Late Saturday night, while many Boston University students were out partying and enjoying the weekend, so were young people in Kuta, Indonesia, a city on the island of Bali.

Two discos in Kuta, however, were destroyed by a fire from a car bomb that also ruined 10 other buildings, left 182 people dead and more than 300 injured. Two Americans are among the dead and another three were injured. The Bush administration condemned the attack, saying it was an attack organized by Al Qaeda, who is believed to have outposts in Indonesia.

Apparently the president doesn’t see the irony of an attack on civilians only a day after he was given the power by both houses of Congress to invade Iraq. An attack on Iraq would ultimately mean an attack on the people of Iraq.

The people of the United States have really only seen one attack on our homeland: the attack on Sept. 11, 2001. The whole country mourned the 3,025 people who died that day. But nobody, the president especially, seems to be learning any lessons from what it’s like to be a nation under attack.

This summer, I took care of three little children whose fathers died on Sept. 11 and many others from New York City who lost people they knew. The three whose fathers died were too young to understand anything that happened, though one’s mother told me her daughter had seen the planes hit from their apartment in TriBeCa, in downtown Manhattan. Older children said things like, “We could see people jumping out of the buildings,” and, “My friend’s father died, he was helping everybody get out and that’s why he didn’t get out.”

They are children of a war zone. New York is my home, too. My heart will probably never leave it, but last year it was a war zone. I worried about kids who had always come to camp there who suddenly were gone this summer; did they lose a family member? These kids’ parents were the most likely to have been in those towers — the young, the rich and the up-and-coming. For the first time in my four years there, I wanted families to keep in touch with me after the summer was over, and I still worried about the families I lost touch with at the end of last summer.

I saw the children of a war zone and now I can’t help but think of the children of another war zone: Iraq. In recent polls, a slim majority of Americans have supported attacking the country. But when asked about casualties, the majority has switched over in favor of waiting to attack. Basically, if people are going to die, Americans aren’t in support of an attack.

Does anyone realize civilians and troops are going to die in an invasion? Even with Afghanistan, a war the majority of Americans supported which was considered a swift regime change, Afghan officials and United States aid workers say as many as 3,000 civilians died. That’s how many people died on Sept. 11. And this war isn’t over yet, even if the fighting is technically done — we have yet to find Osama bin Laden. Twenty-three American soldiers were killed in five months of battle.

The people of Iraq are not the enemy here — the government of Saddam Hussein is. He is dangerous. He has weapons of mass destruction, no one is denying that. He isn’t even denying it. But he did agree to comply with United Nations weapons inspections, and he is not any more dangerous today than he was last year. In fact, after years of economic sanctions by the U.N., the United States and other nations, the military is not as powerful as it was in 1991 and the people of Iraq are starving.

And, as mentioned earlier, Hussein agreed to U.N. inspections. The U.S. is acting alone and acting quickly. Why can’t the administration wait to invade or even to debate invasion until U.N. inspections are a proven failure? Hussein has no nuclear weapons today, nuclear weapons really can’t be built in a number of months and chemical and biological weapons can’t be used for a long range without any missiles to deliver them.

By acting so quickly and without the support of the United Nations, the United States is undermining the United Nation’s efforts to rid Iraq of Hussein. The United Nations is the body that was set up to deal with people like Hussein, not the United States. Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, is the person who should have the authority to decide whether or not an invasion is necessary, not George W. Bush.

The United States also does not have the support of any of Iraq’s neighbors, something that could be important in sustaining a war. In Afghanistan, it was a crucial factor that the United States had not only the support of Pakistan, but also that of Uzbekistan to sustain a ground invasion. The United States doesn’t even have the support of Saudi Arabia, the most United States-friendly nation in the region. Two Kuwaitis killed an American and wounded another, and Kuwait is also supposed to be a United States-friendly nation.

The United States has not been provoked to warrant an invasion. In 1991, the United States could hide behind the invasion of Kuwait to protect oil rights. In 1964, the United States could hide behind the supposed events at the Gulf of Tonkin to declare a war. Even last year, the United States could hide behind the events of Sept. 11 to declare war on terrorism.

Nothing has changed in Iraq and almost no other nation believes Hussein is a threat right now. The United States does not even have the intelligence right now to determine Hussein’s capabilities or even his intentions. A war right now is not only unnecessary, it is wrong. The reasons for moving in are still unclear and the outcome is uncertain. Did the United States really win in the Middle East in 1991? Kuwait was freed from Iraq, but Hussein remained in power.

But one thing is for certain now: the United States is going to war. The United States is ignoring the voice of the international community and risking the lives of American and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi citizens. We lost 23 Americans in Afghanistan, 3,025 Americans on Sept. 11. Who knows how many others will die in combat in Iraq and from the anti-American sentiment that could brew from a war, not to mention the 3,000 Afghans and the Iraqis, who may go uncounted or even count for nothing in the long run — the human toll is rising.

I was lucky when I was growing up; I wasn’t the child of a war zone. I wasn’t like the kids I took care of this summer, but I’m becoming an adult in a country at war. The human toll is rising, my friends are being sent off to war. These are people I grew up with, friends of mine who got expelled from school for setting off stink bombs. That was only five years ago, but now they’re old enough to fight overseas. I only know three people in the armed forces right now, and only one is stationed overseas.

But my friend Chris, who is stationed overseas, has already been injured in Afghanistan. He’s probably being sent to Iraq or could already be there. He’s not married and doesn’t have any children, but his brother is married and has a daughter. Will Chris’ niece become like my kids from this summer, who just knew too much for little kids?

Maybe it’s too late and maybe he’s already there. It seems Congress has already decided he’ll be staying there for a while.