ARE YOU UNMOVED by the loss of the young Americans who have died? Or indifferent to the devastation now felt by their families? Or less than worried sick by what awaits the stalwart individuals poised to enter Baghdad?

Are you surprised that many of Saddam Hussein's defenders have fought ruthlessly and lawlessly? Do the discoveries of mutilated corpses in Basra establish something new? Are you confident that chemical or biological weapons won't yet be unleashed? Or sure that those weapons have not already been dispersed among others who hate America?

Do the deaths of noncombatant Iraqis mean less to you than the fate of your own forces? Are Iraqi children less precious than other children? Are the conscripted young men who make up the bulk of the Iraqi Army deserving of being smashed and killed? Are their families less griefstruck than American families? Do Ba'ath Party leaders care for the huddled people behind whom they hide? Did war planners not know that that mass of people would face death, maiming, homelessness well before the leading clique is cornered? Does it help a bereaved Iraqi family to be told its anguish is ''collateral?''

Would the war unfold differently if the age groups traded places -- with the middle-aged decision makers on both sides leading the charge, while wide-eyed 20-year-olds remained safely behind the lines? Would the war be popular if it involved immediate danger of homeland America's suffering war's direct consequences -- demolished neighborhoods, orphaned babies, thousands homeless, disease from bad water, hospitals overwhelmed? Can a people who have never been subjected to invasion, occupation, or all-out terror bombing begin to imagine what such things actually do to bodies and souls?

Does Washington stand ready to universalize its policies of preventive war and unilateral violation of sovereignty as new principles of international order available to all nations? Would Washington welcome such behavior from Moscow, say, or Beijing? Will the short-term definition of victory in Iraq survive its long-term global consequences, when ''disarmament'' and ''liberation'' become common justifications offered by other nations for aggression? As for consequences local to Iraq, will the pain of those who lost loved ones under Saddam Hussein's tyranny be eliminated by cruise missiles? Will America fare any better as an occupying force than Israel does in the West Bank and in Gaza? Is victory really the opposite of defeat?

In the age of world-destroying weapons, does violence lead to international balance and domestic security? Have the ancient laws of vengeance and vendetta been suspended? Will war at last put an end to war? Does the exercise of overwhelming force by a strong nation against a weak one slow proliferation of nuclear weapons if it gives other weak nations an urgent new reason to obtain such weapons? Does the context implied by such a question seem even to be in the minds of US war planners?

If American purposes are innocent, aiming only at the obliteration of disorder, does that make the new disorder that follows every such act of obliteration any less cruel? If, on the other hand, American purposes are selfish, aiming at economic hegemony and world power, does a war thus waged protect what makes America America? Do American motives, whether good or ill, matter in the slightest to those who are dead?

Can aggressive war be waged by those who grasp the bottomless tragedy of the human condition, how every story -- whether one person's or a nation's -- ends in death? How every untimely death wounds the absolute, and how unnecessary death is itself the mortal enemy? Knowing that, could America so willingly enter into the alliance with death that is war? Could America kill those children? Could America send its own young women and men to die? Could America, for that matter, so ruthlessly maul an army mainly of draftees who have no choice? Could America, more broadly, license future wars like this one, sowing seeds of untimely death into winds that now blow across Iran, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt -- around the very globe to Korea, Pakistan, India? Does a hair-trigger obsession with an axis of evil, in other words, align America with the axis of human good?

Does your nation any longer know that it, too, is part of the human family? That that family is now warning of a fatal loss of trust in the ideal for which the American flag has so long stood? Are that flag, and all who have carried it, honored by what is being done under its sign today?

These many questions boil down to three: Was this war necessary at the start? Is it a just war now? If the one heartbreaking answer were somehow to lead America to change course, away from war toward law and life again, would the dead have died in vain?

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

###