With war drums beating, I guess I'm in a bad mood... made worse by seeing crap like Jill Nelson's OpEd titled "Cries of Desparation".   I really honestly believe that there are a few valid anti-war arguments out there (but on balance, I'm pro Intervention).   BUT, purely by association -- Nelson makes those anti-war folks all seem like idiots.   Can an anti-war person w/ a brain please slap her around a bit?  (verbally of course).

Let's do a quick dissection of her article to see what points she makes and how long she tends to dwell on them.   In a piece approximately 800 words long, Jill provides :

• 150 words retelling the tired, pithy analogy that "Bush is the most dangerous leader in the world today" who is plunging the nation into war despite the millions who are out of work, in poverty, lacking health care, lack of international support, and his questionable claims to the presidency
• 150 words are about the Lost Jedi Colin Powell succumbing to Master Bush's war temptations despite his disagreement with the administration over affirmative action and the fact that the "rest of the world" opposes this stance
• 50 words that argue that Powell's evidence was merely a few "garbled intercepted phone calls" & that North Korea's restarted nuke program is the real threat
• the de rigueur statement about Oil -- "Is it just coincidence that Iraq has enormous oil fields and vast oil wealth?"
• 100 words about how decisions like this should be made exclusively by the all powerful, all-noble UN
• 30 words that Saddam isn't a direct threat to the US (publicly at least...)
• 50 words about how it will enflame the Arab street and create other angry citizens from other nations
• 30 words with the equally de rigueur cowboy and old West analogies
• and 50 final words about how we're going to become just as bad as the terrorists themselves.

What total blather.   A pathetic signal-to-noise ratio with ancient recycled metaphors and not a single argument that stands in the context of the world Hobbesian jungle or refutes anything Powell had to say.   NOTHING about what Saddam could do if he had WMD, about his human rights record, about failure to comply with the resolutions that ended the Gulf War, about his failure to comply with 1441, etc.

Of course, let's not forget that Jill Nelson, who so thoroughly finds Bush a bigger affront to the world than Saddam, is the same fruitcake who equated Burqas and Bikinis. 

I'll freely grant her that preemption and threats to bring force are, all things being equal, threats to the passive safety of the world.   But all things aren't equal (despite Jill's belief system) and, there are times when you pay a cost today to secure a better tomorrow.   Jill conveniently halts her analysis with today's costs.