Many years ago as a student at UNH, my father David Diamond was arrested for refusing to "take shelter" during a drill preparing for nuclear war. There wasn't enough bomb shelter space for everyone, so he was just ordered to step across a line on the sidewalk to SYMBOLIZE taking shelter. Soon thereafter "duck and cover" drills were ended.

I became an activist as a student at Dover High School, when I watched the power of Public Relations devouring the resources and people of Iraq. When a few classmates stopped saluting the flag, the response was to hold an all-school assembly that amounted to a pep-rally for militarism and aggression, led by an Army PR officer. Images of Iraqis being blown up to rock music showed my classmates that it's us versus them, and we're awesome. That's when I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong in this country, and that I had to do something about it.

Since then, as a direct consequence of the US invasions and occupation of Iraq, millions of Iraqis have been made refugees, and perhaps a million Iraqis have been killed. Tens of thousands of US solders have been horrifically maimed, and thousands have died.

In 2003, I tried to attend a demonstration against the "Free Trade Area of the Americas" corporate globalization meeting in Miami, Florida. I was dressed casually, walking calmly down the sidewalk with 2 other people, a few blocks from a demonstration already underway and under attack by the police. I was arrested, charged with a felony for having a pair of medical sheers in my backpack, questioned by the ATF, and held for 5 days. The charges were eventually dropped.

February 5 years ago, just before the latest round of the war in Iraq started, I was part of a huge march in NY City opposing the impending war. The feeder march I was in was blocked from getting to the antiwar rally by the police, who blockaded and guarded each street between us and the rally. It took hours for us to get around the barricades or push through them, and then the rally was over. They didn't want the world to see how many Americans opposed this war from the beginning. They're afraid of the truth. They're afraid of public opinion. They're afraid that the antiwar movement might be effective. So they've hired the Public Relations industry to manage our perceptions.

In the last 175 weeks that I've done the news for my radio show on WSCA in Portsmouth ( www.nhmakingwaves.org ), I've watched the ever-growing disaster in Iraq twisted into a Gordian knot that even progressives struggle to make sense of. These days, logic and common sense are twisted by the corporate media to avoid offending the powerful in ways even Orwell would marvel at.

The most offensive strategy they use is "blame the victim." I heard Hillary Clinton making this argument just a few days ago. They say the US military has to stick around until the Iraqis get their act together. They can't leave until the "Iraqi" military can efficiently kill who they're told to, and the "Iraqi" government rubber-stamps all the policies on the US corporate wish list. The carefully cultivated infighting in Iraq seems to have side effects on their competence, or maybe the Iraqis are just "too stupid" to do as they're told. These are not the exact words politicians use, but the ideas they are putting forward to deflect blame from themselves.

We hear a lot about foreign fighters in Iraq. 150,000 US troops plus a secret but vast number of US mercenaries occupying Iraq apparently don't qualify as "foreign fighters." They call Iraqis "terrorists" for planting improvised roadside bombs, as if American planes and bombs don't terrorize the Iraqi population. They are called "insurgents" for resisting the puppet regime installed under US occupation.

There is always a lot of talk about the horrible possibility of "violence," but US soldiers and their guns are always described as the means of bringing "security," even when they detain and torture the innocent or mow down anyone nearby after a roadside bomb attack. These are the underlying narratives even from the most progressive news outlets, like the Guardian of Britain or the French AFP. Often forgotten is that every poll of the Iraqi people has overwhelmingly showed that they want a date certain for complete US withdrawal. The Democratic party can only tell us that we might have to wait for the next president to get us out of Iraq, in 2013.

The war will not end with the surrender of the resistance, because they never will. 80,000 Sunni fighters, faced with starvation, are taking American dollars and weapons to at least pretend to change sides. Bribing these enemies to become our friends is an unpredictable short-term strategy, causing worries for the pro-Iranian Shiite government in Baghdad. The war will end when America says ENOUGH and completely withdraws without precondition, hopefully before we stumble into an even bigger and more disastrous conflict.

Are Americans trying to look out for "me and mine"? In that selfish, self-defeating pursuit, it's seen as only rational to apply America's power to expand our economic exploitation of the entire world, rather than to expand the self-determination and equality of the world's people. Thus arming and politically backing antidemocratic regimes such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel is justified. Thus the creation of organizations such as the World Bank and IMF to protect corporations from the demands of governments, labor, and the environment makes sense.

My unjustifiable arrest in Miami showed me very clearly that freedom IS under attack in this country, and Americans occupying other countries only makes this problem worse. Yet when a law legitimizing the telecoms cooperating with the Bush administration on warrantless searches expired recently, Bush declared the eavesdropping would continue anyway, and the Democrats negotiated to extend the law allowing warrantless wiretapping. We need to hold their feet to the fire.

The pursuit of quarterly profits and 4-year election results threatens to rob us of not just our rights but our very future, and a meaningful way of life. The US economy remains hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels, a resource that is by definition unsustainable. Ethanol, hydrogen, nuclear, and coal only sink us deeper into this unsustainable, polluting nightmare of the "haves" fighting the "have nots." The use of taxpayer money to shore up the unstable excesses of Wall Street is just another part of this war on the poor, a repeat of the Saving and Loan debacle of the 1980's.

Speaking about the first invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Korb insightfully said, "If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn't give a damn." In a better world, such cynicism would be wrong. The world's people would rise up and stop every injustice, be it when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, when the CIA helped his party to power, or when the US government invaded Iraq based on fabricated intelligence.

In a better world, our economy would be regulated in the public interest and run on sustainable resources so that our society might be celebrated forever, rather than inevitably collapse from its own decadence like every empire before it. In a better America, we would be more concerned about actual poverty and the survival of our planet than the possibility that the sight of clotheslines might make a neighborhood LOOK poor.

In a better world, we would recognize that we are not just Americans, or white people, or members of the "first world," but a critical piece of humanity: the last hope that the human race might stop fighting over the spoils of civilization, and take action now, before its too late, in honor of our equality and the needs of all. Let us make the warmongers' nightmares come true, and become an effective movement to stop them.

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This commentary is a combination of an article I wrote for MW #175 and a short speech I gave at an Iraq war protest in Newburyport, MA on Sunday.