It is 2 a.m., Sunday morning. Perhaps it is the martial nature of my work, I am a third-shift security guard, but I am brooding deeply about war. I am beset by two contradictory fears. I am uncertain, in this feral drunken rush to violence, which will be worse: U.S. military success or failure. I burn each time our President assures us, lamely and straight-faced, that "war is peace, violence is security, preemption is defense." I burn not only because such falsehoods are odious to any free-thinking person but because we all know that this blind, bold, unilateralist attack harbors limitless dangers and myriad opportunities for the horrific and unimaginable.

But what if, in the end, all goes smashingly well? One more sour and intransigent despot finds his end. Brief, intense, but comfortably distant violence awes for a moment but the awe is quickly undone by pictorials of exuberant villagers coronating the new conqueror of Iraq. Peace, like anthrax in the water table, spreads in "ripple effect" from Baghdad to Beirut. The region, moved by so much death and carnage, becomes engulfed in unprecedented good-will. Will we then forget, because we are a nation of forgetters, the shelled hospitals, charred bodies? Wrapping them in yellow ribbons, nursing our own passing discomfort over slightly higher gas prices?

What of the great, crazy anti-war effort to preempt the preemption, screaming, 'our drugged and ambivalent support for war infuriates and confounds that vast majority of the world?' Will history see this merely as an obstacle President Bush overcame?

No matter what the outcome of this, seemingly preordained, unstoppable juggernaut of war, Bush will never be right. He will never be justified. But what if our great killing machine works perfectly as planned: erasing a nation from the planet, quickly, and with little discomfort to the executioner? Our leaders seem intent on lobbing cruise missiles like craps dice: gambling that the precise use of unprovoked force will effect peace. We must not let this debate over war twist into a debate of means justifying ends. No one has the slightest clue how or when this will end. Few tears will be shed for Saddam Hussein. This war isn't really about Hussein. It is about the desire of the United States acting to reshape the world belligerently, violently and unapologetically.

We must resist. We must shout out to our leaders in words they can understand: Gambling is bad for the soul and peace spreads on the wings of doves, not the hum of Predator Drones!