last month i did more of the march, albeit not much of it since it was cold and i was underdressed. today i went directly in my tux to the rally area in front of city hall and hung around there, listening to speakers and performers, wandering and taking pictures with my digi and black & white in my SLR. the rhetoric and the issues are as huge as U.S. imperialism and its foreign policy since the cold war. coming from what may be called a legal background, i was focused more on the illegality and immorality under international law of this impending war on Iraq. it's not really a war, though, is it? it's an aggressive invasion to seize control of oil fields. whoops, sorry, that's rhetoric. it's an invasion. don't you need two sides to have a war? No one called the U.S. sanctioned invasion of East Timor by Indonesia a "war".

but help me figure this out. the Bush administration is claiming we need to invade to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. and if we invade, what will stop Hussein from using those weapons of mass destruction to deter the U.S. invasion? And if Hussein doesn't respond with using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. forces . . . why are we invading? Or should we start invading, and if Hussein doesn't respond with the use of weapons of mass destruction, should we go, "oh, well I guess he doesn't have them after all", and withdraw? Furthermore, if the issue is getting rid of weapons of mass destruction, what does an invasion accomplish that the U.N. inspectors won't. it sounds like we're just going to attack and invade without limits or narrowly defined goals. so the U.S. invasion is to accomplish what the U.N. inspectors . . . can't? are we supposed to go in, push aside the U.N. inspectors and say, "I'm in charge here", and fulfill the job the inspectors were sent to do. but then why rain bombs on Baghdad?

one of the speakers at the rally was a family member of one of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. he mentioned how the Bush administration plans to subdue Baghdad with a tactic of "shock and awe", showering the city with Cruise missiles right from the start. You hit them so hard, and so big, that they can't respond. Recalling the events of Sept. 11, recalling the shock, recalling the awe, another word for the "shock and awe" tactic is "terrorism". Never mind the illegality of indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations and utilities necessary to sustain the civilian population.

If we invade, history will certainly show that it was an illegal act. Although history already shows that the international law of war is pretty much a well-intentioned farce. Hitler's war crimes are well-documented, but the indiscriminate fire-bombing of Dresden was no less in violation of the "laws of war". I once wrote a paper for "International Law of War" class, arguing the illegality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the professor was a military man who gave me grief at every step of writing it. Finally, when I handed in the paper, he admitted that, yes, by a strict legal interpretation, the atomic bombings were, just by their indiscriminate nature, illegal. And Bush will never stand trial as a war criminal because he would have won the invasion.