After one has gotten into enough arguments with one's friends, let alone one's opponents, one begins to dimly understand that there's a difficulty in coming to mutual "understanding" of the historical background to the present U.S. attack on Iraq. What seems quite clear as one reviews the sources, soon becomes an argument between creatures who may as well hail from different planets. One supposes that overcoming dis-understanding in the face of facts is what schools are for, but there's no time for us to return to school while the bombs are falling. And perhaps a deeper problem is with the idea that the sufficient step to convincing people to oppose a war is the marshaling of facts, however incontrovertible we may think the facts to be.

Should the history of events be understood more in the way we understand a painting or a piece of music, or maybe a lover, an understanding given life by its contradictions? If that's true, it's a waste of time to overmuch argue against this latest American invasion of another people by laying out the facts of the case, by pointing to the lies and duplicity. The facts are there for those with the stomach for them. In the face of second-hand news, news as entertainment, and propaganda as news, one can always be put off balance by counter-facts and counter-arguments, no matter how spurious. Argument serves truth only when the opposing sides have a proportional interest in discovering and acting on truth.

Power is interested in ascendancy, not truth. To our opponents, image is all; and a working assumption of the antiwar movement has to be that the population at large has long since abdicated its independence of thought to the mass media, if indeed a "population at large" can be said to have an independence.

To a lesser degree, impelled by the crisis provoked by America since at least the end of the Cold War, the foot soldiers of the left too often accept reasons and rationales that we would re-consider had we the luxury of reflection and a trust that chivalry in argument prevailed. Unable to swallow anything served up by the other side,we sometimes swallow too much of what we ourselves provide, and in that way lose a little bit of the independence of spirit we're struggling to preserve. Living in a constant state of war does this to people.

Not throwing our whole reliance on fact, on what else can we rely? It's a difficult quest for those who distrust dogma, who have seen too many victims turn into executioners.

Today's truth will be tomorrow's dogma. Even so, it's worth even a skeptic's time to seek and express beliefs that need not be run through the ranking of atrocities. One such statement seems to be:

The bombing of cities is not acceptable.

Does this statement require defense, discussion, argument?

Out of his experiences in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence, Albert Camus engaged in a similar quest for what are called here, inadequately, bottom-line beliefs. He arrived at a statement of personal belief - what others would call faith - that took into account all the above uncertainties. This faith was rooted in uncertainty. By virtue of that, it may much more serviceable than all those faiths based on all those certainties that have brought us to such woe. Christians as well as Moslems believe in heaven, and that belief has made it too often too easy for too many of each to devalue life here and now, and to kill.

Probably, Camus would not have called himself a pacifist. He wasn't an idealist; he didn't believe in the possibility of Utopias of any sort, and refused to work toward them. He understood our propensity to crime. He knew that no revolution will ever beat the State at its own game, because the State has all the weapons.

Camus settled for this only: amelioration of the immediate human condition and opposition to the immediate depredations of the State. He did these things to his best ability, and always stood in solidarity with the victim. Today it's worth saying, to stand with the immediate victim, not the one who was yesterday the victim, but who has become the State.

Camus put a lot of this into an essay which we're now putting into shape for upload. Meanwhile, here's the gist of it, the concluding section of Neither Victims nor Executioners. Read it, and weep for what the world could be.