The proposition that you can get someone to do what you want by bombing his country has been disproved over and over again, but arrogant peoples still try.

When the match is as uneven as that between the U. S. and what's left of Afghanistan, you end up with a slaughterhouse, in which the cutlery is wielded by one group of young people, and the livestock are hapless youths from the other group.

As is always the case, the butcher is aware that a measure of cruelty is needed to carry out his mission, and he's proud to be so gifted. No valor is needed, and none is displayed. All the carnage is done by remote control.

No nation has ever had the capacity to kill with the coldness we now are able to affect. We have weapons, guaranteed to destroy populations, that can be launched from hundreds of miles away, and we can keep track of targets from space. There is no contest between soldiers, but only between people, on the one side, and machines, on the other.

American soldiers see more blood after shaving than they do in a month of what is now called "combat" or "fighting." They willingly incinerate babies without ever risking a hair of their own. That must feel weird. I feel like a mass murderer, and I'm opposed to this adventure. I can't imagine how the willing participants must feel.

The "press"--as we affectionately still call the news desk of our entertainment industry--is positively buoyant now that we are inflicting the casualties instead of suffering them. Most public policy is now carried on to satisfy newsmongers' demands, and the current military adventure is no exception. Political correctness, of which they are authors, makes the newsmongers happy. Explosions in foreign cities are like music to them.

Undeniably, Paula Zahn is today smilier and perkier than ever. The networks give us good-looking reporters to lift our spirits (and sell stuff for the sponsors, who all seem to be drug pushers of one kind or another). The great tragedy of 911 has already receded into the distant past. What's left is ersatz nostalgia for the twin towers (so rectangular) and New York, which with Washington, DC, stood in the national psyche as the modern-day equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah in the months and days leading up to 911. Even LA was eclipsed by the venality, brutality, and utter sophistication of East Coast outlaw culture, but that's all history now. Now, we all love New York, and we all love our elected representative, and we all can talk about killing, unabashedly, and we're not afraid to cash in, either.

I haven't heard anybody apologize for making a buck off our so-called war. Everybody's doing it, and they're all proud to be a part of the spectacle. America needs flags, new cars, tax cuts, leadership, prayer, martial law, and guns, and the purveyors of these and similar goods and services are entitled to a healthy profit.

Imagine our embarrassment in the world. Caught prosecuting a bloody bombing campaign to satisfy the WTC lynch mob, we seem to have as our secondary purpose the enrichment of war profiteers and the empowerment of corrupt officials, who are beyond accountability because, according to them, "this is war."

They say everything is different after 911. I'm not different. Call me a sentimental old literalist, but don't expect a mass murder in New York to weaken my attachment to due process of law.

I dissent from the commentators, who seem to be unanimous in the opinion that arrests and trials in the wake of the attack would be a bad thing. No wonder. The crime's not solved yet. Bush's approach and that of the opinion leaders is to declare guilt by decree--since there's not enough evidence to prosecute under law--and proceed to punishment. Makes you wonder what the troops are defending over there on the Indian Ocean.

Bush says our most valuable resource is the military. Not the fertility of our soil. Not the vastness of our continent. Not our tradition of invention and innovation. Not our diverse population. All of these national resources trail the armed forces in value, according to our leader and most of his followers. And at the very end of the list of resources, dead last in Bush's uncomplicated little brain and in the national mind as it exists today, is our commitment to law.

This government of laws that was invented for us, the quintessential product of an age of reason, is a thing of compelling logic. Whatever the laws may be, the guarantee of due process keeps the sovereign at bay, as it never had been in the Imperial past. No star chambers, inquisitions, pogroms, or forced confessions for our founders.

They came up with a government of enumerated powers. Unlike all of its predecessor governments, this one was endowed with limited authority. Officials may do only what the Constitution allows, and the courts, in this system of checks and balances, are given the power to say just how far they can go.

There is no legal authority for what our government is now doing. Just as you are forbidden to shoot your neighbor, we are forbidden as a nation to engage proxies to kill people in distant lands. Our government officials are denied this authority because it is nowhere given to them by the Constitution. There is a procedure in the Constitution for war, but we have not followed it, and so all of the killing is contrary to law.

We have no more legal right to bomb Afghans than the Japanese government had to bomb Hawaii in 1941, and we shame the authors of our freedoms by indulging in these atrocities. I hear the terms "self-defense" and "justice," but their use implies that the people being killed are guilty of something, and no such finding has been made. The idea of the sovereign targeting and killing people without arrest, trial, or any determination of guilt was an old one by the time Jefferson and Adams came of age. Although they disagreed on much, there were united against this sort of justice.

What amazes me is the spirit of compliance that seems to be rife. You can't get people to obey the speed limits, but they seem willing and even eager to give up basic civil rights. Few people are kicking about:

Propaganda and disinformation. The lies come daily. They're so transparent, it's embarrassing. We're not targeting civilians (but we admit we're trying to spur them to rebellion against their government). The networks can't show tapes of Bin Laden because there might be secret messages in them (Never mind that the whole Arab-speaking world can view them uncut if they subscribe to the Al Jazeera cable television network). Hard to believe Americans are eating this stuff and keeping it down.

Racial profiling. Better not be an Arab or look like one. You're liable to be picked up and held without charges. Everybody is in favor of this practice, with the possible exception of the people who are getting locked up. There could be a handful of plotters or hangers-on among the 1,000 people detained by the authorities, but it can't be more than that, or there would have been advance intelligence of the attacks. Our law enforcers are hassling upwards of 1,000 innocent people, mainly because of their ethnicity. This roundup is so egregious a violation of what were lately considered precious American principles that it can only be seen as a sweeping transformation of national values. Racial profiling is as popular a tactic here today as it was 65 years ago in Nazi Germany.

Seizure of property. Our government is freezing the assets of foreign persons and organizations. The question is, on whose say-so? There was a time when they couldn't deprive you of property without a hearing, but those days are gone forever, and nobody seems to worry about the precedent.

Corruption of news media. Dan Rather says he'll follow wherever George W. Bush may choose to lead him. That bodes poorly for a free press--on which we used to rely to hold public officials accountable--but the viewers loved it, and Dan's as popular an entertainment figure as ever. Rather is typical of his profession. Reporters at a briefing are like pigeons around a park bench. They'll swallow anything that's thrown at them and are grateful just to be there.

Assassination policy. It should raise some questions. For instance, do I, as a citizen, have a legal right to advocate assassination? May I advocate government death squads, in general, to terminate wrongdoers? May I advocate the assassination of named individuals, such as Osama, for instance? Whose assassination may I advocate, and whose may I not advocate? May I advocate the assassination of a person in a foreign country? How about here? If I say Democratic office-holders should be lined up and shot, am I doing something wrong, or am I guilty merely of bad taste? Can I say my neighbor should be killed? My ex-spouse? Charles Manson? Bill Clinton? My mayor? My president? Jesse Jackson? Michael Jackson? If I can't do it, then neither can George Bush. The law gives neither of us a license to kill.

Lack of accountability of military or civilian authority. People used to get upset about overpriced toilet seats on military aircraft. Today the army detonates million-dollar bombs against vacant mountainsides, and there's hardly a peep. Crooked politicians, accompanied by professional government sex workers with official titles, imagine themselves wartime leaders and, leveraging their new status with the clever manipulation of fear and love of country in their constituents, make themselves immune to all manner of oversight and deaf to all forms of dissent.

Martial law. People seem not at all concerned that there is an armed government presence everywhere. Somebody's going to have to design military fatigues that blend in with stairways, corridors, and other features of public buildings, because that's where the soldiers are, and the "camouflage" they now wear is not fooling anybody. I'd like to be able to convince my grown-up kids that the presence of men with assault rifles at every corner does not mean that we are actually in danger, but I can't. The best I can do is to tell them that in all likelihood someone else will be killed, and not one of us. A few thousand out of a population of hundreds of millions is still pretty good odds. A few acres out of millions of square miles make only a tiny dot on the map.

Our liberties are simply the price of basking in the luxury of superpower status. The world resents nations that regularly try out their newest weapons on real people. We seem to wait for our opportunity to exercise the troops, and it almost always comes, usually after a lapse of four or five years since the last engagement. The leader of some nation whose people won't be missed--Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia--commits an act so heinous that innocents have to pay for it. We call this collateral damage, and it creates a continual security risk for all of us.

I guess it must be worth the bargain. Not only can we thus give vent to our homicidal urges, we get to prove the inevitability of U. S. hegemony, which we consider a good thing. It also turns out to be a riveting piece of theater. The networks all assign a theme song to it from their library of news themes. It gets an official handle and each network gives it a cute title. It's orchestrated as an amusement, and it's followed as a grand entertainment. A contest, sports fans, in which the home team must die at the hands of the visitors, us. Sport worthy of ancient Rome or the Third Reich, and what people crave in days of excess and decadence.