Leaving aside the torrent of welded politics and propaganda, one simple question predominates. How many people supporting the attack on Iraq would feel the same if they risked their own homes being bombed? If the armchair generals were equally prepared to risk extreme violence being visited on themselves, they have a case. If not, they don't.
If "war" meant more than a "shock and awe" televisual spectacle, human life might mean something too. A tiny incident on Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's cheerleader-in-chief for bombing Iraq, was salutary this week. One of the channel's army of mannequin-faced, dentally-sublime hacks was enjoying a drool-in with a hawkish, ex-US army bloke about the expected attack strategy.
Signing-off, the hawk, remembering to spout some folksy guff, congratulated mannequin man on the recent birth of his son. Mannequin man beamed. His fully-bared teeth, a proliferating weapon of mass media, acted like a retina-piercing strobe light as he accepted the congratulations. Then the prat resumed eulogising the bombs and weapons that will kill other people's babies.
On another channel, US Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, arms aloft like a victorious heavyweight champion, entered a hangar full of cheering soldiers, rock music blaring. "Make no mistake, when the president says 'go', it's hammer time," he barked to deafening grunts, whooping and cheering. "Hammer time", indeed.
Wealthy bullies in expensive suits, spouting self-righteous rhetoric are ordering soldiers to blast, burn, butcher, slaughter, massacre, dismember, leave starving, render homeless - basically "destroy" (George Bush's word) - poor people, as though they were vermin. Of course, it's all for the good of the poor people.
The US is now controlled by an extreme right faction. The regular right, whether people agree with such politics or not - in Ireland, most do - has cogent arguments and deserves to be heard. But this outfit - dragging with it Britain's "New Labour" - is clearly dangerous and belligerent to a degree that is not even in the interests of most Americans. It's hard to know what to do.
In the left-wing tyranny of Joe Stalin's gulags, ideas to boost a prisoner's chances of survival crystallised into three axioms. One: don't show fear. Two: never ask for anything. Three: believe nothing the powers that be tell you. These axioms provided no guarantee of survival, of course, but adherence to them was widely held to maximise an inmate's chances.
Now that world opinion against an attack on Iraq has, as expected, been ignored, the gulag axioms have renewed relevance amid this latest extremism. The broad world order that has, despite aberrations, existed since 1945, is gone. The age of the state-sanctioned, pre-emptive attack is upon us as unanswerable power chooses countries to be ideologically gulag-ised . . . for their own re-education and betterment, of course.
Perhaps we ought to adapt the wisdom of the gulags. One: if people against the attack are cowed, it's too easy for the bully boys and girls. It will surely encourage them. Two: there is no point in asking pro-attack politicians and supporters to reconsider. Three: only idiots will believe the briefings of US General Tommy Franks and his Hollywood-inspired Qatar show.
Franks's job is, after all, to win over media and public opinion. He already has huge and influential battalions of media cheerleaders. Resignation, fatigue and propaganda are expected to mollify much of the public opinion against an attack. Opposition to pre-emptive slaughter will, its godfathers and cheerleaders hope, crumble and the world will quickly forget.
Perhaps it will - but only if we let it. If you believed it wrong on February 15th, when six million people (100,000 of them in Dublin) marched against the attack, nothing has changed to make it any less wrong. Unless you want to join the cowardly new world and self-regard of Clare Short, there is no reason to cease resisting.
Despite the politics, "diplomacy', spin and the rest of the charade, a country is being devastated. Even if killings are few and the "liberation" lie convincing, the pre-emptive nature of the US and British attack, without UN sanction, breaches the guiding principles of the last half-century. Indeed, this outrage breaches the principles of democracy formulated in the late 18th century.
Absolutism decreed that a monarch had absolute power; that he combined political and religious power through divine right; that rulers be selected by family line; that subjects must accept and obey the authority of the monarch; that government existed for its own sake and people existed to serve the monarch. Remind you of anybody central to the attack on Iraq? Democracy decreed the opposite. Yet this slaughter, we are told, is being conducted to promote democracy. As poor Iraqis are "destroyed" - maybe some relatively poor Yanks and British too - the bullies and their armchair acolytes remain contemptuous of world opinion, the UN, Hans Blix, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, religious leaders and common humanity. Ask not on whom the bomb falls . . .