Back when I was a callow impressionable youth, my greatest fear was of single- and double-digit numbers. I was eighteen, still a senior in high school, and somewhere off in a jungle halfway around the world kids my age were getting their nuts blown off in an unwinable war waged for corporate and political interests that had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the protection of people in the United States.

Why did I fear low ordinate numbers? Because we had something called the Draft. Each year, some old white guy in a shiny suit, standing at a table in Washington DC, would start spinning a wire basket filled with numbered tiles. There were 365 tiles in the basket, and the first one out belonged to January first. If you were nineteen that year, and your birthday drew a low number, it was just a matter of time before you found yourself hanging out of a chopper taking AK fire over a rice paddy in Nam.

This was not your daddy's war. In 1941 a bunch of guys flew all the way across the Pacific to bomb the living bejeezus out of Pearl Harbor, removing the last bastion of defense between them and California. That was an enemy worth fighting. We have to recall that we weren't at war with Germany and the other Axis Powers until we declared war - mostly as an afterthought - on the Japanese. The next day, Hitler declared war on us, and the conflict Americans had desperately sought to avoid for years was on, baby. That was a noble fight. Everyone knew that if we didn't stop the bad guys, it was just a matter of time before the state food of Kansas was wiener schnitzel and sushi, because they'd already demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that they intended to kick our collective ass.

Nam was a different story. We took a losing war off the hands of the French (again), and set about losing it ourselves, against an enemy who posed absolutely no threat to the United States in any way, shape, or form. It was a geopolitical conflict designed to inflict one form of government over another, because BY GAWD we knew that the only good gummint is a democratic gummint, and we were going to force Democracy down the throats of the Vietnamese if it choked them to death.

That didn't make sense to me in 1972, and it still doesn't make sense. Fortunately, I was one of the lucky ones. I drew a high number in the draft lottery. I was relatively safe, unless Nixon decided to divert attention from the mounting suspicions regarding his felonious activities by invading China or something. Still, and despite my position of safety, I knew guys who were going over there to become rice fertilizer for no good reason, and I had to try to stop it. I joined in with other youthful anti-war protestors, and took to the streets to demonstrate and try to end the madness.

And you know what? It worked. Not only did we pull out of Viet Nam (sadly, not before we got shellacked by the Cong), but we also managed to can Tricky Dick's lying ass in the process. We felt pretty good for a bunch of skinny, long-haired malcontents. Surely we'd shown THEM. It would certainly be a hundred years before we ran across another administration as soulless and depraved as Nixon's. Right?

Right?

Well, I guess not. It's been thirty years, now, and here we are again, campers. Those of us who long ago learned to observe the lessons of history decried this ill-begotten Iraq invasion long before cruise missiles lit up the sky over Baghdad in 2003. We could see the handwriting on the wall, no matter how vehemently Rummy denied that Iraq would be another Viet Nam.

Nobody listened.

Okay, guys, before the right-wing history revisionists burn all the books and name an airport after The Shrub, I want to set the record straight.

First, and absolutely foremost: IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11!!!!!

There were no Iraqis on any of the airplanes that day. No Iraqis were involved in the planning of the attacks. No Iraqis assisted in transporting any of the 9/11 terrorists. No Iraqis profited from the attacks. In fact, Iraq had not posed a single threat to anyone in the Middle East since Desert Storm in the early 1990s. Why? Because they were embargoed. They were hemmed in on all sides by a UN coalition. Hell, they couldn't even get FOOD in, let alone weapons of mass destruction.

Second, and fundamental to the rest of my points: The so-called "war" in Iraq, which was never actually declared, was planned by the cabal surrounding The Shrub long before 9/11. There are records making it clear that discussions surrounding an Iraqi invasion took place among the Bush faithful even before the 2000 election. Why? Because Saddam Hussein had been an embarrassment to The Shrub's daddy ever since Operation Desert Storm. Daddy didn't finish the job by rooting Saddam out of his palaces and disemboweling him in the Baghdad public square in 1991, and as a result lost the election to Bill Clinton in 1992. Daddy Bush never got over the sting of that defeat. So, when The Shrub got a shot at the White House in 2000, Daddy Bush surrounded him with all the old Bush 1 cronies, put Skull and Boners Cheney and Rummy in charge, and told The Shrub to shut up, sit in the corner, and let Cheney pull the strings on the Bush Family Vendetta.

9/11 provided the trigger. We all know now, from Condoleezza Rice's own words, that The Shrub approached her on the day of the WTC attacks and asked her how they could connect the tragedy to Saddam Hussein. Huh? Well, they couldn't, but they did it anyway. They wouldn't let something as simple as the truth get in their way - family scores had to be settled. We know now, from the Downing Street Memos, that The Shrub and Daddy's Cronies intended to attack Iraq from the very start.

The justification? Well, since the United States had now joined the worldwide club of terrorist victims, we now somehow understood the problem, and it was our responsibility to wipe ALL terrorism off the face of the Earth, by Gawd.

The only problem? There weren't any terrorists in Iraq. Uh-oh. Hmmm. What to do about that?

"Wait!" Rummy said, "What about the Weapons of Mass Destruction?"

You know - the weapons that Hans Blix and his entire crew of UN investigators had never been able to prove existed. Those weapons.

"We gotta go in and get those weapons!" The Shrub cried. "Rush Limbaugh told me that the UN couldn't find it's ass with both hands and a GPS, so we have to go do their jobs for them!"

(By the way: he would use this same basic excuse two years later to make the Recess Appointment of John "Door Banger" Bolton to be the UN Ambassador - why waste a good excuse on just a single incident?)

So, we bombed the holy shit out of Baghdad, made a glorious - if completely unopposed - dash across the desert, and eventually dragged Saddam Hussein out of a spider hole so we could take pictures of him in his BVDs and distribute them on the wire services. Then we found the Weapons of Mass Destruction and proved to the world that our mission had been just and right.

What?

Oh, yeah. I forgot. No Weapons of Mass Destruction. Oops. Our bad.

"But wait!" Rummy said. "We just change the mission! Now we say that our real intent was to bring Democracy to Iraq, exactly the way we did in Viet Nam thirty years ago."

"Um. Excuse me," said all of us who actually remembered what happened in Viet Nam. "We got our butts kicked in Nam. We left with our tails between our legs because the enemy engaged in a guerilla war we couldn't win."

Nobody listened, of course, because there was this election going on, you see, and they were too busy listening to the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush trying to paint John Kerry as a cowardly Commie sympathizer. This was no time for The Shrub to admit a possible weakness in Iraq! We had to press on with The Mission. We'd make Iraq a democratic society if we had to kill every last one of them to do it!

Which, of course, sounds exactly like the rationale that was used in Viet Nam.

"But this is different," Rummy argues. "This isn't Viet Nam. It's Iraq."

Yeah, it's Iraq. It's a place where - instead of hiding in jungle thickets and sniping at enemy soldiers - we have Islamic radical fundamentalists who reject every tenet of democratic rule and aren't terribly shy about blowing themselves to kingdom come to make their point. Only problem is, they tend to like blowing themselves to kingdom come when they're hanging with a large number our soldiers.

This is why Cindy Sheehan is encamped outside The Shrub's Crawford, Texas bunker... uh, compound. She knows, as we all SHOULD know, that the entire Iraq debacle is a shell game of lies built on lies. Having invaded the country to save Daddy's face, The Shrub now - like the dog who finally catches a car - has to figure out what to do with it. It's "You Broke It, You Bought It" on a global geopolitical scale.

I think Cindy Sheehan should be Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Maybe she should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In a perfect world, her single act of courage in facing down the biggest presidential liar since Nixon would be the catalyst that would energize a new anti-war movement in this country. In a perfect world, seeing her selfless vigil, people of genuinely good will would take to the streets, march toward Crawford, clog the interstates, fill the hills and valleys, and converge on the Bush enclave with one, unfaltering voice, proclaiming that THIS WAR IS WRONG!

And, when The Shrub finally does make his escape and head back to his thankfully temporary digs on Penn Ave, we should follow him there, and fill the Mall with thousands of angry, chanting, vocal demonstrators. By Gawd, it would be 1972 all over again.

I don't think it will happen, though. I don't see the people who could make it happen - the young people - getting energized enough to mobilize and collectively voice their anger and rage. Maybe it's because, despite the lowest military recruiting numbers in decades, the youth of America aren't truly threatened by the "war" in Iraq. After all, it isn't as if there's a draft anymore. Nobody has to sweat out the rolling rat cage and the tiles with the single-digit numbers, wondering whether the luck of the draw means they'll have their asses shipped over to some stinking desert to get blown off by some suicide bomber or an errant landmine.

The kids of today won't fight against the war, because the lack of a draft means they won't have to go fight it.

"But wait!" says Rummy....