And when I say a very long time, I mean a very long time. Not decades, or even centuries. Try millennia! As part of the new Peace Movement, theater groups around the world are giving performances and readings of the classic play Lysistrata. Why? Because Lysistrata is a play with strong anti-war sentiments, expressed through biting satire. Never mind the details, it happens to be an extremely good play. And anti-war sentiments are highly noble. It's become a cliché -- because of its deep and lasting truth -- that nobody hates war more than the warriors. After all, who gets torn from their families, and thrown into a chaotic, emotionally maiming environment where destruction and slaughter rule?

Plays are good things. Culture matters. Part of why America and our friends fight in defense of freedom is to protect culture as an open forum to exchange ideas.

There's just one poignant irony here. Lysistrata was written by a Greek named Aristophanes in the year 410 BC. Anti-war protests almost twenty-five centuries ago? Well, humanity has had war for much longer than that. And there might have been something overly optimistic about Aristophanes, despite his mega-long off off Broadway run: Throughout these many centuries since, "civilized" nations -- the same nations who can best savor the culture of Ancient Greece -- have nevertheless continued having wars. Sometimes they fought each other. Sometimes they fought "less civilized" nations and cultures around the globe, to expand their own empires, their co-prosperity spheres. If Aristophanes meant to stamp out war, he failed.

Which brings us back to the present, and the spectacle building over intervention in Iraq. Lysistrata is being used to protest so-called unilateral American action! Let's pause for just a moment and take stock of certain realities. Diplomacy alone never unseats an entrenched dictator. Neither does governance by worldwide committee, when that committee can't seem to agree on anything important to begin with. Diplomacy must be supported by arms. The use of that armed power can and will be made flexible to the circumstances. But without the big and expensive buildup of American and friendly forces in Saddam Hussein's front yard, diplomacy would remain a paper tiger.

Yet Westerners are going to Baghdad to volunteer as "human shields." I don't doubt the sincerity of these folks. (Their sanity is another matter.) But the use of human shields by a belligerent state is supposed to be a war crime. Does that mean these volunteers -- well-meaning though misguided as they may be -- are aiding and abetting a crime against humanity? Remember, they volunteered. They can't use the Nuremberg defense, "I was only following orders." And they're being used themselves, very cynically already, by Saddam's propaganda machine.

The buildup to Gulf War II, whatever form that war may actually take, is creating a spectacle of another type thanks to the Internet: On-line gambling. When will the ground attack start? How long will it take to bring Saddam down? Different websites give you the odds. And a lot of people are placing bets. One newspaper recently said that a Gulf War gambling website put the odds of ground fighting breaking out soon, with at least 500 separate Allied military units involved, as 4 to 1. In other words, 80% probability fighting occurs. The article didn't specify what a military unit meant. An infantry squad? A tank company? A Tomahawk cruise missile? I didn't go to the Website to read the fine print. Frankly, I think this one misses something vital. War, in any rational sense of the word, has been going on with Saddam and his minions for years. Remember Operation Desert Fox? And if Allied aircraft dueling with Iraqi ground-to-air missile sites, with lethal weapons used on both sides, isn't war, what is?

If that's not bad enough, then there are the agenda games: It's really about President George W. Bush trying to relive his father's glory in Gulf War I. It's really about Big Oil. It's really about creating an American colony in Iraq, exporting democracy by force (which seems an oxymoron, but never mind).

People who offer these alleged agendas as reasons to pull back from armed intervention in Iraq are missing the point. Whatever family traditions George W. daydreams about, he is our country's Commander in Chief. Whatever windfall profits the oil companies might hope to reap by the present anxiety-driven high price per barrel, a possible post-war glut once Saddam topples could more than wipe out those gains; the oil business is infamously cyclical. And it seems that with so many other nations having prime interests in the area -- like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both bordering Iraq -- the idea the U.S. could really run a colony there sounds silly.

The definitive containment of Saddam Hussein is based on one overweening fact, the most stark spectacle of all, Saddam's own proven hostile agenda: repeated attempts to obtain weapons of mass destruction of every sort, willingness to use those weapons when available (poison gas against the Kurds), and his continuing financial (and other?) support of external terrorist groups. By the latter I mean, at a minimum, his paying $25,000 to the family of every Palestinian homicide bomber. Stopping Saddam and halting these horrors, permanently, is the essential and necessary goal of Gulf War II.

So much for agenda games.

Human shield volunteers deserve what they get. If you want to volunteer for something useful, join the National Guard.

The morality of Internet gambling is beyond the scope of this essay.

So here we are, from 410 BC to 2003 AD. Aristophanes, I'm sure you really meant well. Did you ever visit Baghdad in the old days? How would you have felt, knowing Lysistrata would be used to try to further empower the lying tyrant who's in charge there now?

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com