-Caveat Lector-
Anti-War Protestors Are Warmongers for Our Enemies
By Alex Epstein
CNSNews.com Commentary
February 11, 2003
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=%5CCommentary%
5Carchive%5C200302%5CCOM20030211d.html
President's Day weekend is a time when Americans should celebrate the
heroism of Washington and Lincoln, the men who led our country through
its two most important wars.
But hundreds of thousands of Americans will instead devote February 15
and 16 to spitting on the accomplishments of these great men -- by rallying
for policies that would enable our enemies to obliterate the freedom that
Washington and Lincoln fought to secure. They are the members of the
self-proclaimed "anti-war" movement.
Of course, the throngs who will participate in the upcoming "anti- war"
protests in New York, San Francisco, and many other cities to voice their
opposition to an invasion of Iraq -- and to any other U.S. military action in
the War on Terrorism -- claim a benevolent purpose. "You can bomb the
world to pieces," they chant, "but you can't bomb it into
peace."
But if dropping bombs won't work, what should the United States do to
obtain a peaceful relationship with the numerous hostile regimes, including
Iraq, that seek to harm us with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction?
The "peace advocates" offer no answer. The most one can coax out of
them are vague platitudes (we should "make common cause with the
people of the world," says the prominent "anti-war" group Not In Our
Name) and agonized soul- searching ("Why do they hate us?").
The absence of a peacenik peace plan is no accident. Pacifism is
inherently a negative doctrine--it merely says that military action is always
bad. As one San Francisco protestor put the point: "I don't think it's right
for our government to kill people." In practice, this leaves the government
only two means of dealing with our enemies: to ignore their acts of
aggression, or to appease them by capitulating to the aggressors' demands.
We do not need to predict or deduce the consequences of pacifism with
regard to terrorism and the nations that sponsor it, because we
experienced those consequences on September 11. Pacifism practically
dictated the American response to terrorism for more than 23 years, from
our government's response to the first major act of Islamic terrorism
against this country: when Iranian mobs held 52 Americans hostage for 444
days at the American embassy in Tehran.
In response to that and later terrorist atrocities, American Presidents
sought to avoid military action at all costs--by treating terrorists as isolated
criminals and thereby ignoring the role of the governments that support
them, or by offering diplomatic handouts to terrorist states in hopes that
they would want to be our friends. With each pacifist response it became
clearer that the most powerful nation on Earth was a paper tiger -- and
our enemies made the most of it.
After years of American politicians acting like peaceniks, Islamic terrorism
had proliferated from a few gangs of thugs to a worldwide scourge --
making possible the attacks of September 11.
It is an obvious evasion of history and logic for the advocates of pacifism to
label themselves "anti-war," since the policies they advocate necessarily
invite escalating acts of war against anyone who practices them. Military
inaction sends the message to an aggressor--and to other, potential
aggressors -- that it will benefit by attacking the United States.
To whatever extent "anti-war" protesters influence policy, they are not
helping to prevent war; they are acting to make war more frequent and
deadly, by making our enemies more aggressive, more plentiful, and more
powerful.
The only way to deal with militant enemies is to show them unequivocally
that aggression against the United States will lead to their destruction.
The only means of imparting this lesson is overwhelming military force --
enough to defeat and incapacitate the enemy. Had we annihilated the
Iranian regime 23 years ago, we could have thwarted Islamic terrorism at
the beginning, with far less cost than will be required to defeat terrorism
today.
And if we fail to use our military against state sponsors of terrorism today,
imagine the challenge we will face five years from now when Iraq and Iran
possess nuclear weapons and are ready to disseminate them to their
terrorist minions. Yet such a world is the goal of the "anti-war" movement.
The suicidal stance of peaceniks is no innocent error or mere overflow of
youthful idealism. It is the product of a fundamentally immoral
commitment: the commitment to ignore reality -- from the historical
evidence of the consequences of pacifism to the very existence of the
violent threats that confront us today -- in favor of the wish that laying
down our arms will achieve peace somehow.
Those of us who are committed to facing the facts should condemn these
peaceniks for what they really are: warmongers for our enemies.
( Alex Epstein is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institue in Irvine, Calif. The
Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged
and The Fountainhead.)
Copyright 2003, Ayn Rand Institute
Forwarded for your information. The text and intent of the article
have to stand on their own merits.
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