Did you hear about the government's new plan to launch anticipatory strikes against evildoers?

No, not President George W. Bush's policy, announced on June 1, of "preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives." That's old news. Now it's time to look ahead, to "Minority Report," the new Steven Spielberg movie, which offers a window into the dystopic future when government power is taken to extremes. If the film scares you, remember, it isn't "only a movie"  -- it's real life, too.

"Minority Report," set in 2054, imagines that the government has set up a Department of Precrime, using the clairvoyance of three mutant "precogs" to see criminality before it happens. But sometimes the visions of the precogs differ, in which case a minority report is filed, alongside the majority report. And so the plot thickens.

The film gets its eerie resonance from the rush of reality, from what's happening in the here and now. Already, Uncle Sam is using spooky techniques of profiling and data-mining to gain clues about things to come. In the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller: "What we need to do better is be predictive ... We have to develop the capability to anticipate attacks."

President Bush believes that future attacks will come from the "axis of evil," the three countries -- North Korea, Iran, Iraq -- that he singled out for stigma in his State of the Union address. But there's a bug in the "Bush Doctrine." Put bluntly, Bush's "preknowledge" about these nations puts him in the distinct minority.

For openers, take North Korea. South Korea, as well as every other Asian state, believes that North Korea is more likely to starve its own citizens than attack its neighbors.

As for Iran, just on Monday, the 15-member European Union decided to open formal trade relations with Tehran, despite strong objections from Washington. The Europeans have long done business with Iran, but their decision underscores their rejection of Bush's Iran-isolating policy.

Indeed, America has, in effect, filed two Iranian minority reports. First, the United States is in the lonely position of declaring a trade embargo that the rest of the world ignores. Second, at the same time, bizarrely enough, the Bush administration has ended up on the same side as Iran in its reluctance to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. And so it's America -- plus Iran -- against the 169 countries that have ratified this equal-rights treaty.

But, of course, in the Bush view, the big enchilada of evil is Iraq. And it takes no special powers to divine the commander-in-chief's intentions: "I made up my mind that Hussein needs to go," Bush said on April 4. And leading Democrats agree that a U.S.-imposed "regime change" in Iraq is a matter of when, not if.

But here again, in its preoccupation with Baghdad, America is in the world minority, destined to attack alone -- although perhaps a couple of other countries will provide token support. To be sure, hawks on Iraq insist that many countries secretly support American pre-emption. But consider: According to this scenario, countries would be lying when they said they opposed Bush administration military action. But if a country is willing to lie to the world publicly about its true policy, how do we know that in fact that same country isn't lying to the United States privately?

The answer, of course, is to move from one-on-one pre-emption to planetary persuasion. That is, if Bush has a good case against Iraq, let him take it to the world. Let him turn his present-day minority into a future anti-Saddam majority.

But if he insists on acting alone, if other countries see an Iraq attack as merely the arbitrary use of Pentagon power, then one need not be a precog to see what will happen next. If America, the global leader, lets loose a new doctrine of pre-emption, then other countries, too, will feel emboldened to identify "pre-aggression" all around them, launching unilateral attacks of their own whenever it suits them. That's a forecast based on history, not technology.

But in the age of loose nukes, the idea of America's greenlighting a return to earlier lawless eras, those of lone-wolf attacks across sovereign borders, is scarier than anything in the movies.