside.

But the carnage in Iraq is something new.  It is the product of a war initiated by the United States of America.  Our government has acted on a radical new doctrine: the right of our president to order preemptive war. 

In the days ahead, as in past days, the human toll of the war in Iraq will get little attention.  George W. Bush will be applauded throughout America as the conquering Caesar who ignored the naysayers and ordered a high-tech military force into quick conquest of the regime headed by Saddam Hussein, an evil, brutal dictator, declared by the president to be an imminent menace to the United States.        

The president, already strong willed and brash, may find the experience intoxicating.  It may prompt him to accelerate plans for his next military conquest, likely Syria.  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently publicly warned Syria that any “hostile acts” they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences.  Told of his statement, the president said, “Good.”

          Bush has the power and congressional authority to make war at will.  He need not consult anyone, not even Congress.  As the self-appointed policeman of the world, our government has established four new U.S. military bases near the Caspian Sea oil reserves and will soon have several new ones near the Iraqi oil reserves.

We have adopted the strategy of Israel, a nation long noted for its preemptive acts of war against Lebanon and Syria, as well as against the Palestinian people.  Out of mind is the condemnation of preemptive war by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1946. When attorneys for Nazi officers on trial for war crimes tried to defend preemptive war, the tribunal rejected their argument in these words: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” 

Bush describes his preemptive war against Iraq as an act of liberation, not aggression.  He described his war against Afghanistan in similar terms. Conquerors tend to describe their invasions as favors to local people, not aggression. 

We are in a new era, an era of American imperialism.  We embrace might, not right. We focus on power, not justice.  The war in Iraq is widely believed to be the first big step by America—the new imperial power from the West—as it sets forth to reorder the entire Middle East to suit its own security needs—and those of Israel, the only nation on earth that strongly supports the war.   

         We should return to America’s traditional commitment to the rule of law, not preemptive war, in international affairs and abide by the injunction God gave Moses: “Seek justice, only justice.”