War and Anti-War

The staunchly conservative columnist in my local newspaper today proclaims that the Democratic Party "with the possible exception of U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), simply cannot be trusted to act decisively without international approval in the war on terrorism." (AJC, 9/14/2003). He also refers to Gov. Dean as "anti-war presidential candidate."

First, let's disabuse this notion that by not supporting the taking over of Iraq you are somehow "anti-war". The administration made the case for invading Iraq on faulty intelligence and deceptive spins repeated over and over last fall and early winter. Remember the imagery from President Bush about not waiting for the "mushroom cloud"? Turns out there was no mushroom cloud or even a bio-chemical cloud coming from Iraq. Saddam Hussein had ordered destroyed most of those programs years earlier to get out from under UN sanctions.

The administration's neo-conservatives were bent on flexing our country's muscles, to prove to the world that we weren't wimps. Iraqi nationals who wanted to take control of Iraq fed them a line of bull about these supposed weapons that didn't exist. And now we're stuck in Iraq.

Being against the invasion of Iraq does not mean you are "anti-war" at all. It means you weighed the available evidence being presented by the administration -- which was mostly smoke and mirrors hidden behind the veil of "national security" restraints -- and weighed the odds of not attacking vs. attacking and decided that not attacking was the better choice at that moment.

If concrete verifiable evidence of Iraq's nuclear or bio-chem initiatives had turned up -- and I mean more than a few old bombs lying in a pile at a presidential palace that Iraq immediately took steps to destroy -- then the case for war would have been more solid and more people would have been supportive.

And the Democratic presidential candidates would not now be having a field day railing against the administration for their zeal for war.

Second, being anti-war in itself is not a bad thing either, although it can be very misguided at the wrong time in history. I'm not sure how many people want to walk around proclaiming "I love war!" Yet, being "anti-war" to a vast number of Americans is somehow a bad thing.

Americans want to stand tall and be proud of our ability to fight and win when the chips are down and we're called on to defend our liberty, our honor, our country. I'm all for that. But when we're led to send 150,000 of our troops to a foreign country by an administration intent on war without specific credible evidence that there was a threat to our liberty or our country, then you have to wonder why being "pro-war" is so great.

By contrast, we've sent about 10,000 troops to Afghanistan, the country of bin Laden and al Qaida. We have less than 1000 troops in Saudi Arabia, where Time Magazine reports that -- until very recently -- the country's schools taught kids that Jews and Christians ("infidels") were their enemy.

The war in Iraq continues to be pushed by the administration and conservatives as a "war on terrorism". However, they can't point to any credible current information that Iraq was involved in terrorism against the USA. On the other hand, the war on terrorism where the terrorists are living and hiding and planning appears to occupy only 1/15th the number of our troops as the occupation of Iraq.

Questioning this imbalance doesn't make you "anti-war". In the eyes of many of our citizens, it makes you more qualified to be the commander in chief of our great country.