I've written before about the myth of the heartland — roughly speaking, the "red states," which voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, as opposed to the "blue states," which voted for Al Gore. The nation's interior is supposedly a place of rugged individualists, unlike the spongers and whiners along the coasts. In reality, of course, rural states are heavily subsidized by urban states. New Jersey pays about $1.50 in federal taxes for every dollar it gets in return; Montana receives about $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it pays in taxes.

Any sensible program of spending on homeland security would at least partly redress this balance. The most natural targets for terrorism lie in or near great metropolitan areas; surely protecting those areas is the highest priority, right?

Apparently not. Even in the first months after Sept. 11, Republican lawmakers made it clear that they would not support any major effort to rebuild or even secure New York. And now that anti-urban prejudice has taken statistical form: under the formula the Department of Homeland Security has adopted for handing out money, it spends 7 times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming as it does protecting each resident of New York.

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.

"Here is a list of the serial lying from the Bush Regime about Iraq, including links to a cross section of all the news sources."

While the U.S. government spends billions of dollars to wage war against Iraq, some 30 million people in the United States go hungry, 12 million of whom are children, says Anuradha Mittal, co-director of the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (IFDP).

"What it [television war coverage] does is leave people with the impression that they have learned when all they have done is feel."

The "terrorist" is generally considered such because he is indifferent to the fate of civilians. As the Iraqis, lacking B-52s and tens of thousands of bombs, turn to guerrilla tactics, their use of civilian shields properly horrifies us. Yet when civilians are terrorized in their homes by our high-tech explosives, their deaths and sorrow are considered beside the point or "collateral." ...

Language is everything here, as always has been the case with war propaganda, wherein the goal is inevitably the rationalization of unsavory means through the assertion of a noble end. To this end, we are on a mission to "liberate" the people of Iraq from a cruel dictator our own government supported, even armed, during decades of war crimes and human rights abuses.

After sweeping aside a U.N. disarmament program that was working, and now with the United States unable to produce evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, we find after-the-fact justification for our preemptive invasion in our talk of Saddam Hussein's desperate resort to guerrilla tactics.

How easy to forget that our own war for independence was largely fought by "irregulars" condemned as terrorists by the British because they would snipe from behind scattered trees rather than fight from the tight parade formations that were the civilized form of warfare in those days.