The unjustified US war o­n Iraq must be brought to an end before more innocent lives are lost.

George W Bush and the hawks that have seized his presidency have created a new bi-polar world: the US versus the United Nations and most of its members states.

Apart from Britain, the ''coalition of the willing'' claimed to be o­n the side of the US represents a motley group of states unwilling or unable to commit troops or resources and whose support, in some cases, has been coerced or bought.

I join the many millions in the US and around the world protesting and asking how the US - o­nce a beacon of democracy, the rule of law, economic opportunity and individual self-realisation - could have turned into an over-militarised globocop claiming the preemptive right to bomb and attack other nations it deems ''evil"?

How did an educated, developed, democratic nation like the US come to be led by a misguided administration whose president sees our complex world through a prism of simple-minded slogans?

Other nations are ''with us or against us''. Iraq, which could have been disarmed peacefully, is just the first domino in Bush's ''axis of evil'' in the ''war to rid the world of evil''.

As with many politicians throughout history, war has increased Bush's popularity.

Reasons US strayed

There are numerous reasons why the US has strayed from its former role as champion of multilateralism and the international rule of law:

- American democracy has been gradually undermined by the rise of corporate power, which dominates the Congress. Both Republicans and Democrats are minority parties - each garnering

about 30 percent of votes cast - while the other 40 percent of voters register as ''independents'', yet without a third party.

- The corporate takeover in the US and its culture of ''winner-take-all'' has been the subject of endless press coverage, public hearings, lawsuits, and public outrage after the fall of Enron. Yet o­nly a few reforms, watered down by intense lobbying by interested industries, have been achieved. The administration's deep corporate connections, which George W Bush initially boasted of, are now a source of embarrassment covered up with media ''spin''.

- The conglomeration of mass media in giant corporations, which is accelerating under Republican control of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), chaired by free-marketeer Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, continues to narrow choice and further trivialise news and content. The Pentagon is controlling the coverage of the war o­n Iraq by training and ''embedding'' journalists within its force structure. The war is ubiquitously covered as virtually a video game of ''good guys and bad guys''.

The Centre for Public Integrity broke the story of widespread conflicts of interest and war profiteering within the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), which advises Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. This led Richard Perle, long-time Bush adviser and ''hawk'', to resign as its chair, though Rumsfeld has not asked him to leave the group. Nine of the DPB's 30 members have ties to companies that won over US$76 billion in defence contracts in 2001 and 2002.

No wonder the US public is confused, divided and misinformed.

Kept in the dark

The people were also kept in the dark about the cost of the war o­n Iraq until after it started. Bush, facing growing deficits due in part to his tax cuts, tried to force his FY 2004 budget (with another US$600 billion in tax cuts for investors) through congress before divulging his request for an additional US$75 billion for the first six months of the war. People were assured that Bush's global war would require no sacrifices o­n their part.

Now most states are facing budget crises and are cutting education and health and human services, getting no help from the now deficit-ridden federal government. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (architect with Richard Perle of the administration's September 2002 doctrine of preemptive military action) also misinformed the public.

Wolfowitz claimed that an Iraq war would be swift and that ''the Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberation.'' This position was reaffirmed by Bush's official statements.

All these tragic circumstances reveal the flaws in US-style democracy, which relies so heavily o­n a free press to act as the Fourth Estate, to balance and check the power of the president, the congress and the courts. If a free mass media does not, as Thomas Jefferson warned, "inform the consent of the governed'', democracy fails. The new Patriot Act, along with the new Homeland Security bureaucracy, continue to erode press freedom and individual civil liberties with more surveillance, secrecy, arbitrary arrests, and detentions.

The best way to restore the widespread global goodwill toward the US demonstrated after 9/11 is to bring the war o­n Iraq to a swift end; re-commit the US to its historic multilateralist role and to support of the UN; assure that constituting popular governance and reconstructing Iraq are under a UN mandate and that no US corporations or oil interests, such as Halliburton and others with administration ties, are allowed any preferential access to contracts. All this may require regime change in the US in the elections of 2004. - IPS

HAZEL HENDERSON is author of Beyond Globalisation , Building a Win-Win World and other books, and partner of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators.