PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST:

The Fog of Peace: The evasions, distractions, and miasma of the anti-war left. (David Brooks, 09/30/2002, Weekly Standard)

The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs, still tyrannizing his own people, fomenting radicalism, and perpetuating the current political climate in the Arab world. And because almost nobody in the peace camp is willing to face the realities that a peace policy would preserve, the peace proponents really cannot address the fundamental calculation we confront: Are the risks of killing Saddam greater or less than the risks of tolerating him? Instead of facing the real options, they fill the air with evasions, distractions, and gestures--a miasma of insults and verbiage that distract from the core issue. They are living in the fog of peace.

Maybe this problem is really easy to solve and conservatives have just no given it enough thought. Suppose President Bush were to frame the case for the war against Saddam in a way that it might resonate with the Left: "I want you to imagine what it must be like to be a single black Wiccan lesbian mother in Baghdad, a state with no Hate Crimes laws, where your sex, sexual preference, race, and religion could each make you an enemy of the state; where you and your children have no access to health insurance, no Social Security, and inadequate schools; a state run by the oil industry, where you are even more disenfranchised than if you lived in Broward County, Florida and where the ruler got even less votes than I did." Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2002 8:25 AM