Well, Mary Anne certainly deserves extra points for having the gumption to actually fisk one of SDAI's stemwinders. I agree with some of her points, and some of SDAI's, although I might have worded it differently.

The original article was interesting. I didn't see whether he had been drafted or volunteered. Might be an important data point. Would also be interested to know if he supported the military effort in Afghanistan. Supporting Afghanistan but not Iraq is one way I separate the reasonable antiwar types from the unreasonable ones.

"I had a vague understanding that it makes no difference to the peasants who wins a war. Their lives improve when the fighting stops."

If the level of your existence is farming rice paddies, it doesn't make a lot of difference whether you are ruled by a king, a politburo, or a priesthood. They take their cut, hopefully without hurting you, and life goes on. This has been the existence of a majority of mankind for thousands of years. If you are an industrialist developing and building integrated circuits for an advanced technological society, it isn't that simple any more.

There is a reason America is the way it is, and the Third World is the way it is. It's individual freedom, and a government built around that basic principle. It isn't race. It isn't climate (usually). It isn't even culture, unless collectivism is a critical part of it. There are examples of thriving technological "Western*" civilizations from all parts of the globe and all peoples.

My belief is that there is no place on Earth that cannot become a healthy, thriving civilization under the right political conditions. Bush has expressed this as well, and the term "Wilsonian" has been applied to this. A serious and thoughtful debate can be had about whether Bush is taking the right approach--the example of the United States has accomplished a lot more in this area than military effort, IMO. But what happens when a tyranny prevents a people from growing on their own? Or when a tyranny tries to bring down the advanced nations?

I don't have easy answers. Vietnam seems to be evolving out of dictatorship, but then it no longer is a pawn of the U.S.S.R. either, and more importantly, seems to be posing no danger to any other nations any more.

North Korea looks like it will be a hellhole forever unless something drastic happens. Iran and Syria need to be addressed. All three currently support terror and tyrannies outside their nations, and two of them are doggedly pursuing nuclear weapons.

Of course, it does the author's case no good when he dips a toe into the Looney Zone:

As the 62nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor looms Sunday, Elliston noted that some historians concluded that Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt anticipated an attack but "felt it was necessary to have a catastrophic attack like that to mobilize the American public to get into World War II."

"There are also implications that Republican President Bush knows more about 9/11," he said, noting that the White House has been "very secretive" and has refused to release documents, just as FDR did after Dec. 7, 1941.

*Used in the cultural and political sense, and has nothing to do with Europeans or any racial factor. In most ways, Taiwan is probably more "western" than France is.