If we are about to go to war, then ours is a curious sort of home front. It's not just that the public attitude toward war with Iraq is ambivalent, though that's part of it, certainly. There is a reason we think of "home front" as a World War II concept and not a Vietnam one. "Home front" suggests the appearance, at least, of unified, even monolithic opinion. Support for this war is soft and shifting -- it depends a great deal on how pollsters ask the question -- and plenty of people remain divided within themselves.

Besides, a home front presumes a fairly stable division between battlefield and nonbattlefield, a division that can't be counted upon in any war on terrorism (assuming, that is, that the war on Iraq is in some sense a continuation of the war on terrorism). If civilians in the U.S. are potential targets, then "over here" and "over there" don't mean quite the same thing anymore. Since Sept. 11, we have been introduced to the low-level, unpredictable vulnerability that, for most of us noncombatants anyway, doesn't bear much thinking about or demand any particular action. Perhaps war doesn't seem quite the interruption of the status quo that it might have before Sept. 11, and that it should.

But even given all that, it's odd how diffuse and distracted our focus on war is, how much less riveted we are by the prospect than we were by, say, the impending first gulf war. Unless you or someone you love is in the military, or you are a first responder facing the prospect of a risky smallpox shot, or an antiwar activist, it's easy to avoid discussion of war against Iraq altogether. The signs of preparedness are random and inarticulate. There are those mysterious rumblings from Dick Cheney's house that have neighbors in a snit, wondering how long construction on what many of them assume is a bunker will keep interrupting their dinner parties. (When disgruntled homeowners inquired about what was causing the noises from the Cheney manse, they got a nonanswer pleading "national security and homeland defense," and the need to keep blasting at night, in order to maintain "a highly accelerated schedule.") There are the brisk sales of video games like "Conflict: Desert Storm," in which the object is to assassinate a Saddam Hussein stand-in, or "Soldier of Fortune II," in which you, the antiterrorist mercenary, try to foil the release of a killer virus, or "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell," in which "black-ops" agents "neutralize" terrorists with "extreme prejudice." There's the opening of a survivalist boutique -- Safer America -- in Lower Manhattan that sells biohazard suits and potassium iodide pills.

What all of these developments on the home front have in common is an air of unreality, a distance from actual conflict and actual sacrifice. They seem to confirm our era's reputation for being so not the greatest generation -- for being timid and virtual, liability-conscious and Nimby-ish.

This is peculiar when you think about it, though, because some of the sacrifices civilians are now being asked to make in the name of homeland (so much softer and less martial-sounding than home front) security are actually quite large. TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) -- the thankfully deep-sixed idea for making spies out of ordinary citizens -- was one such sacrifice, a violation of deeply held notions of privacy and an invitation to the kind of petty vengeance that kept Stasi agents busy for years. The government's latest terrorist hunting scheme, TIA, for Total Information Awareness, is another. This is the project, led by John Poindexter, the architect of Iran-contra, that could collect every bit of information available in cyberspace about every American -- telephone, medical, school, travel and credit-card records, all the e-mail ever sent -- and link it up with tools for biometric analysis, like facial and optical imaging and gait recognition. Think, for a moment, of all the mistaken, or partly true, or used-to-be-true, or just personal information about you that could be "mined" from some database or other, and imagine for a moment the potential uses and abuses.

Total Information Awareness is one of those few ideas that justify the cliche "Orwellian." Just start with the name, go on to the technologies it touts ("biologically inspired algorithms for agent control," "truth maintenance") and end up with its symbol, a cultish looking all-seeing eye with the accompanying slogan "Scientia Est Potentia" ("Knowledge Is Power").

Unlike rationing and blackouts, Rosie Riveting and the warnings not to let loose lips sink ships, Total Information Awareness would be a sacrifice -- indeed, a violation of what it has long meant to be an American in relation to the government -- that would last beyond wartime. Unlike those, it would be a renunciation less of comforts than of principles. War will claim a home front, if it's useful enough, and pliant enough, whether we've decided we're living on one or not. So far, the war on Al Qaeda hasn't demanded much more from most of us than airport security hassles, to which we've pretty well grown accustomed. But it could soon be different, and so far, we've hardly noticed.