What's In A Name -

What's In A Name - For the last several months, I've been trying to come up with a snide, pithy yet apt moniker for the "Anti-War" movement.

I've been through "Pro-Dictator", "Pro-Genocide" and "Pro-Oppression", but none of them exactly rolls off the tongue. And putting "anti-war" in sneer quotes certainly works on my end, but I'm not sure it gets the whole idea across.

But it occurs to me that the appellation that best sums up the full breadth of the "movement", from the flea-bitten college "students" to the plush-bottom, correctly-grayed, properly-organic Mac-Groveland matrons in their Volvo 740s with their pre-printed signs and dogma to match, is the "Anti-Bush" movement.

Quid Pro Quo - It's not only illogical for the anti-Bush movement to distinguish between wars on Hussein - it misses a key point. Twelve years of failed, misguided "containment" are integrally related to the rise of Bin Laden and Al Quaeda:

We know that if nothing else Saddam and al Qaeda share the common goal of punishing the U.S. and driving us from the Mideast. In his famous 1998 fatwa endorsing the murder of Americans, "civilian and military alike," Osama bin Laden mentioned two main complaints: First, that U.S. troops were deployed on the Islamic holy land of Arabia, and second that U.S. planes continued to bomb Iraq while enforcing the U.N.'s no-fly zones.

Osama's jihad--and therefore September 11 itself--is in other words one direct consequence of the past 12 years of U.S. "containment" of Saddam. Without his continuing threat, American troops would not need to be stationed in Saudi Arabia and U.S. fighters would not still patrol the skies over Iraq. While fretting about the costs of going to Baghdad, those who favor a policy of sanctions and diplomacy have never been honest about the real costs of containment.

Such honesty would rattle the complacency of many on the Anti-Bush left.

Posted by Mitch at March 18, 2003 08:52 AM