It would be nice to end this dreadful year on a cheery, upbeat note. To do so, however, one would have to be either totally oblivious or massively indifferent to nearly everything going on around us.

Charities in the international field have been told by the U.S. government they won't get the funds to buy food for distribution to the poor and needy that they received in previous years. College students are being warned their government grants will be cut drastically from what many are counting on to pay next year's rising tuition bills. Soldiers and reservists who thought they had satisfied their combat obligations are learning either that their tours of duty are being extended or they have to return to the nightmare that is Iraq and further risk their lives in that deadly quagmire.

About the only thing that is on the increase, in fact, (besides the costs of health care and prescription drugs that make life so precarious for many of the elderly) are the costs of the mess in Iraq -- the cost in tax dollars, in the incredible federal budget deficit that paying for the war is helping to create and, most of all, the cost in human lives, those of our troops and innocent Iraqi civilians.

Car decals admonish us to "support our troops"; the support they really need is from those who sent them into Iraq in the first place. In numbers too few to do the job for which they were dispatched and without adequate armor and other equipment for their own protection, our soldiers themselves are asking everyone -- up to and including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- why they are being required to fight a war for which they are so obviously ill-equipped. Support is needed where it would count for something -- from sources and with supplies that might make a difference in whether our troops survive or are mangled and slaughtered in increasing numbers in a war that gets worse by the day.

There is considerable irony in the fact that we've just gone through a season whose theme is peace and good will among peoples and nations while the headlines and newscasts scream of destruction and mayhem in a country to which we've sent 150,000 troops -- a country that an uncomfortable number of Americans couldn't have found on a map two years ago.

How people manage to reconcile seasonal proclamations of peace with patriotic displays of support for the carnage occurring in Iraq is beyond me. Two years ago, people lived in that country under a despot of the worst order but they didn't have to worry about suicide car bombers or contend with what they (and we) are told are nation-building efforts, carried out by an army of occupation. Two years later, we find ourselves ostensibly bringing freedom and democracy to people who didn't ask us to do so and at the cost of turning their cities into rubble, their streets into shooting galleries and their homes into trash heaps.

Deciding that peace can be brought to the world by spreading freedom and democracy is an appealing idea but it's a difficult one under the best of circumstances. Determining to spread freedom and democracy -- as we've chosen to do in at least two countries we've selected to be recipients of our beneficent efforts -- by sending troops and making precision bombing assaults makes a mockery of the ideas of freedom and democracy. It subjects the notion that we are about peaceful pursuits to worldwide ridicule.

In spite of it all, anticipating a new year somehow gives us the conviction that we can also hope for better things. There is something in the human spirit that refuses, in most circumstances, to succumb to despair, that searches for even the smallest signs of positive change and that believes in our capacity to do better in the future than we have in the past. Those of us who believe this nation of ours is arrogantly storming down the wrong path, on both the domestic and international fronts, especially have to guard against disillusionment and redouble our support of the causes and ideals in which we believe.

I wish for all a happy New Year!

Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

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