Salon.com | Sleepwalking toward Baghdad Behind the vulgar flag-waving bombast of the mass media, behind the pro-war chest-beating or too-little, too-late reservations of the nation's leading newspapers, behind the embarrassing attempts to blame the Bush administration's worldwide isolation on the French, there is a great hollowness -- the sinking, empty feeling that follows the dissemination and absorption of a Big National Lie.

Salon.com | Sleepwalking toward Baghdad One cannot reach the place of honesty required to answer the question whether war is required if one does not first accept what war means, and look long and hard down that hellish road.