Dear Smiley-face Doll from Alaska, listen please:

You've accused Barack Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists." You were speaking of a professor named William Ayers, who got way too angry in his youth.

When Ayers was an alleged "terrorist" Obama was a 7-year-old boy who didn't know him. Ayers was violently opposed to the Vietnam War, as was a large proportion of the American public at the time. The Pentagon was a target because that's who was running that misbegotten war. Millions of Americans opposed that war because the United States was bombing and strafing Vietnamese cities and villages, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Our bombings were terrorist acts on a huge scale.

The silver-haired old gent beside you now, the one who picked you to be his running mate in the presidential campaign, was one of those people who flew fighter-bomber planes over Vietnamese cities and killed innocent people in their own country. To them, such pilots were genuine terrorists.

This semester, I'm teaching a course that examines U.S. press performance during the Iraq War. We've been using books -- such as Michael Massing's eminently readable, if deeply disturbing, Now They Tell Us -- that document the extent to which American journalists uncritically accepted the Bush administration's rationale for war with Iraq.

My students are bright, and they certainly appreciate the importance of critical thinking. Nonetheless, they have had a hard time accepting the awful truth that the U.S. press corps was complicit in the administration's propaganda campaign to secure popular support for the war.

It's hard to refrain from saying, "I told you so."

I first began pleading, way back about 18 years ago: "Let's not start wars in the Middle East. Please. Don't attack Iraq, George Bush."

The first time, I was speaking of George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States. He was getting ready to hit Iraq for attacking Kuwait. Old George's popularity ratings were way down (as Bush popularity ratings tend to go as soon as they get in the White House), and here was a chance for him to look righteous and strong, even if it meant turning suddenly against an old ally, Saddam Hussein.

We know Hussein was vicious and nuts, but we'd been sucking up to him because of certain oil-supply realities and because he was an enemy of our "enemy," Iran. Maybe you remember that photograph of Donald Rumsfeld bowing to and shaking hands with Saddam, who had been gassing Kurds with chemical weapons acquired from American businesses. It's one of my favorite news photographs of all time, because it is the purest image of political hypocrisy that ever stood before a camera lens.

Dear Sen. McCain:

I duly admire your courage. I like a couple of your ideas. But we need moral judgment in the White House, so I'm going to lecture you now on right and wrong. I can do that, because I'm even older than you, and I've never killed civilians. Listen, please:

Bombing, invading and occupying the countries of people who have never attacked us is not right, it's wrong. It is a crime. Crime does not pay. Once you do it, you are morally unable to prevail; you deserve to lose. Even if you can somehow convince yourself that you're getting away with it, it's still a crime. Even if you think you can make someone else's botched crime more efficient by taking control, it's still a crime, and it would be wrong for you to perpetuate it.

The only right thing to do about a crime, if you're in a position to do anything about it, is to put a stop to it and see that the culprits are brought to justice.

Let me say it again, because you seem to be a slow learner: crime is wrong, and whether you do it adeptly or poorly, it won't pay, because it's still a crime.

Former Pentagon and State Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg knows a lot about the lies politicians from both major parties use to generate support for unpopular and costly wars.

Though it felt awkward asking him for permission to tape our recent phone conversation, he readily agreed. Since the host of his upcoming will be ACLU-Indiana, we began our conversation with that topic.

TPH: The theme of the ACLU-Indiana banquet that you will address is: "Restore American Democracy: A Call for Change." What kind of changes will you be calling for?

Howard Zinn, eminent peacemonger and sage, can really set you to thinking.

He wrote to me last week that he'd given a Veterans Day speech in Worcester, Mass., telling the audience what Veterans Day should be: a day we pledge "No more veterans!"

Wow! Is that a loaded idea!

Stop making veterans. Pledge to stop making wars for so long that peace outlives even the oldest veterans. Think of it.

A busload of card-carrying peace activists, jacked up on caffeine and shared contempt for the Bush war machine and a Democratic Congress that needs to dial 1-800-GROW-A-SPINE, rolled out of Bloomington early Oct. 27 to join several thousands more in Chicago for one of 11 regional anti-war demonstrations that took place that day.

Bloomington Peace Action Coalition (BPAC) organizers Christine Glaser and Timothy Baer led that group to the Windy City. And several other area groups and individuals met them there.

Other cities that participated included Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Orlando and Seattle.

We know by now that our troops have been fighting and dying in Iraq longer than they fought in World War II.

Might as well mention also that we’ve been fighting and dying in Iraq’s civil war as long as we did in our own Civil War (1861-65).

George W. Bush has put David Petraeus, surge-in general of the United States, out front pitching his case for making it last longer. What U.S. military officer ever had a harder mission assigned to him: trying to convince Congress and the American people that Bush is telling the truth about something he’s lied about for five years? About his reason for starting it; about “Mission Accomplished” when it was just beginning; about its costs; about its progress, etc., etc.

Do you know where Zimbabwe is? I’ll give you a hint -- Africa, the most fucked up continent on the planet. We’ve become so desensitized to the problems of Africa because all we hear about is the famine, disease, repression, and death. That’s what’s expected of Africa.

We send our soldiers into Somalia (think Black Hawk Down) only to get our embassies blown up. It almost seems they just don’t appreciate what help we try to provide. Zimbabwe, with a total population of 12 million people, is just a speck on our radar screens. Zimbabwe’s total population is still only half as many people as are in New York City, and 25 percent of the adult population is HIV positive, with an 80 percent unemployment rate.

The economy of Wal-Mart is over 100 times bigger than the economy of Zimbabwe, and people aren’t expected to live past 40. Have I emphasized this point enough? We don’t really care too much about Africa because it’s not economically worth it.

Elizabeth Verbich-Britton doesn’t think for a minute that her opinion on the Iraq war is any more valuable than any other American’s. But because her husband is a soldier in Iraq, it’s a bit more personal for her.

So, when her landlord forced her to remove her “U.S. Out of Iraq Now!” poster from her bedroom window, she was incensed.

“The sign was up for about a month,” she said during an interview at her apartment on East 10th Street. “I heard nothing from anyone about it, and then all of a sudden I got a letter from Woodbridge management saying I had to take the sign out of my window. And of course I was angry right away.”

After Verbich-Britton analyzed the rule cited by the apartment management and consulted with a couple attorneys, she was even angrier.

“Basically the way leases are written it’s all about the lessors’ rights, and the lessees have no rights at all,” she said. So she took her message to another venue, one that Woodbridge management couldn’t touch.