We all hope that there will be irrefutable and incontrovertible proof that these bio-chemical and nuclear weapons were not planted there by American or coalition forces.

We all hope that the elusive mobile laboratories for the development of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction will all be taken off Iraqi super highways and byways and placed in a huge parking lot for the entire world to examine.

We all hope that the Iraqi people will finally come to their senses and realize that twelve years of embargo, bombing, and occasionally holding back humanitarian aid from the UN food for oil program was really for their own good. Our own strongest coalition ally, Tony Blair, says that 400,000 Iraqi children have died of malnutrition in the past five years while others put the estimate at 500,000 in the past twelve years.

We all hope that the stories appearing in foreign news about the U.S. use of cluster bombs on Iraqi cities, in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the resultant death and injury of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children are false.

We all hope that Donald Rumsfeld has been telling us the truth when he claims that American "smart bombs" are directed with great precision at Iraq's military headquarters and Saddam's strongholds with only an occasional mishap like the one dropped on a Kuwait shopping center or a couple of Baghdad neighborhoods where Saddam might have been or the hotel where foreign correspondents were killed. Every war has collateral damage.

We all hope that the eighty to ninety-seven percent of the people in countries throughout the world who are against this war, even within our coalition allies England, Spain, and Australia, will change their minds once victory is assured and again think of us as "the good guys."

We all hope that the world's greatest superpower is not going to use this small nation as a base of military operation from which to wage war against every other nation in the Islamic world under the same pretext of "first strike" against anyone that might harm us.

But most of all, we hope that the other nations of the world will chip in to help us rebuild Iraq and provide humanitarian aid because, quite frankly, the American people are just about tapped out in taxes, subverted federal funds, and a horrendous national debt that we're laying at the feet of our children and grandchildren. (Download the free pamphlet "To The Moon, Alice")