An intersting op-ed piece called The Limits of Emotion by a combat veteran:

March 16, 2003 -- IF anyone in our domestic antiwar movement offered me a convincing alternative to a war to eliminate Saddam Hussein, I would be the first in line to sign up. But the protesters do not offer serious solutions to the threat of weapons of mass destruction or the agony of the Iraqi people. They merely shout well-intentioned slogans, bond briefly, pat themselves on the back, and go home to their insulated lives.
If platitudes could change the world for the better, I would be out there myself, marching in favor of universal disarmament. I credit the anti-war movement within the United States with sincere emotion. But it is utterly lacking in intellectual integrity. An earnest, if vague, sense that war is bad may inspire undergraduates, but it does not prevent massacres, depose tyrants or deter terrorists.



Consider the greatest lie that adorns those posters, as our fellow citizens march in the streets: "War doesn't solve anything."

On the contrary, war solves a great deal. Not always for the better, that I grant. But, fortunately, the good guys have won more often than not for the past few hundred years. Do the protesters believe that our Civil War, which ended the institution of slavery in our country, failed to solve anything? Would we be better off had blacks remained in bondage on our soil? It was civil society, after the war, that failed African-Americans. The soldiers did their part and broke the chains.

Shortly before writing this piece, I watched a TV interview with a Parisian woman. A singer by trade, she, too, argued that war never accomplishes anything. I assume she wishes our GIs had not disturbed the love affair between Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime. She could be singing "Lili Marlene" night after night.

As a man with some remaining shreds of conscience, I wish the protesters were correct, that war was pointless and useless, and that we could abolish it. But humankind is not made so.

Setting aside the Freudian issues involved when Americans insist their own country is the font of all evil (although few protesters buy retirement homes in North Korea), the indisputable fact is that free and tolerant societies cannot survive under conditions of weakness. Cain will always raise his hand against Abel.

Of course, the protesters would disagree with that view of human nature. But it is easy for Susan Sarandon or Sean Penn to look at things through their rose-colored sunglasses. Less privileged than the stars-who-always-know-best, my military comrades and I spent much of our lives wading through the wreckage of other people's wars, and I may claim with eyewitness authority that we live in a dangerous world, where bullies must be checked and murderers disarmed.

Singing songs, however lovely the voices, will not soften the killer's heart.

If you leave these shores, where you can duck into a cozy Starbucks after an hour or two of protest marching and celebrate your virtue with a latte, the world rapidly takes on a different coloration. How would the protesters feel if they had to live under Saddam's regime for even a few months? Without a decaf or doppio in sight?

I would feel much more sympathetic to the antiwar movement if they would offer me rigorous answers to a few straightforward questions:

1) Do you honestly believe, after 12 years of failure, that U.N. inspections can disarm Saddam Hussein? If your reply is "Yes!" or if you refuse to believe the evidence that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction, wants more of them, and intends to use them, proceed to question 2.

2) Should we simply turn our backs on the Iraqi people and allow Saddam to continue to torment and murder them? Should we, thereafter, allow one of his homicidal sons to succeed him?

Don't the people of Iraq, who have been gassed, tortured, raped, shot and starved (while Saddam builds dozens of vast palaces for himself), deserve liberation? Or is freedom only for educated white people and the Botox brigade?

3) What would you do, in practical terms, to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their eventual use by terrorists against us? No generalities, please - specific answers are required.

Until our anti-war activists, with their presumed monopoly on virtue, can answer those questions, I shall remain unconvinced that they know whereof they shout. It is not enough to oppose, if you cannot offer convincing alternatives. Progress and security demand a sense of responsibility. It is always satisfying to complain, but far harder to forge solutions. It is, above all, the dishonesty and the moral capriciousness of the antiwar movement that disappoints me.

I wish the activists had better solutions - genuine alternatives to war. I wish they would engage the rest of us intellectually. Competition is as vital in the marketplace of ideas as it is in any other marketplace. But behind the fashionable poses and quaint campus anger, the closed minds and indestructible prejudices of the antiwar movement are cause for dismay. How can we speak with those who are always shouting?

And those falling stars who never fail to appear before the cameras at the protests? A part of me would like to dismiss them all, yet I recognize that there are sincere celebrities who take their causes seriously and who truly do make a difference: Bono is an admirable, remarkable example, with his crusade against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Audrey Hepburn lived her causes and didn't simply show up for a photo-op once a season.

Celebrity can be put to higher purposes. But the celeb has to live the cause, not merely visit it at autograph time.

Now consider those who routinely show up to support Saddam Hussein (for that is what they are doing, no matter their demurrals): The bluntest manifestation of their self-interest came last month, when several members of the Sarandon-Penn Collective worried aloud that, as a result of their protest activities, they might be blacklisted in Hollywood.

Really?

This was a brilliant tactic, the deployment of a self-licking ice-cream cone. The fading celebrities put Hollywood - where ticket-sales and DVD-rentals rule - on notice: If they are not offered future roles, it will have nothing to do with their strings of box-office failures, but will be solely because of their noble anti-war stance. In other words, "If I don't get plum film roles now, you're all fascists."

Brilliant. I wish they would apply that sort of tactical genius to improving the lot of the Iraqi people.

And I wonder how much our sad, silly Hollywood protesters really know about the McCarthy era and blacklisting? If any of them had read even one book on the subject, they would know that, while all of the actors and writers and directors were running for cover and betraying their friends, only the United States Army had the guts to stand up to Tailgunner Joe (a great part for Sean Penn). It was the Army vs. McCarthy hearings, with their insistence on strict constitutionality, that brought the reign of terror to an end.

Just as the United States Army, and the rest of our military, will bring Saddam's reign of terror to an end.

Might be a movie in it.



Ralph Peters is a frequent Post contributor and the author of the recently-republished novel "Twilight Of Heroes."