The biggest issue of the year has also been the only real issue for half a decade. That, of course, is the Iraq War, which continues to rage with no end in sight five years after its launching, even as hundreds of billions of dollars and more than 4,000 Americans’ lives have been sacrificed in vain.

Unfortunately, the war is no longer news. It’s been pushed out of the headlines by the dreary daily details of the election, despite the fact that the election itself – with an unapologetically pro-war candidate facing a steadfastly anti-war candidate -?is sure to be nothing less than a national referendum on the war.

Out of the spotlight, given tacit permission to do whatever it likes until November, the Bush administration has only grown more arrogant, more vainglorious, more certain of the righteousness of its cause. Nor do they feel bound by any desire to represent their own people. When an ABC News correspondent asked Dick Cheney what he thought of the fact that most Americans now opposed the war, he snapped back, “”So?”” Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

If there is anything heartening about the last five years, it has been the overwhelming evidence that Americans are not militaristic by nature. Relatively few of us have actually been affected directly by the war – at least compared to World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which Americans were actually drafted to fight in. Yet Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of the war and want out.

The Iraq War has proven once and for all that Americans, however easily they might be misled for a time, simply will not stomach an empire. Cynics may think America ready for “”fascism,”” but as usual, we remain not a few steps ahead of our scheming rulers.

Justyn Dillingham is a senior majoring in history and political science.