by Rahul Mahajan

About the author: Rahul Mahajan is a founding member of the Nowar Collective, an organization that is opposed to the 2003 war against Iraq.

The United States is now a formal colonial power in Iraq, and the combination of the [George W. Bush] Administration's deceptions and the mounting American casualties has dimmed the shine on the colonialists' boots. In March and April [2003], public support for the war was in the neighborhood of 75 percent; by the end of July, it had fallen below 60 percent.

It might have fallen further but for the notion—peddled by Bush, as well as by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times—that the reason for the war didn't matter because the United States liberated the Iraqi people and is now building democracy in Iraq.

It is...