For those who didn’t hear Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s exact words at a Aug. 26 press conference, here they are:

“And of course, the advantage of not acting against the moon would be that no one could say that you acted. They would say, `Isn’t that good? You didn’t do anything against the moon.’ The other side of the coin of not acting against the moon in the event that the moon posed a serious threat would be that you then suffered a serious loss and you’re sorry after that’s over.” (NPR, Aug. 27)

As Dave Barry is fond of saying, I’m not making this up. This is the secretary of defense of the United States of America talking. They are the words of a man wrapped in a sense of impunity, patiently explaining why our justification for waging war has just shifted: No longer just defending ourselves against aggression, we will now attack anyone we designate could threaten us in the future.

If you had just landed here from the moon, you couldn’t be more astonished at the speed with which this underlying imperial belligerence has been politically re-conditioned for popular consumption and cngressional approval. Within four weeks of Don Rumsfeld’s lunar lecture, rhetorical targets have been baited and switched: In our crosshairs now are not terrorists but tyrants. The provocation no longer is imminent threat, but 10 years of Iraqi noncompliance with U.N. resolutions, now suddenly intolerable. Our demands for weapons inspections have vanished; we now will not take Yes for an answer.

The rest of the world is listening, too. It’s a world that does not happen to share our president’s fairy tale notion that he champions an epic struggle against an Axis of Evil that hates us for our freedom. Or that blasting yet another country to smithereens will make our world safer. There is no country in the world, friend or foe, that doesn’t think it’s just a little more complicated than that.

For starters consider that Iraq – though Secretary Rumsfeld seems to have some trouble with this concept – is not the moon, but is home to millions of human beings each as capable of suffering, pain and anger as are we who mourn our Sept. 11 victims. They are people who likely are no less fearful for their lives than we might be if an unassailable military power announced it was preparing a massive military strike on our homeland.

One year following 9/11, we are in a struggle to isolate those who disregard all norms of civilized behavior and bring them to justice. Instead, it is America that George Bush & Co. now isolates in the extreme, inventing Alice-in- Wonderland rules to justify that least civilized behavior of all -one country waging unprovoked war on another.

Iraqis know that the sanitized phrase “regime change” means simply this: George Bush wants Saddam Hussein’s head on a platter, and is willing to spill as much Iraqi blood as it takes, plus politically acceptable amounts of American blood, to arrange this victory banquet for himself, in the name of Freedom.

Regarding American lives, it is not only U.S. soldiers for whom we should fear. Because the lavish bloodbath that will be upbeatly and surgically entitled “Taking Out Saddam Hussein” will imperil all Americans, as well as our designated enemies.

For who among us truly believes that all our border patrols or airline security checks will ultimately protect us from at least a gust of the whirlwind we will reap at the hands of those whose children we kill, whose cities we flatten, whose brethren we humiliate, whose neighbors we infuriate. Long after the President, Vice-president and Secretary of Defense have retired to their well-secured family compounds, the rest of us may well be paying a deadly price for their swashbuckling adventures.

So when our secretary of defense invokes the moon to explain why we have the right to do whatever we want to whomever we want, we have a breach of homeland security. When President Bush is bent on raining death on a Middle Eastern country that even the CIA has been unable to show has any connection to al-Qaida, we have a breach of homeland security. One year later, terrorist recruiters worldwide must be smiling. With no additional prompting following an initial ghastly strike, an administration playing Gunsmoke is set to make their work much easier.

Citizens distraught about the impending large-scale sacrifice of American and Iraqi lives, and about recklessly endangering our collective future, ought to send a less feeble message: Stop this Lunacy.

Time’s running out.

Dennis Chinoy lives in Bangor.