Participation in the peace movement is an unending occasion for frustration. Outside the circle of power, it counts on the facts, sound arguments and popular support to sway government. Given public indifference to foreign affairs and the victims of our aggressions, popular support often is hard to come by. When it is, the authorities, abetted by uncritical media support, ignore all that and go right ahead, unchecked.

The people eventually rejected the U.S.-sponsored contra terror against the people of Nicaragua, but that did not deter Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Their efforts to end the Sandinista regime never flagged, even when it meant impeachable violation of the law. Consequently, Nicaraguan gains in education and health care were lost and the country has sunk into dire poverty.

The clear majority opposed former President Bush Gulf War buildup in favor of good faith negotiations, but Bush rammed his war authorization through Congress, knowing, as did Congress, that once the bombs began falling, popular support for his course would rise and those who went along would be safe from retribution.

The pending war: Same song, third verse, worse:

The campaign against al-Qaida stalled, suddenly, last September, the administration launched a “new product” – war against Iraq. TV talking heads were instantly in full cry, asking only when and how, rarely, if ever, why and why now.

Over six months, the Bush folk have failed to make a convincing case that Saddam Hussein is a present or near threat to his neighbors, much less us. And the media have not seriously examined the radical Bush global domination foreign policy. Bush has stonewalled church leaders who solidly declare such aggression morally untenable.

The Bushies have never satisfactorily explained why containment, which is working, must give way to war, which could kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, turn the Arab world into a cauldron, escalate terrorist attacks, and cost our sagging economy over $100 billion. Announced motives shift from interdicting weapons of mass destruction to regime change to freeing Iraqis from tyranny and revenge for an attempt on former President Bush life that never occurred. Nor have they explained at all how licensing intensified Israeli repression of Palestinians that has destroyed their economy and left many near starvation serves to lessen the danger of terrorist attacks.

With a breezy arrogance, administration voices acknowledge the world domination motive: We will be safe against any conceivable threat, however many people we have to kill in the process. They don’t mention a second, securing Israel’s hegemony in the region, and deny the third, control of Iraqi oil, essential to world domination.

They insist, ad nauseam, that time is running out, when U.N. resolution 1441 sets no deadline, without ever explaining their hurry – save that the optimum time for attack this year is February and March.

President Bush, himself, argues by assertion, exaggeration and such lies as the claim of a tie between Iraq and al-Qaida, which CIA sources insist even he does not believe.

So it fell to Colin Powell, the administration’s one man of supposedly unimpeachable integrity, to provide to the nation “irrefutable and undeniable” evidence that Saddam had not disarmed. Never mind that Powell had been part of the military’s deceit about the Vietnam War, the My Lai coverup, and the glossing over of the “turkey shoot” war crime of mowing down soldiers fleeing the Iraq battlefield.

Powell trotted out all of the trappings of evidence and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, columnist Mary McGrory and nearly a third of the country fell in line. Bush quickly declared that “the game is over” -before any of the serious critics’ reviews were in.

The reviews, of course, were not good. Plagiarism of a graduate student paper, ancient intelligence, possibly tortured witnesses. Hans Blix undercut Powell’s best stuff. Scott Ritter dismissed it all. “A farago of half-truths, assertions, and over-the-top spin,” a member of Tony Blair’s Labor Party opined. “Hypothesis.” Shadowy CIA voices dismissed Powell’s strained linkage of al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein. And how can Hussein trace the destruction of weapons we bombed to smithereens in 1991?

What Powell nowhere mentions these days is his first rule for military engagement: War should be the politics of last resort and when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.” They don’t; well over half of the country trusts the United Nations more than George W. Bush and Powell, and war remains Bush’s politics of first resort.

Demonstrations and polls worldwide, the result of decent citizen instincts everywhere and an unprecedented peace movement mobilization, much abetted by the Internet, say no to Bush’s war, loudly. Despite unprecedented U.S. arm-twisting and bribery, the Security Council is poised to say no. Yet, all prognoses are that, failing of a U.N. go-to-war resolution, we will test our new military toys on helpless and innocent Iraqis – in and out of uniform, world opinion nothwithstanding – and ignore the blood, counting on loyalty to “our boys” to quiet dissent.

The peace movement is making a mistake in accepting that “loyalty” argument which invariably serves to snatch defeat from its successes in mobilizing against war. It should be telling the troops that if they expect support they should be refusing deployment.

William H. Slavick, a retired University of Southern Maine professor, is coordinator of Pax Christi Maine, the Catholic and ecumenical peace movement.