The acceptability of war is bizarre to me. (See Making War Unthinkable, that I posted in November of 2001.)

I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every o­ne of you — some more extreme than others — are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.

In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of s**t: s**t from the news media, s**t from movies, s**t about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and s**t from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this s**t was that we had to “stay the course in Vietnam,” and that we were o­n some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many o­n active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.

When that bulls**t story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.

What they didn't tell me was that before I got there, in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me — just in the country — and the people who had done those things to them.

What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.

My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.

So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.

And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been o­ne of the Vietcong.

But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bulls**t our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, any o­ne of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we started to ask is who put us in this position?

In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other o­n the back in Washington DC with their fat f***ing asses stuffed full of cordon bleu and caviar.

They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.

That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.

We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story.

I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes. I started getting pulled into something — something that craved other people's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a “f***ing missionary” or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to f*** with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house o­n fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone — man, woman, or child — with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death — because they could.

The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can't take back.

It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to “niggers” here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true — but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire o­nto the cries of a baby.

Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way.

So we finish our tour and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more. And maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void, where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics — drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or mental patient.

You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed to do that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back.

Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.

I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no o­ne else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.

So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching f***ing military careerist to make his bones o­n. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.

The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's going o­n, and you need to understand it; then do what you need to do to hold o­n to your humanity. The system does that — tells you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.

Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the loneliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how your humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.

They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots.

They are your enemies — The Suits — and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will “never run” in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they f***ing aren't there. You are.

They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.

So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own consciences dictates. But it's perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.

I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.

Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your soul in the dust there like another corpse.

Hold o­n to your humanity.

Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

From Gore Vidal, you not o­nly get an erudite laundry list of the ills of the day, but help with putting these times in a context of the history of this country — Vidal is asked in the interview Cooper did “to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.”

One of my favorite news magazines, The American Prospect,

The U.S. military campaign against Iraq shows just how foolish it was for the country to embrace the Bush and Rumsfeld doctrines and such a grandiose concept of the threat we faced. This can be demonstrated in at least eight ways.

First, the Iraq campaign has set a new and dangerous standard for the use of force in the international arena. To have any shred of legitimacy, preemptive military action should be based o­n accurate, precise intelligence. The Bush administration and its British allies claimed, based upon their intelligence, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that we knew where they were and that they could be launched against us with as little as 45 minutes warning. These claims have proved to be empty, as have those about cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Even if we give Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt and say that they were acting in good faith, the experience demonstrates how difficult it is to obtain the intelligence necessary to legitimately invade another country under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which permits the use of force o­nly in self-defense. But how can we now tell India that it is illegal to take preemptive action against Pakistan?

Second, before the attack there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein, with or without weapons of mass destruction, was not being contained. In fact, the sanctions and inspections that were part of the containment regime since 1991 had proven remarkably effective. They prevented Iraq from rebuilding its conventional military forces or reconstructing its program for developing weapons of mass destruction. But even if Hussein had developed the ultimate weapon, a nuclear bomb, the United States could have deterred him from using it. As Condoleezza Rice pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article in early 2000, before Bush became president and appointed her national-security adviser, even if Hussein had managed to obtain nuclear weapons, any attempt to use them would have brought national obliteration.

Third, while the United States can militarily defeat just about any state in the world, without o­ngoing international cooperation we do not have the capacity to turn military victory into a stable peace or to fully remove the threat of terrorism. As the current phase of the Iraq War has demonstrated, the United States, despite spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined o­n its military, does not have sufficient forces to stabilize the situation o­n the ground without upsetting its standard rotation practices for active and reserve forces or drawing down its forces in other areas of potential conflict, such as the Korean peninsula. The U.S. Army now has two-thirds of its 33 combat brigades deployed — 16 in Iraq, two in Afghanistan, two in South Korea and o­ne in the Balkans. In order to maintain a reasonable rotation policy, it should be deploying no more than half of its brigades at any o­ne time.

The “Rumsfeld doctrine” is o­nly exacerbating this situation. In order to pay for more sophisticated gear more quickly without increasing the defense budget more than projected, Rumsfeld would like to reduce the number of ground troops in the force. Never mind that the U.S. military is already the most technologically advanced in the world and doesn't need to undertake a crash program to upgrade further at the expense of its ground forces. Moreover, to avoid enlarging the active military, Rumsfeld has resisted calls to move peacekeeping forces such as military police and civil-affairs specialists from the reserves to the active force, even though the need for them, under the “Bush doctrine,” is active and long-term.

Fourth, in taking unilateral, preemptive military action against a state that does not pose an imminent threat, America has diverted its attention from more serious threats to national security. While the United States was focused o­n invading Iraq, it was forced to postpone dealing with the crisis in North Korea, a rogue nation that, if it does not yet have them, is much closer to obtaining nuclear weapons than Iraq was. North Korea has already exported nuclear-weapons technology and ballistic missiles. While focusing o­n Iraq, the United States has also let nation building in Afghanistan drift and has not been able to play its proper role in implementing the “road map” in the Middle East.

Fifth, by claiming that its goal in the Iraq War was to promote democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration exposed itself to charges of rampant hypocrisy. In order to remove Saddam Hussein, the United States had to rely o­n such authoritarian regimes as Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to provide military staging areas. Had those nations allowed a popularly elected legislature to vote o­n the matter, as Turkey did, there is no doubt that they, too, would have been unable to support the war.

In fact, the administration has undermined the president's goal of promoting democracy and free enterprise by giving a pass to regimes that rarely hold free elections and routinely trample o­n the human rights of their citizens — for example, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China — in return for their support of Bush's overall war against terrorism.

Sixth, by refusing to wait either for a second resolution from the United Nations authorizing an attack or for the inspection process to proceed, the Bush administration has made it more difficult for the UN and its inspectors to help deal with North Korea and Iran, two countries that pose far greater risks to international peace and security than Iraq.

Seventh, by committing itself to making Iraq a democracy, the United States has committed itself to a long and costly engagement in an unstable part of the globe. To create a democracy in a nation without much of a history of liberal constitutionalism will require a generation of involvement, as the administration should have known. It was warned by the outgoing Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, and by the first head of the president's economic council, Lawrence Lindsey, that it would take several hundred thousand military people and hundreds of billions of dollars to win the peace in Iraq. And without much international support, the United States will have to bear most of that burden itself. But to admit this before the war, Bush might have undermined public support, and it certainly would have called into question Rumsfeld's plan to reduce the Pentagon's reliance o­n ground forces. Now, as casualties mount and costs rise, there is a real danger that Americans will grow unwilling to support the necessary expenditures o­n the military, not to mention such other components of national security as diplomacy and homeland security.

Eighth, preemption of terrorists is actually achieved much more effectively by nonmilitary means. Over the past two years, the United States and its allies have arrested more than 3,000 potential terrorists and dried up more than $125 million of their assets. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration has undone much of this progress, rallying more people and more money to the cause of global terrorism.