I am an American citizen, and I am deeply alarmed by the harm my country has suffered. I used to work at the WTC buildings myself, and so did several of my friends. But the collapse of two buildings is the least of it. The deaths on September 11 were certainly tragic, but it is even more tragic to make those deaths into a pretext for killing other innocent people in far-away places. Starting a war does not make the world a safer place for the survivors -- quite the opposite!

It does not even avenge the dead, for not one of the hijackers was an Iraqi or Afghani. Most of them were Saudis who got their flight training in Florida. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, al-Qaeda and the Taliban were created under the Carter administration with $500 million of secret funding for Operation Cyclone, to destabilize the Soviet Union by spreading Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia. Some of the young zealots were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, within sight of the Twin Towers, and sent to a CIA training camp in Virginia to learn terrorist skills. Should we also bomb Virginia?

No one is denying that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are dangerous men -- and the US government should have taken that into account before it supported their rise to power. But Bush is dangerous, too, and he has access to many more weapons of mass destruction than Saddam (who acquired much of his own supply from the USA).

America today bears little resemblance to the country where I spent my youth, in an era when you could get a clerical job without a urine test, take a bus trip without having your luggage inspected by dope-sniffing dogs, and enjoy your country home without being buzzed by surveillance helicopters several times a night. This summer we had a houseguest, a Russian immigrant who had driven across the USA for sightseeing purposes. He really liked the American people he met along the way, he said, but he wouldn't want to live here, because the government is getting to be too much like Russia's!

I love my country, but I don't love the thugs who have hijacked it. Most of the Americans I talk to realize that Bush stole the election. No one I know, on either left or right, trusts the Bush government or wants this war. This goes beyond party politics. Orwell's 1984 was assigned reading when we were in high school, and we recognize the script.

I grew up drawing pictures of mushroom clouds and reading science-fiction stories about the mutant inhabitants of radioactive wastelands (perhaps similar to Iraq today, after our use of depleted uranium in Gulf War I). I made no effort to save for retirement because I never expected to live this long. One man of my generation told me he was puzzled as a small child when his mom took him to shop for clothes: why buy new clothes if you're about to die?

To me, it has always seemed self-evident that entering into a nuclear war -- especially, starting one -- for any reason whatsoever is a very, very, VERY bad idea!

With this escalation of the Iraqi war (it never really stopped), we feel like we are caught in the crossfire of a shootout at the OK Corral, but our real position is infinitely more perilous. Not just we ourselves, but everyone and everything we love, or might ever love, seems to be threatened from all directions -- and the most immediate threat is coming from the very people who claim to be protecting us. Some of us are so acutely aware of the situation that we find it hard to think or talk of anything else -- though we do occasionally wonder just what it is that we're being kept so distracted from. (The Enron crimes? The Patriot Act II?)

If several friends tell you that you're too drunk to drive, you'd better believe them. The USA's allies are trying to tell the American people that Bush and his cohorts are drunk with power and they'd better take away the keys. The USA must stop behaving like a "rogue nation" before all our allies turn against us and somebody, somewhere, does get mad enough, or scared enough, to nuke us. I do hope this antiwar movement can buy us some time and persuade Americans to wake up and reclaim their freedoms and their democracy before it is too late. We are not trying to bash America, but to save it, and to keep this planet intact for future generations.

Don't shoot the messenger!