I guess it almost comes as a relief. It’s like when you’ve had a paper hanging over your head for weeks, and every time you close your eyes you hear a phantom rustle in which you can barely make out words: “Write … meeeee …” By midnight on the paper’s due date, when you finally stop checking your e-mail long enough to create a new Word document named “paper,” you curse yourself and dream voluptuous daydreams of the sleep you would be getting if you weren’t such a blankety-blank procrastinator — but it’s a relief, nonetheless, to know you’re done dreading — that the sword has fallen.

That’s almost what it’s like to know Bush’s war has finally begun. It’s been creeping up on us since the Sept. 11 attacks, maybe before. Everyone knew it was bound to happen sometime. Under the weight of that knowledge, “I hope there’s no war” turns into “I wish there weren’t going to be a war” turns into “Come on, war, just break out already!”

So it’s a small relief that the long-threatened war has finally broken out. Now instead of dreading that, we can worry about the specifics of fighting, or how and when it’s going to end, or, say, the ramifications of having just invaded a sovereign state.

Nice to have one worry crossed off the list, eh?

I admit that from this end, at this time, everything looks to be going swimmingly in Iraq. Viewed from above, most of the Iraqi troops met so far are an unbroken expanse of fluttering white. All signs point to a short, successful conflict of practically surgical neatness; I don’t think we’re headed for “Rilla of Ingleside”-style home-front agony and generation-decimating casualties. As wars go, this one seems poised to earn high marks.

This does not make it inherently good. There are absolute designations and then there are relative ones; the worst baseball game ever beats the heck out of the best war. A good war is akin to a bad orgasm or the world’s cuddliest scorpion.

See, here’s the whole point of war: killing people. No matter how much you dress it up with strategic maneuvers and calculated displays of strength, it’s just killing people to make a point. Human life becomes peripheral, a bargaining chip.

How can you back an action whose central technique is to trivialize life? Yes, war can serve a purpose. Scores of Iraqi casualties would send a much stronger message to Hussein than politely asking him to step down would. But expediency doesn’t justify violence. What could be a more expedient way to streamline our prison system than to impose the death penalty on every inmate who’s serving 10 years or more? Isn’t the most efficient way to win an argument simply to knock the other person unconscious?

I guess I’m a damn dirty bleeding-heart knee-jerk peacenik liberal hippie, but I don’t see a greater good being served by invading Iraq. I see the United States, land of the free and all that, playing thug. I see people dying, maybe for no reason but that they thought joining the military would be kind of neat. Casualties have been few — so far, this war is well below last month’s club fire in Rhode Island — but each one is still a life. You only get one round on this earth.

It’s not that I think Iraq is so great, not that more arms inspections would have sent Saddam running for the hills, not that belonging to the military makes you evil. I can’t imagine the courage it must take to say, “It’s for my country,” and go. I don’t know what else could be done to improve the situation of the Iraqi people. I just don’t think putting them in more danger is the answer.

The U.S. is supposed to be the good guy — not the tortured antihero for whom violence is a reflex. We’re a nation formed on ideals and principles. Shouldn’t we take the high road?

Although I have no idea what that high road is, I doubt that it involves initiating violence in the empty name of expediency.

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in English.