Every time I see on the TV screen "another 50 or 60 or 30 killed somewhere in Iraq," whether they are Iraqis or American soldiers, I think of the real WMD. They are Bush, and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rove, Blair, Azner, Howard, Koizumi, and all those who authored the invasion of Iraq in defiance of the UN charter and against the wishes of the millions of people world wide who protested against the invasion.

Rather than "establishing democracy," the invasion has led to a civil war which accounts for the death and destruction every day in Iraq. Therefore, people accountable for causing this tragedy should be named for what they are: WMD. Proliferation of weapons too is a problem but the men who are indifferent to the loss of human lives are greater threats to civilized society.

Many will also put in the list of WMD, Osama and others responsible for death and destruction in many parts of the world, most spectacularly in New York and Washington, DC in 2001. And there will be others (few, I hope) who will see him as a "rebel with a cause" striking terror at the hearts of the WMD.

Rather than trying to define terrorism which is problematic, I define a terrorist attack as an attack that kills and harms innocent people deliberately. Accordingly, both attacks on New York's World Trade Center as well as other attacks the same day that used civilian planes as missiles (showing no regard for the lives of non-combatants) and the attacks on Iraq or elsewhere are terrorist attacks for the fact that in each of these instances the overwhelming majority of victims were innocent civilians.

The Hall of (In)Fame of the twentieth century for WMD will include Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, and those unnamed villains in Rwanda and (maybe Harry Truman for ordering to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The track record of the US does not look particularly good here. US was the first country to develop nuclear bomb (Yes, the Germans started experiments but it is the Manhattan Project in US with help from some of the German refugee physicists who brought it to fruition); first country to conduct a test explosion of a nuclear weapon (in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945), and the first country to use the WMD, in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and then in Nagasaki three days later.

Sometimes it looks rather odd when US rides the moral high horse condemning nuclear proliferation and keeps spreading hysteria against Iran's nuclear program. A mighty country, that once dealt with major nuclear powered country like USSR which had thousands of the world's most lethal weapons as well as delivery systems, is now fidgeting over Iran. The great lies of Bush and Blair that created Iraq as a threat to these nuclear powers are caught in their own lies. Iran becomes a threat, North Korea becomes a threat, and the list may multiply.

In this lawless world, we have laws of the states but those laws cannot be used against the custodians of the state. I asked some American legal experts last year whether Americans can sue President Bush for invading Iraq without justification and the miseries it has caused to them. I was told that the president has immunity. So the leaders of the states are not accountable for the loss of human lives caused by wars and mayhem they unleash; they are untouchable.

What can be done to pre-empt men in charge of large arsenals (Bush, Blair) or small arsenals like Kim Jong Il from unleashing death and destruction? What can be done to prevent men in charge of even smaller arsenals, such as the likes of Osama, from striking terrorist attacks on others?

The real antidote to WMD is to expose and discard war-mongering leaders (WMD) by voting them out of public office so that the public can live in peace. And parents do not have to bury their children who die in far lands the names of which they cannot pronounce for reasons best known to the protagonists of the New American Century Project.

How to deal with small-time WMDs who work outside the bounds of law, launching terror at will? Here, we need coalition of sensible people worldwide. Using Chairman Mao's wisdom, one must win the ocean so that fishes will not have sanctuary. The US policy so far has been to dry the ocean to capture some difficult fish. For Norh Korea, negotiation, not demonizing Kim Jong Il will help.

First, remove conditions of injustice that feed frustration and anger, and opt for non-violent resolution of problems. We must use honest laws that are founded on the fundamental principle of respect for life. Secondly, the laws must be used evenly and predictably. There is no substitute for peaceful negotiation to resolve problems.

But does that mean war is completely avoidable? A non-violent world must be the long-term goal and in order to reach that destination, one must move carefully and force must be used as the last alternative and not the first.

The writer is a professor of sociology and a commentator on global affairs.