ts in both houses, Congress has just given vast power to the man who is already the most powerful person on Earth.

President Bush can now attack Iraq any time he feels like it.

He doesn't need to wait for Iraq to do anything that would even approximate a casus belli.

He doesn't first have to let the U.N. inspectors go back to Iraq (actually, the United States is blocking their return right now).

He doesn't have to await the approval of the U.N. Security Council (even though Congress bases its authorization, in part, on previous Security Council Resolutions).

No, all Bush needs to say is diplomacy has failed, and the war is on.

Valiantly, 133 members of the House and 23 members of the Senate opposed the war, some of them eloquently, including Senators Kennedy, Feingold, and Byrd, as well as Representatives Kucinich and Baldwin and Stark.

Credit goes out to peace activists for putting the heat on legislators to get as many votes as they did.

But not nearly enough legislators came around.

This vote reveals the weakness of the Democratic Party as an oppositional force, especially at the leadership level. Tom Daschle and especially Dick Gephardt undercut their colleagues who wanted to take a principled stand. And blowhards like Joe Biden at the end of the day gave Bush what he wanted.

Which is a license to unleash, as he so grotesquely put it the other day, "the full force and fury" of the U.S. military on the people of Iraq.

Thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis are likely to die in this war. And the U.S. military is likely to slaughter thousands of Iraqi troops as during the Turkey Shoot of the first Iraq war.

"We need to get over thinking as if soldiers who are killed in war are not innocent," Howard Zinn noted in a speech in Madison, Wisconsin, October 10. "In war, you kill the victims of the tyrant you are fighting against."

Zinn also underlined how our system of checks and balances, which in normal times does not function very well, totally breaks down in times of war. "Democracy flies out the window as soon as war comes along," he said.

Only one thing now stands in the way of the massacre Bush is planning: the organized resistance of peace activists around the country.

Congress has shirked its duty, but we should not shirk ours.

We must try to persuade a majority of our fellow citizens that this war is madness. Already, support for the war is wearing thin, and opposition intensifying. In rallies across the country, thousands of new people are coming to the fore to challenge Bush's policy.

Washington and the mainstream media are in for a surprise: A new peace movement is rumbling.

It will take an enormous clamoring from the citizenry if we have any hope to derail Bush's bullet train.

Clamor we must.

Here are three web sites that can help you get involved:

www.endthewar.org

www.unitedforpeace.org

www.peace-action.org

-- Matthew Rothschild

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