[Urbane Guerrilla]

Dana, the medical treatment of Ayman al-Zarqawi in an Iraqi governmental hospital for a serious leg wound lets the air out of your contention that "Al-Qaeda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other." Those whose guidance, if followed, would lose us the war, contend that bin Laden's religiosity and Saddam's overall secularism would have kept these two peachy fellows well apart -- I don't see that that idea holds up, so on this fundamental point, I ignore these people. The idea fails because both parties were working on establishing a partnership, and this is documented also. The idea fails because an alliance between these suits too well the dictatorships' need for proxy warriors and dictatorship's penchant for making war, either overtly or deniably; from the dictators' points of view, what's not to like? Go and look for the documentation. I'm finding it. Do some reading; there's quite a bit coming out nowadays.

International terrorism doesn't happen without national sponsors, official or unofficial, and the Saddam regime's active governmental and financial support of terrorism is so satisfactorily proven that I see no reason to doubt it. This war is not being solely prosecuted by al-Qaeda, either, nor is it solely directed against us; these guys, al-Quaeda and not-exactly, are working on revenging themselves on most of Europe. We should, I think, have suitable misgivings about their aims. I do not propose to endure the tyranny of the vengeance-minded; for their sin of attempting it, I should kill them.

DanaC, I grow very tired of repeating this, but how much did Nazi Germany have to do with Pearl Harbor? Nonetheless, we knew even without Germany's declaration of war that Germany was part of the overarching problem we'd have to solve. Saddam's Iraq had spent the eleven years between Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom exacerbating the problem, shooting at patrol planes, paying terrorists' families, and convincing the entire planet, you included, that they had WMD and the desire to use them, particularly in light of the chemical raids in the eighties. This is all part of the typical nasty behavior of dictatorships. Dictatorships and dictators are more alike than different -- Saddam and Adolf even shared a penchant for uniforms and facial hair -- and dictatorships have a great penchant for warfare. The foreign policy of dictatorships is usually one of conquest and generally being a bad neighbor. When we tangled with Hitler, his power relative to ours was considerably greater -- yet how much woe would have been averted if Hitler had been stopped in the Sudetenland or Alsace-Lorraine, when he was less powerful? We managed to have the wisdom to hit Saddam at the right time -- relatively early in his ongoing bad-neighbor policy. It was our good fortune that Saddam's regime wasn't as militarily competent as Hitler's. It had more capable weapons.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We do not live under any great expectation of a followup attack on US soil precisely because of the Bush Administration's strategy of taking the war to our self-made, self-declared enemies' back yard and decimating them there. We are teaching the nations that their national interests do not lie with cells of thuggish religious bigots -- for it is their bigotry that provides our foes their emotional sustenance. We must discredit bigotry and crush it. The way to discourage others who might be sitting on the fence from taking bigotry up is to show them that bigots have short and unhappy lives and leave no children and get buried in small caskets because there are pieces missing.

This is why I have no patience with the antiwar demonstrators. Imprudence in this cost us our will to keep South Vietnam out of the darkness of a remarkably stupid and oppressive ideology, that like most such, proved efficient only at killing and wasting. Vietnam wasn't the only domino that fell. Why should anyone with a functioning central nervous system call for the victory of the tyrannical over the democratic? Why? Why? Why? Is not democracy already hard enough won? (For why this has been, read The First Democracies.)

I notice, for a specific instance, that the bulk of Iraqis aren't in sympathy with the antiwar marchers, either. No matter how many car and suicide bombs the would-be-again tyrants send against Iraqis, their march towards a democratized and likely federal governmental form is undeterred. It strikes me that the antiwar marchers are cowards and slackers, with no faith in the goodness of democracy, and no interest in seeing anyone outside of our borders get any. Shame! This is a moral failure, this allowing of oppression, tyranny, and bad government.