There was a surreal quality about President Bush's "news conference" setting out his case for why the United States must abandon diplomacy and accelerate the march toward war with Iraq. In a mood that many analysts described as somber but which I perceived as robotic and distant, Bush called out the names of a pre-selected list of reporters and responded to their questions with snippets of his stump speech about why Saddam Hussein is an evil man who must be subjected to "regime change."

The weakest element of Bush's presentation was his failure to explain what the rush is all about. Saddam Hussein's regime is beginning to cooperate more fully with UN weapons inspectors, no doubt in significant part because of the threat of force posed by U.S. forces gathering in the region. He has no missiles that can reach the United States. The International Atomic Energy Agency (which Bush inadvertently referred to as the "IEAE" instead of the "IAEA" during his press conference) has suggested that not only does Iraq not currently possess nuclear weapons or the facilities to make them, but that with a few more months of inspections, the agency should be in a position to verify whether all remnants of Iraq's nuclear weapons program have been eliminated. What remains of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs is really all that is at issue now, and top UN inspector Hans Blix is clearly of the opinion that the with the increased cooperation created by the threat of force these programs too can be substantially dismantled.

Given these realities, where is the case for a war that the Bush administration seems ready to launch within weeks, if not days? It's all about ideology. It's clearly not about the facts of the case - otherwise Bush wouldn't have trotted out that discredited line about a "poison factory" in Northern Iraq. The so-called factory, which was referenced in Colin Powell's Security Council presentation last month, is in an enclave in Northern Iraq controlled by the Islamic group Al Ansar, a split-off from the anti-Saddam Kurdish movement in Northern Iraq which gets the bulk of its material support from Iran, Saddam Hussein's longstanding regional adversary. Not only does Al Ansar have no operational links to Saddam Hussein, but the "poison factory" is not a poison factory. A group of international journalists, including one from the United States' only staunch anti-Iraq ally, the United Kingdom, visited the alleged poison factory site after Powell's presentation and found a hodge podge of shacks with barely enough electricity to run a few light bulbs, much less power a chem/bio weapons laboratory. It's quite likely that the Bush administration's new rumors about hidden Iraqi missile production capabilities and other alleged transgressions will prove equally dubious upon inspection. But the administration is banking on the fact that once the war starts; the time for these kinds of questions will have passed.

My friend and colleague Michael Klare, a respected arms analyst who heads the Five Colleges' Peace and World Security Studies program in Western Massachusetts, gave his take on Bush's press conference in a radio interview on WBAI in New York this morning. He said that Bush's demeanor represented the somber tone of a man who truly believed what he was saying - that Saddam Hussein is the greatest threat to peace in the world, that the United States has a God-given responsibility to remove him from power, and so forth. This is far scarier than the notion that Bush is the front man for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and probably closer to the truth. The Bush doctrine of "preemption" mixed with Bush's own peculiar brand of religious faith yields a policy in which overthrowing governments that the President perceives to be a potential threat to the United States at some unspecified future date is not merely seen as a policy option, but as a moral obligation. The fact that the leaders of most major religious denominations in the U.S., not to mention many of our major allies and the vast majority of the world's people, oppose a war with Iraq, does not seem to weigh particularly heavily in Bush's calculations. He has described the millions who marched against the war on the week-end of February 15th and 16th as the equivalent of a "focus group" and suggested that they won't change his mind, and he has apparently lectured an emissary of the pope on why going to war with Iraq is in fact the moral and holy thing to do, regardless of what the Vatican or any other religious authority may say on the subject.

So, where does that leave us? With a lot of work to do. We need the biggest turnouts we can muster at this weekend's International Women's Day actions against the war, and we need to stay strong and courageous if and when the bombs start falling. We need to continue to voice support for the governments that are willing to veto or vote against a war resolution in the UN Security Council, and try to strengthen the backbones of any and all members of Congress willing to denounce the "rush to war" and ideally, the war itself. Anything that promotes delay at this point helps the forces of peace. If Bush does pull the trigger on the war in the next few days or weeks, we need to keep the pressure on for alternatives, and battle the White House spin control machine in defining for the public what this war (and the other potential wars on the administration's agenda) really means for America and the world.