Yourish brings this reality check to our attention, reassuring us that half a million lunkheads are still, well, half a million lunkheads.

The whole antiwar thing, in the US at least, to me reeks of ad hominem. Certainly when Clinton struck Iraq with cruise missles ("killing 5 civilians") we did not even get a whiff of uproar. Yes, this is different. This is invasion, not just bombing. Certainly at that time we had not been attacked on US soil. Surely by that point nightclubs full of people had not been flattened in the middle of the night. Most definitely in that era people had not been stuffing their shoes with explosives.

I respect the anti-war bunch, I really do. My problem is that for at least the past ten years and perhaps for the past sixty we have been dancing on needles trying to protect our interests while making sure we didn't so much as offend anyone. We were more concerned about bruising someone else's ego than we were about making sure wackos couldn't attack our very way of life. This. Did. Not. Work.

You're against war. Fine. Are you against burkhas? Are you against having a baby's spine broken because they don't have a penis? Are you against the legal rape of a woman just because her brother doesn't like the way she looked at a man? Are you against children twisted and blackened by gas, or men starving behind barbed wire? If you're against these things why are you trying to stop us?

You say we made Saddam. Fine. I'll accept that. You say we're chasing the wrong target. Fine, I'll even accept that. But consider that I'd accuse you of taking the short view just because you don't like the guy in charge. This is not a climax. This is not the final battle. This isn't the whole point.

We tried moral relativism, saying that just because we think what you're doing is wrong doesn't mean it's wrong. We ended up with smoking holes in our cities and three or four sets of maniacs trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons to make sure the next time they took out cities and not just buildings.

Me, I think Saddam is the epitome of that old joke about lawyers at the bottom of the sea.

A start^*.