I can't agree that the Europeans who came and conquered the Americas had good intentions.

In terms of the "righteousness" of the current war against Saddam--an estimated 2.5 million people have been slaughtered in the last five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Saddam hasn't come close to that level of slaughter in his entire 35 years of rule, even when you take the nearly one million killed in the Iran Iraq war into account.

Yet, there isn't a single African nation on the list of the Bush administration's "evil" countries harboring "terrorists" and "weapons of mass destruction".

The majority of those killed in the Congo have been killed without any weapons of mass destruction whatsoever--starvation, machetes and rifles--and all the victims and assailants in close, intimate contact.

OTOH, the US bombing is incredibly "clean" by comparison, isn't it? And the Iraqi casualties are much, much fewer than many had originally thought would result from the bombing.

It isn't the bombing that kills the most people. Urban fighting, in close quarters and proximity, is where the casualties can become obscene. I'm fiercely opposed to this war. But I feel there is a certain disingenuousness about it, especially when the talk turns to the number of deaths. I wish the anti-war movement could be more honest about what it is that truly disturbs us about the Bush doctrine. It isn't the efficiency of war technology, which IS making warfare more humane. It is the taint of bloody empire on all our hands that we dislike.