The Curtain Will Come Down on the Peaceniks
by Mark Steyn
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com

The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony
Blair, looking out of his window and observing:
"If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the
number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
"If there are one million, that is still less than the number of
people who died in the wars he started."

In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter.
I'm tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it
in a roundabout sort of way.

The other day I got a copy of Andrew Roberts' new book, Hitler And
Churchill: Secrets Of Leadership, which sounds like some lame-o
management techniques cash-in, but is, in fact, a very useful take on
very familiar material.
Most of us have read a gazillion books about the Second World War (when
I say "most of us," I exclude the fellow in Hyde Park on Saturday
holding a placard with the words "PEACE IN OUR TIME," and even then I
kind of hope he was some waggish saboteur, since the notion that the
peaceniks, though deluded, are that ignorant is a little mind-boggling).

But, comparing Britain's and Germany's wartime leaders directly, you
can't help feeling that victory and defeat were predetermined:
As Philip Hensher neatly put it in his review of Roberts' essay,
"Churchill knew very well what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea
what sort of man Churchill was."

Just so. When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood
between him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was
"that puppet of Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to
the crowd when you're foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation
of your opponent made in the quiet of your study it's simply ...
inadequate.

This failure to engage with reality is particularly telling when you
look at how each leader dealt with setbacks:

During the Blitz, Churchill would stand on the roof and watch the
Luftwaffe bombing London; in the morning, he would walk through the
ruins.

Hitler, by contrast, never visited bombed-out areas and, just in case
the driver should take a wrong turn, he drove the streets with his car
windows curtained. His final days were spent in a bunker -- the perfect
ending for a man whose worldview depended on keeping reality at bay no
matter how relentlessly it closed in on him.

Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd
invented a universal theory -- the wickedness of the international
Jewish conspiracy -- and he persisted in fitting every square peg of
cold hard reality into that theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be
a "puppet of Jewry."

As a general rule, when it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality.
That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter
insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But
the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards
were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The
Eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't.

Well, the Soviet Union's gone now so Pinter no longer has to observe the
pox-on-both-their-houses niceties.

Addressing the demonstrators on Saturday, he declared that the U.S. is
"a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with Tony Blair as a hired
Christian thug."
Got that?

*It's not Saddam who's the thug, it's Tony. *It's not the Baathist
killers from Tikrit who are the bunch of criminals, it's the Republican
Party.
*It's not the million-man murderer of Baghdad who's the new Hitler, it's
George W. Bush.
*It's not the Iraqi one-party state with its government-controlled media
that "crushes dissent," it's the White House. *It's not the Wahhabis who
are the fundamentalists, it's Bush, Blair and the other Christians.
*It's not Osama bin Laden who's the terrorist, it's American foreign
policy. *Supporting the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is
"pacifist," but it's "racist" for America to disagree with the UN, even
though it's Colin Powell and Condi Rice doing the disagreeing and the
fellows they're disagreeing with are a bunch of white guys from Europe.

The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and
placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem,
American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame.

In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that
the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes
controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like
Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted
overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first
non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the
world's woes, then logic is irrelevant.

"It's all about oil"? Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is
far more of a determining factor than America's ever has been or will
be.

"America created Saddam"? No, not really, the French and Germans and
Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor
which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't
destroyed it in the Eighties.

But, as Colin Powell and Jack Straw have surely learned by now, there's
no real point doing the patient line-by-line rebuttal:
Nobody's interested in French oil contracts or German arms sales or even
Saddamite corpse tallies because it doesn't fit into the Universal
Theory which insists that everything can be explained by the Evil of
America. On the other hand, the indestructible belief that "over 4,000"
civilians were killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan is impervious to
scientific evidence because it accords perfectly with the Universal
Theory.

How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped
talking about their little pet cause of the Nineties, East Timor, ever
since the guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting
together those "Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East
Timor's independence as one of the Islamist grievances against the West.
But why be surprised?
In fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left
defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed
homosexuals. Yet these are the same fellows who insist that a secular
regime like Iraq's would never make common cause with Islamic
fundamentalists, apparently requiring a higher degree of intellectual
coherence of Saddam than of themselves.

You can believe all this if you want, just as Harold Pinter believed
that the Iron Curtain was only there to prevent fleeing Westerners from
swamping Warsaw Pact social services.
But it depends on keeping reality at arm's length or beyond: You're
metaphorically driving around with the curtains drawn.

Perhaps that's why so many of the "peace" crowd get ever so touchy if
you question their slogans. If you ask a guy with an "It's All About
Oil" sign what he thinks of the recent contracts signed between Iraq and
France's Total Fina Elf, he looks blank for a moment and then accuses
you of wanting to crush dissent. It's not fair, you're trying to pull
back his curtain.

I bet on reality. The defining difference between Hitler and Churchill
is that, while the former presided over a court of sycophants, the
latter thrived on argument and antagonism. (Lord Alanbrooke's diaries
are especially recommended in this regard.) He had a not untypical
background for an Englishman of his time and class -- an unexceptional
public school education, a bit of colonial adventuring.
It's what the multiculturalists would have us believe was a narrow and
blinkered upbringing. Yet an English public-school debating-society
approach to life served him in good stead: He was utterly at ease with
disagreement, quite happy to have any assertion tested. In Saturday's
demonstrations, the heirs to Churchill's Harrow schoolmasters were well
represented -- lots of teachers and professors.

Yet the difference between now and then is their reluctance to expose
their assertions to debate -- these days few institutions are as
aggressively protective of their fragile little pieties as the academy.

Well, so be it. If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would
be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality
will be breaking in very soon.

Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute
the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or
Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's
pathetic.


JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London)
Spectator and the author, most recently, of "The Face of the Tiger," a
new book on the world post-Sept. 11.


=====
Excellent Slogans on some PRO-US protest signs seen at the SF
"Saddamites on Parade" Peace March:

"Protect Islamic Property Rights Against Western Imperialism! Say No to
War!"
[with picture of a burqa-wearing woman tied to a post]

"Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, War Has
Never Solved Anything,"

"Saddam Only Kills His Own People. It's None of Our Business"

"Communism has Only Killed 100 Million People. Let's Give it Another
Chance."

,,,,,,,,,,

=They accepted dishonour to have peace.
=They will have their dishonour, and war. --
Winston Churchill - 1938
-upon the return from Munich of
British PM Neville Chamberlain and
French Premier Edouard Daladier
having 'appeased' Hitler with the Sudetenland.

What would Sir Winston say now concerning the vile and cowardly
appeasement policies of Chirac, deVillepin and Schroeder regarding
today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?
Especially concerning the same hideous applause given to deVillepin at
the UN Security Council that Chamberlain got when he waved that useless
piece of paper in the air....

In article ,
[email protected] (Thom Wilkerson) wrote:

    > The Curtain Will Come Down on the Peaceniks
    > by Mark Steyn

Interesting post -- thanks. I rarely agree with The Spectator but it does
carry some good writing. However...

    > Nobody's interested in French oil contracts or German arms sales or even
    > Saddamite corpse tallies because it doesn't fit into the Universal
    > Theory which insists that everything can be explained by the Evil of
    > America.

...please understand that not all of us in Europe who are anti-war
subscribe to this risible theory (in fact, I don't know anyone older than
21 who does, though of course I don't know everyone).

Some of us just believe that out of a very unappealing set of choices that
the West can currently make regarding its behaviour in the Middle East, a
military invasion of Iraq has the worst set of possible outcomes for the
region as a whole.

From our POV it's nothing to do with America being good or bad, or Bush
coming from the oil industry, or Saddam's questionable moral qualities.
Arguing about these is a distraction. It's all about what happens next in
all the countries of the region, *not* just Iraq -- and we don't see
military intervention leading to anything but even more unrest and
oppression than already obtains.

In article ,
Thom Wilkerson writes
    >The Curtain Will Come Down on the Peaceniks
    >by Mark Steyn
    >http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
    >The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony
    >Blair, looking out of his window and observing:
    > "If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the
    >number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
    > "If there are one million, that is still less than the number of
    >people who died in the wars he started."
    >In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter.
    >I'm tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it
    >in a roundabout sort of way.
    >The other day I got a copy of Andrew Roberts' new book, Hitler And
    >Churchill: Secrets Of Leadership, which sounds like some lame-o
    >management techniques cash-in, but is, in fact, a very useful take on
    >very familiar material.
    >Most of us have read a gazillion books about the Second World War (when
    >I say "most of us," I exclude the fellow in Hyde Park on Saturday
    >holding a placard with the words "PEACE IN OUR TIME," and even then I
    >kind of hope he was some waggish saboteur, since the notion that the
    >peaceniks, though deluded, are that ignorant is a little mind-boggling).
    >But, comparing Britain's and Germany's wartime leaders directly, you
    >can't help feeling that victory and defeat were predetermined:
    >As Philip Hensher neatly put it in his review of Roberts' essay,
    >"Churchill knew very well what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea
    >what sort of man Churchill was."
    >Just so. When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood
    >between him and world domination, they're just silly: Churchill was
    >"that puppet of Jewry." OK, that's fine as a bit of red meat tossed to
    >the crowd when you're foaming at Nuremberg, but as a serious evaluation
    >of your opponent made in the quiet of your study it's simply ...
    >inadequate.
    >This failure to engage with reality is particularly telling when you
    >look at how each leader dealt with setbacks:
    >During the Blitz, Churchill would stand on the roof and watch the
    >Luftwaffe bombing London; in the morning, he would walk through the
    >ruins.
    >Hitler, by contrast, never visited bombed-out areas and, just in case
    >the driver should take a wrong turn, he drove the streets with his car
    >windows curtained. His final days were spent in a bunker -- the perfect
    >ending for a man whose worldview depended on keeping reality at bay no
    >matter how relentlessly it closed in on him.
    >Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd
    >invented a universal theory -- the wickedness of the international
    >Jewish conspiracy -- and he persisted in fitting every square peg of
    >cold hard reality into that theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be
    >a "puppet of Jewry."
    >As a general rule, when it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality.
    >That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter
    >insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But
    >the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards
    >were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The
    >Eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't.
    >Well, the Soviet Union's gone now so Pinter no longer has to observe the
    >pox-on-both-their-houses niceties.
    >Addressing the demonstrators on Saturday, he declared that the U.S. is
    >"a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with Tony Blair as a hired
    >Christian thug."
    >Got that?
    >*It's not Saddam who's the thug, it's Tony. *It's not the Baathist
    >killers from Tikrit who are the bunch of criminals, it's the Republican
    >Party.
    >*It's not the million-man murderer of Baghdad who's the new Hitler, it's
    >George W. Bush.
    >*It's not the Iraqi one-party state with its government-controlled media
    >that "crushes dissent," it's the White House. *It's not the Wahhabis who
    >are the fundamentalists, it's Bush, Blair and the other Christians.
    >*It's not Osama bin Laden who's the terrorist, it's American foreign
    >policy. *Supporting the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is
    >"pacifist," but it's "racist" for America to disagree with the UN, even
    >though it's Colin Powell and Condi Rice doing the disagreeing and the
    >fellows they're disagreeing with are a bunch of white guys from Europe.
    >The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and
    >placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem,
    >American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame.
    >In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that
    >the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes
    >controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like
    >Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted
    >overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first
    >non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the
    >world's woes, then logic is irrelevant.
    >"It's all about oil"? Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is
    >far more of a determining factor than America's ever has been or will
    >be.
    >"America created Saddam"? No, not really, the French and Germans and
    >Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor
    >which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't
    >destroyed it in the Eighties.
    >But, as Colin Powell and Jack Straw have surely learned by now, there's
    >no real point doing the patient line-by-line rebuttal:
    >Nobody's interested in French oil contracts or German arms sales or even
    >Saddamite corpse tallies because it doesn't fit into the Universal
    >Theory which insists that everything can be explained by the Evil of
    >America. On the other hand, the indestructible belief that "over 4,000"
    >civilians were killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan is impervious to
    >scientific evidence because it accords perfectly with the Universal
    >Theory.
    >How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped
    >talking about their little pet cause of the Nineties, East Timor, ever
    >since the guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting
    >together those "Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East
    >Timor's independence as one of the Islamist grievances against the West.
    >But why be surprised?
    >In fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left
    >defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed
    >homosexuals. Yet these are the same fellows who insist that a secular
    >regime like Iraq's would never make common cause with Islamic
    >fundamentalists, apparently requiring a higher degree of intellectual
    >coherence of Saddam than of themselves.
    >You can believe all this if you want, just as Harold Pinter believed
    >that the Iron Curtain was only there to prevent fleeing Westerners from
    >swamping Warsaw Pact social services.
    >But it depends on keeping reality at arm's length or beyond: You're
    >metaphorically driving around with the curtains drawn.
    >Perhaps that's why so many of the "peace" crowd get ever so touchy if
    >you question their slogans. If you ask a guy with an "It's All About
    >Oil" sign what he thinks of the recent contracts signed between Iraq and
    >France's Total Fina Elf, he looks blank for a moment and then accuses
    >you of wanting to crush dissent. It's not fair, you're trying to pull
    >back his curtain.
    >I bet on reality. The defining difference between Hitler and Churchill
    >is that, while the former presided over a court of sycophants, the
    >latter thrived on argument and antagonism. (Lord Alanbrooke's diaries
    >are especially recommended in this regard.) He had a not untypical
    >background for an Englishman of his time and class -- an unexceptional
    >public school education, a bit of colonial adventuring.
    >It's what the multiculturalists would have us believe was a narrow and
    >blinkered upbringing. Yet an English public-school debating-society
    >approach to life served him in good stead: He was utterly at ease with
    >disagreement, quite happy to have any assertion tested. In Saturday's
    >demonstrations, the heirs to Churchill's Harrow schoolmasters were well
    >represented -- lots of teachers and professors.
    >Yet the difference between now and then is their reluctance to expose
    >their assertions to debate -- these days few institutions are as
    >aggressively protective of their fragile little pieties as the academy.
    >Well, so be it. If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would
    >be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality
    >will be breaking in very soon.
    >Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute
    >the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or
    >Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's
    >pathetic.
    >JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London)
    >Spectator and the author, most recently, of "The Face of the Tiger," a
    >new book on the world post-Sept. 11.
    >=====
    >Excellent Slogans on some PRO-US protest signs seen at the SF
    >"Saddamites on Parade" Peace March:
    >"Protect Islamic Property Rights Against Western Imperialism! Say No to
    >War!"
    >[with picture of a burqa-wearing woman tied to a post]
    > "Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, War Has
    >Never Solved Anything,"
    >"Saddam Only Kills His Own People. It's None of Our Business"
    >"Communism has Only Killed 100 Million People. Let's Give it Another
    >Chance."
    >,,,,,,,,,,
    >=They accepted dishonour to have peace.
    >=They will have their dishonour, and war. --
    >Winston Churchill - 1938
    >-upon the return from Munich of
    >British PM Neville Chamberlain and
    >French Premier Edouard Daladier
    >having 'appeased' Hitler with the Sudetenland.
    >What would Sir Winston say now concerning the vile and cowardly
    >appeasement policies of Chirac, deVillepin and Schroeder regarding
    >today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?
    >Especially concerning the same hideous applause given to deVillepin at
    >the UN Security Council that Chamberlain got when he waved that useless
    >piece of paper in the air....
Feel better now?
--
Marie Lewis

    > The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony
    > Blair, looking out of his window and observing:
    > "If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the
    > number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
    > "If there are one million, that is still less than the number of
    > people who died in the wars he started."
    > In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter.
    > I'm tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it
    > in a roundabout sort of way.


I don't think numbers really come into most peoples conciousness in any
meaningful way.

2000 people killed on september 11th
2000 children per month die in Iraq due to sanctions.

300 people killed today in air crash in Iran
less than 10 people killed in last "big" train crash in UK.

An estimated 1 MILLION Tutsies killed in Rwanda relatively recently
A few white farmers killed in Zimbabwe.

7 Astronauts killed in shuttle.



Not really about numbers at all.

Marie Lewis wrote: then he waved that useless

    > >piece of paper in the air....
    > >
    > Feel better now?
    > --
    > Marie Lewis

Read it again Marie, try and understand, it's a well reasoned view,dont be
blinded by your dogma.
BJ



--
(Antispam, drop pants to EMail)
All outgoing Emails checked for Virus with Norton.

Gareth M wrote:

    > Not really about numbers at all.

Wait until WMDs are acquired and used by unaccountable terrorists and you can
multiply those figures by 10,100 or even a1000, perhaps then you will be
happy in your delusion "Not really about numbers at all"
BJ



--
(Antispam, drop pants to EMail)
All outgoing Emails checked for Virus with Norton.

In article ,
BJ wrote:

    > Gareth M wrote:
    >
    > >
    > > Not really about numbers at all.
    >
    > Wait until WMDs are acquired and used by unaccountable terrorists and you can
    > multiply those figures by 10,100 or even a1000, perhaps then you will be
    > happy in your delusion "Not really about numbers at all"

It's going to happen anyway. With bush's actions, probably a lot sooner
rather than later and with the U.S. even more of a target.

Not the Karl Orff wrote: at all"

    > It's going to happen anyway. With bush's actions, probably a lot sooner
    > rather than later

I would prefer to stand up to it now than hide in a cave waiting for the inevitable
(later) as you put it, where's YOUR balls man are you happy to see the civilized
world as we see it being threatened by terrorists with WMDs?

    > and with the U.S. even more of a target.

Sad isn't it, we the UK standing as a target against tyranny once again, I was only
one year old when that happened in 1939. Thank God the US are with us from the
start this time.
BJ
--
(Antispam, drop pants to EMail)
All outgoing Emails checked for Virus with Norton.

In article ,
BJ wrote:

    > Not the Karl Orff wrote: at all"
    >
    > >
    > > It's going to happen anyway. With bush's actions, probably a lot sooner
    > > rather than later
    >
    > I would prefer to stand up to it now than hide in a cave waiting for the
    > inevitable
    > (later) as you put it, where's YOUR balls man are you happy to see the
    > civilized
    > world as we see it being threatened by terrorists with WMDs?

Your government's actons are simply going to creat more hate against you
and more importantly, numerous people bent on inflicting pain against
you.

    > > and with the U.S. even more of a target.
    >
    > Sad isn't it, we the UK standing as a target against tyranny once again, I
    > was only
    > one year old when that happened in 1939. Thank God the US are with us from
    > the
    > start this time.

Tyrnany? Didn;t do anything about Joe Stalin. That was real tyranny.

How many innocents killed today in the abortion clinics??


"Gareth M" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
    > > The "peace" marches? Oh, I've nothing to say. Can't improve on Tony
    > > Blair, looking out of his window and observing:
    > > "If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the
    > > number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
    > > "If there are one million, that is still less than the number of
    > > people who died in the wars he started."
    > >
    > > In other words, if it's a numbers game, those are the ones that matter.
    > > I'm tempted to leave it there and go skiing, but let me come back to it
    > > in a roundabout sort of way.
    > >
    > I don't think numbers really come into most peoples conciousness in any
    > meaningful way.
    > 2000 people killed on september 11th
    > 2000 children per month die in Iraq due to sanctions.
    > 300 people killed today in air crash in Iran
    > less than 10 people killed in last "big" train crash in UK.
    > An estimated 1 MILLION Tutsies killed in Rwanda relatively recently
    > A few white farmers killed in Zimbabwe.
    > 7 Astronauts killed in shuttle.
    > Not really about numbers at all.

Now What wrote:
    > How many innocents killed today in the abortion clinics??

What, is Paul Hill out already?

miguel
--
Hit The Road! Photos and tales from around the world: http://travel.u.nu

In article , BJ
writes
    >Read it again Marie, try and understand, it's a well reasoned view,dont be
    >blinded by your dogma.
    >BJ
Punctuation!
--
Marie Lewis

"Now What" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
    > How many innocents killed today in the abortion clinics??

eh?

my point is that for example 3443 people died on the UK roads in 2001 and
nobody bats an eyelid, whereas the very few killed in the train crash was
seen as a disaster, a terrible human tragedy. We simply don't think in terms
of numbers killed and for that arse Tony Blair to start quoting figures like
this is rather ridiculous.

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 01:42:16 GMT, "Now What"
wrote:

    >How many innocents killed today in the abortion clinics??


WTF has that got to do with it

JH
*plonk*

In article ,
BJ wrote:

    > Gareth M wrote:
    >
    > >
    > > Not really about numbers at all.
    >
    > Wait until WMDs are acquired and used by unaccountable terrorists and you can
    > multiply those figures by 10,100 or even a1000, perhaps then you will be
    > happy in your delusion "Not really about numbers at all"
    > BJ

there is no reason to think that enraging the entire Muslim world by
'preemptively' attacking a Muslim country will reduce the likelihood of
WMDs being created or disseminated or used. IN fact, the likelihood
will probably go up.

simple minded conventional wars are not what is needed to defend against
terrorism -- an international partnership to root these creeps out is
needed --