A reader responds to the article Sit Down, Stand Up:

Your first analogy assumes that the United States should be judged no differently than North Korea. But North Korea is not the United States. Kim Jung Il is regarded as an unstable lunatic (even by the French, who tend to overlook the worst in dictators). He’s directly responsible for the starvation of millions. But, while his communist regime can’t afford to feed its people, it somehow finds the funds to direct more than 25% of the economy to the military. (The United States, by comparison,
directs less than 4% of its economy to the military, making it more frugal than world powers like Greece and Turkey.)

And the war against world terrorism bears no resemblance to the conflict between India and Pakistan, a half-century old dispute over borders that were drawn arbitrarily by a receding empire. Despite how heated the rhetoric sometimes gets between India and Pakistan, the goal of each nation is to gain uncontested control of Kashmir, not to wipe the other from the map.

Contrast that last point with al Qaeda, its affiliates and client states: their stated goal is to kill every last American. They cannot be placated by compromise, because they don’t want anything from us other than our nonexistence. If they are ever successful at eliminating America, their ideology mandates that they then move on to killing the rest of the infidels: in other words, anyone who isn’t a Muslim fundamentalist. Western civilization would lie in ruin if al Qaeda had its way, and it is just a few dozen well-placed nuclear bombs away from making it happen.

Which brings us to Saddam Hussein. When all is said and done, there will be absolutely no question that Iraq had a weapons program and a plan to conceal it. Perhaps the program was temporarily dismantled during the “rush to war” that lasted over a year. Perhaps the plan was to act like Eddie Haskell while U.N. inspectors scurried about. But I think you must have an awfully large quantity of misplaced trust to believe that Saddam Hussein is a recent convert to the peace movement.

Without the war, Saddam Hussein would now be playing a waiting game that—eventually—would lead to his unimpeded freedom. Further U.N. inspections would be ineffective without real Iraqi cooperation: after a while, the world would grow bored and shift its attention elsewhere. The inspections would become so meaningless that, if they were to stop abruptly without conclusion, nobody would give a damn. How do I know this would happen? Because it already happened once.

An unfettered Saddam Hussein might decide to exact revenge on his old foe, the United States. Of course, having his fingerprints on an attack would be detrimental to his health, so he’d enlist the help of a courier: al Qaeda, for example. He doesn’t have to like the courier. The courier doesn’t have to like him. But if al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein both share a strong desire to detonate large bombs in our cities, then I say we shouldn’t stake our lives on the gamble that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein wouldn’t do business with each another.

That’s why I’m glad President Bush took care of the problem now, even if the danger was years away. What if the threat didn’t materialize until 2006? I sure as hell wouldn’t want Howard Dean in the Oval Office dealing with it!

This brings me to your next analogy. You have no right to stab the “shady looking Puerto Rican dude” without provocation. You don’t know who he is, and you have no evidence that he means you any harm. We agree on that. But, what if he’s a known mass murderer? What if he had attacked you in the past? What if you hear him mumbling about his plans to kill you? What if all those things are true? That is a much more accurate analogy for the situation we face today.

Finally, you conclude your e-mail by saying:

If I do not wait until the physical threat has manifested itself, then I am the aggressor, not him, and I lose the moral high ground, and the status of victim. I am the criminal.

You advocate waiting to be hit because you see no distinction between an unknown person on a dimly-lit street and people who (1) are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and (2) would love to get their hands on weapons capable of killing millions more.

Don’t forget: it will soon be possible—if it isn’t already—for the United States to be reduced to ragged bands of nomadic tribes in a single day. As more and more countries become nuclear powers, the ability to ensure the safety of the worldwide stockpile becomes exponentially more difficult. Components are small and mobile, and we already know that our enemies move stealthily among us.

So, should we, as a nation, wait to be hit? We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Evan