In October 2000, dozens of Iraqi women suspected of prostitution were arrested and beheaded, without trial. One of them was a Baghdad doctor who reportedly had been critical of the Iraqi health services. Another was a mother of three, whose Islamist husband had fled into exile while suspected of working against the state.

Then there is the case of a former army general who fled Iraq in 1995 and who, in exile, joined an opposition group. In June 2000, he received a videotape in the mail. He watched: Iraqi agents were raping a woman from his family. Soon after, the general got a phone call from Iraq, apparently from an intelligence agent. The caller asked whether he had enjoyed the "gift." And by the way, the caller said, we still have her in custody.

Or consider the story of a former intelligence officer who was arrested in the mid-1990s. He apparently was suspected of having contacts with opposition groups. For two years he was held in solitary confinement at the General Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. The cell was painted entirely red; even the light was red. The intelligence officer was subjected to regular and varied torture: He was hogtied and suspended from a metal bar. He was beaten and shocked. He was raped with a wooden stick. He was released at the end of 1997, but then, in 1999 he was arrested once more. The nightmare started all over again.

Strangely, it is not the physical torture that lingers with me. Rather, the red room haunts my imagination -- and not just the color of it, but the intention of it. It is not enough to take him out of political circulation. It is not enough to wreck his body and humiliate him. They wanted to destroy his sanity. And then they sent him back to his family and friends so that his broken body and broken mind would convey an unmistakable warning.

I read these stories of intimidation, humiliation, murder and systematic subjugation, and I come away puzzled. Many of us on the left are preoccupied with cataloging the mendacity of the White House, or lamenting the ineffectuality of the Democrats; we spend hours researching how Republican officials or their cronies did deals with Saddam or how the impending war is a cynical ploy for taking Iraq's rich oil fields. Of course it is essential to document these failures and misdeeds and to work relentlessly to hold these people accountable. Still, none of that addresses the issues raised by the red cell. None of these address the fact that Saddam, by some counts, is blamed for a million deaths.

What are we doing to make sure that not another woman is raped or beheaded as a form of political terror? What are we doing to make sure that not another man is humiliated and rendered mute and powerless as the ex-general was? What are we doing to shut down the headquarters of General Intelligence? In the community of human rights monitors, work toward these goals is heroic and often dangerous. These would seem also to be urgent goals for all who consider themselves progressive. But for the most part, in all the angry debate over the war, the left rarely discusses these issues. We acknowledge Saddam as a ruthless dictator and lament his human rights abuses, but we focus our rage on Bush.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell was preparing to go before the United Nations Security Council last month, there was a minor controversy over the decision to cover the U.N.'s tapestry of Picasso's painting "Guernica," a masterpiece depicting the suffering brought by war. But a crucial nuance was overlooked both by U.N. staffers who wanted the picture covered and antiwar critics who saw hypocrisy in the move.

The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica was carried out by Hitler's Luftwaffe in 1936, as part of his effort to help fascist General Francisco Franco to overthrow the democratically elected leftist government of Spain. In a few hours of relentless bombing, 1,600 people were killed or wounded. Picasso was a Spanish pacifist and a leftist; he was a partisan of the elected government and an anti-fascist. His painting was perhaps a testament to the horrors of war, but in the context of the time, it would inevitably be seen as a testament to the specific horrors of fascism. Indeed, in the aftermath of Franco's victory, Picasso would not let his painting be shown in his home country until "public liberties and democratic institutions" had been established.

The Spanish Civil War was the last war in modern times that galvanized the American and European left to take up arms. Famous poets and writers went to war against Franco -- anarchists, socialists and communists -- and when they died in the trenches, they became leftist heroes. George Orwell had not yet written his masterpiece "1984," and he was among the wave of leftist artists and intellectuals who took up arms to aid the Spanish Republicans. In "Homage to Catalonia," an account of his months on the front lines in northeastern Spain, we see just how the mind-set of a Western leftist in 1937 differs from the mind-set that prevails today.

Before Orwell was almost killed by a bullet in the neck, there were long weeks of waiting. "I was sick of the inaction on the Aragon front and chiefly conscious that I had not done my fair share of the fighting," he wrote of those days. "I used to think of the recruiting poster in Barcelona which demanded accusingly of passers-by: 'What have you done for democracy?' and feel that I could only answer: 'I have drawn my rations.' When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist -- after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct -- and I had killed nobody yet."

You see the fundamental leftist impulse of that era: Anti-fascist, even if it means taking up arms.

An American variant could be found in James Jones' still-stunning novel "From Here to Eternity." Jones' hero is Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a rock-hard soldier's soldier, a boxer and ultracool bugle player who is anti-authority to the core of his brooding, blues-playing soul. He rebels against the Army, goes AWOL from his base in Hawaii, and then, in the days after Pearl Harbor, he tries to steal back into the base to rejoin his unit -- only to be shot and killed by a U.S. patrol. But the book is suffused with the sense that, at the onset of World War II, Prewitt was America's greatest weapon against fascism, if only America could harness his nature instead of trying to suppress it.

Today, the explicit anti-totalitarian impulse has been narrowed and diminished in leftist culture. Instead, the fundamental leftist reflex has evolved into something related, and yet quite different: antiwar, anti-America, and anti-American authority. That helps to explain the strange behavior of an alienated idealist like John Walker Lindh, who, in disillusionment with his native country, ends up fighting with the ferociously anti-democratic forces of the Taliban. It explains how some lost souls would go to Iraq to serve as human shields, unaware or unconcerned that they would provide support and aid to a tyrant.

What accounts for the difference between 1937 and 2003? Though the left had a tortured and complex evolution in the aftermath of WWII, from the disillusionment of the Stalin years through the blacklists of the McCarthy era, one thing changed everything: Vietnam. Superficially, the arguments for intervention in Vietnam and Iraq appear the same: that the small country far from home poses a direct threat to our interests, our freedom and our lives. Forty years ago, it was fear of communism -- and the geopolitical illusions spawned by that fear -- that drove the U.S. to intervene. It was so horrible and so unnecessary, mass cruelty and tens of thousands of deaths justified by a systematic lie. And in the crucible of that time, the antiwar movement and the political counterculture and popular culture fused. To oppose war became righteous. It appropriated the moral high ground. It was hip.

By the late 1970s and 1980s, the transformation was evident in leftist reaction to the liberation struggles in Central America. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. provided arms and money to military regimes that relied on death squads and torture chambers to suppress popular uprisings; in Nicaragua, the U.S.-backed remnants of the Somoza dictatorship and others who were trying to overthrow the deeply flawed but popular Sandinista government. American and European leftists played a significant role in illuminating the U.S. complicity, and they combated it by domestic political action, by spiriting torture victims to safety in the United States and, in some cases, by risking their lives to provide support to communities in those embattled countries.

But the Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War had no counterpart in those years. Much of the resistance to U.S. policy was organized or supported by churches and pacifist groups. And though some were murdered as they worked for justice in those countries, there was no leftist call to enlist and fight in defense of freedom and democracy, no valor in killing or risking death alongside armed opponents of the death squad governments.

A decade later, many leftists opposed military intervention to take down Slobodan Milosevic, who is now on trial for war crimes at The Hague. I remember talking with a friend at the height of that conflict, a committed and connected human rights advocate, who had left his job with a high-profile rights group out of frustration with its political caution. The left at the time was riven by such uncertainties and disagreements. I asked my friend: What do you think we should do about Bosnia?

I was surprised when he uttered words that seemed forbidden: "We should've bombed the shit out of Milosevic a long time ago."

Perhaps the roots of today's divisions go back to Bosnia. A few years later, during the debate over the Kosovo intervention, the left was suffering from a profound internal conflict. Many found that intervention justified, just as my friend would justify the need for military action against Milosevic. But for many others on the left -- including stalwarts like Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark -- even horrific accounts of a ruthless despot engaged in ethnic cleansing could not move them to accept the use of U.S. military force.

The expected U.S. intervention in Iraq today is more difficult and more ambiguous, and the potential for casualties greater by far. In this climate, the antiwar left has galvanized and thrived and, with considerable success, has reached out to others who are apprehensive about the possible costs of war. But when leftists drift from their most essential values -- to stand for the liberation of repressed people, and to oppose those who repress them -- their righteous passion only partly offsets the strains in their reasoning. In extreme cases, they seem to have lost their compass. There is a good argument against an invasion of Iraq, but arguments commonly employed by many on the left seem to contradict bedrock leftist values.

1. Conflict can be solved without war.

This is a noble faith, and I wish it were true. But history is rich in examples of people who were able to throw off repression only with force, and sometimes only with the help of foreign allies. More than 50 million people dead in World War II prove the point. Moreover, the argument suggests that the Salvadoran rebels weren't right to take up arms against the death-squad government there, that Nicaraguans weren't right to take up arms against the Somoza dictatorship, that the African National Congress wasn't justified in employing arms against apartheid when apartheid would not yield to reason alone. Even the American revolution, perhaps the most durable democratic revolution in world history, was powered by the barrel of a gun.

2. We can't solve all of the world's problems. The popular variant: Why Iraq? Why now? Why not North Korea?

I am tempted to answer: Yes, let's liberate North Korea too. There are 22 million people there living under a despotic, almost cultlike mind-control government that starves its population and pours its meager resources into soldiers and guns. But that is not the real intention of those who make this argument. They cite North Korea to block a move against Iraq, apparently untroubled that such a calculus leaves two despots in power rather than one. Such demands for moral consistency ignore the fact that there is no consistency in the nature of the conflicts and that each, therefore, requires a different approach. Because North Korea has a much bigger and more lethal military, it would be more difficult to unseat, and so the human cost of a military action against North Korea could be far higher. Further, it has seemed clear that Kim Jong Il wants negotiation, and because the U.S. has resisted, he is escalating the threat of violence. Saddam's game is much different, and by most accounts, he is much less likely to change through negotiation.

3. We have to let the Iraqis solve their own problems.

This argument, very similar to arguments made on behalf of the Viet Cong in the 1960s, seems an homage to democratic self-determination. In fact, it is almost cruelly naive. Saddam's effectiveness over 20 years has been in crushing dissent before it has a chance to form. He arrests, imprisons, tortures and kills based on suspicion alone, and sometimes even in absence of suspicion. If you have a dissident thought, you not only risk your own life, but the lives of your family and friends. Coup attempts have repeatedly been cruelly crushed in advance. Saddam's willingness to back up the threat with violence, systematically, every day, millions of times, has assured that the Iraqis cannot solve this on their own.

4. Invading Iraq will give rise to a new legion of terrorists.

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