As the United States moves closer to attacking Iraq, it seems ap propriate to ask what we, the people, think about President George W. Bush's obsession with ridding the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

One day I went cross-country skiing along Fairmount Boulevard and I came upon a parked car with a bumper sticker that said, 'Attack Iraq? NO!'. It takes courage to put that kind of bumper sticker out there for everybody to see. I found a piece of paper and wrote, 'Bravo!' and put it on the windshield. Then I decided I had to do something myself.

Dr. Ingrid Lantner retired pediatrician from Cleveland

Consulting the most recent polls on the subject reveals a hodgepodge of opinions leading to the conclusion that we are not sure what we think.

Yes, a majority of Americans - 56 percent in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 64 percent in the CBS News Poll - favor the idea of taking some sort of military action against Iraq, even invading with U.S. ground troops to topple Saddam.

Fully two-thirds of us believe that Saddam was behind the 9/11 terrorists attack against the United States and is plotting with al-Qaida to launch more attacks, although there is no hard evidence to support either of these claims.

But when asked about qualifiers, we hedge our belligerence. We're split, 50-50, on whether it's good to attack another country before there has been any actual attack against Americans or U.S. interests.

Less than a fourth of us favor attacking based solely on the evidence provided by the Bush administration, and more than half of us would sanction an invasion only after U.N. inspectors find evidence of weapons that could kill massive numbers of people.

One of every five Americans thinks we should not invade regardless of what the U.N. inspectors find.

Given the choice, we, the people, would prefer diplomacy to war. In a Knight Ridder poll, 68 percent said, "take time to achieve goals without war," whereas only 27 percent want to "move forward quickly with military action."

One question the pollsters haven't asked is this:

Do you think you, as an individual American citizen, can do anything one way or the other about whether the United States goes to war?

The answer, I think, would be a resounding "no!" I imagine that most of us would say, "What can one person out of 280 million do about anything?"

Fortunately for the republic, some of our fellow citizens don't dwell on those odds. They were among the multitudes that gathered yesterday in Washington, San Francisco and other communities to protest against the war that most Americans believe is inevitable.

One face in the crowd was that of Dr. Ingrid Lantner, a retired pediatrician from Cleveland, who flew to Washington to participate in the anti-war rally. A native of Latvia, Lantner was in the front row for World War II as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union battled over control of her country. She escaped unharmed and eventually found her way to the United States. The experience left her shaken by the horrors of war.

Even so, until yesterday she had never taken to the streets to protest, not even during Vietnam, when her work and her children took precedence. Still, she says she is a rebel. And now that she's a grandmother she has time to express her feelings publicly. She's marching, she says, because Bush has not made the case for war - that and because of a bumper sticker she saw this month.

"One day I went cross-country skiing along Fairmount Boulevard and I came upon a parked car with a bumper sticker that said, 'Attack Iraq? NO!' " she said. "It takes courage to put that kind of bumper sticker out there for everybody to see. I found a piece of paper and wrote, 'Bravo!' and put it on the windshield. Then I decided I had to do something myself."

No matter what the numbers at yesterday's anti-war rallies, the intensity of the opposition so far pales next to the bloody protests of the Vietnam era. The elimination of the military draft has removed even the pretense that we're all in this together. Most of us can sit back and watch the armed forces that we have hired with our tax dollars do our fighting for us.

Even the forced extension of active duty for many in the military and the call-up of reservists and National Guard units have not had an impact on the majority of Americans. But, no matter how it turns out, we cannot escape the consequences of war.

"Most people don't say or do anything," Lantner says. "They are like silent leaves. But we should not be intimidated. This is a democracy. If enough people speak out, we can make things happen."

Brazaitis, formerly a Plain Dealer senior editor, is a Washington columnist.

©2003 cleveland.com

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