Red, white and blue displays of American ideals and patriotic symbols marched across Iowa on the Fourth of July. Many ISU students and faculty members were swept up in the rhythm of high school bands playing the national anthem as gray-haired war veterans proudly carried the stars and stripes down U.S. main streets.

Unfortunately, something was missing. The bands were slightly out of tune. The flag bearers were a fraction of a second out of step. The War on Terror was taking its toll on the American dream.

Lady Liberty, “justice for all” and “let freedom ring” have been bound and gagged by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ memo that waives anti-torture laws; the Abu Ghraib torture photographs; the climbing death toll of innocent Iraqi civilians and the worsening living conditions in that country. The War on Terror has indeed been unleashed on Iraq.

I have heard President Bush say on several occasions that his decision to invade Iraq was the right one and that Americans will help Iraqis spread democracy and freedom around their country and even the entire Middle East. U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales echoed this sentiment in a visit to Iraq over the Fourth of July weekend.

“We are doing a lot to promote democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press quoted Gonzales as saying while he was traveling on an Air Force plane bound for the country on Saturday.

Perhaps the Bush Administration and I have different definitions of the terms democracy, freedom and the rule of law, because I see only chaos and destruction being spread from Mosul to Basra.

According to an Associated Press article by Mariam Fam dated July 2, Baghdad’s approximately 6.5 million residents suffer water shortages, frequent electricity outages, erratic fuel supplies, congested traffic, diminished public services and the ever present threat of kidnappings and car bombings. Fam’s description of the situation in the capitol city is verified in living color on the major television networks’ nightly news coverage.

What is truly shocking to me is that in one weekend in Baghdad, at the same time Americans were shopping for their Fourth of July hot dogs and watermelon, the chief of the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Baghdad was kidnapped by gunmen while buying a newspaper.

In that same weekend in Baghdad, gunmen wounded police Brig. Gen. Abdul Hussein Hamid Khalaf and killed his son while they were both riding in a car together.

The Industry Minister of Iraq escaped an assassination attempt, and 16 people died as the result of a suicide bomb outside a police recruiting station in the western part of the city.

If the capitol of this country reflects the brightest and best of what it has to offer the world, then Iraq is really in trouble.

When the Berlin Wall tumbled down in 1989, this event marked the end of an East versus West, communism versus capitalism, Cold War mentality transmitted from parents to children around the globe.

In his memoir “Chronicles Volume I,” American folk singer Bob Dylan describes his childhood and adolescence in the 1940s and 1950s as growing up under a cloud of paranoia and fear. The red scare, or fear of communists and communism, that permeated American society during Dylan’s boyhood, is similar to the fear of terrorists and terrorism that pervades American life today.

The War on Terror emerges from the same fear and paranoia that caused America to engage in a nuclear arms race with Russia during the Cold War, but today, weapons of war are more sophisticated, expensive and destructive.

Isn’t it sad that American children are growing up under a cloud of paranoia and fear just like Dylan’s generation 60 years ago, while Iraqi children suffer the consequences of an occupying force on a mission to win the hazy and undefined War on Terror?