This is important, and I'm going to bcc several of my own friends in the hope they may consider showing up. (A hint from my days as a pro-Vietnam student activist -- if half-a-dozen 'good guys" show up [in a counter-demonstration] with posters painted with 1" brushes (rather than magic markers, which was a common mode in 1967) saying "WIN THE WAR", "GOD BLESS THE PRESIDENT", "VICTORY OVER TYRANNY IN IRAQ" and the like, and they spread out in the crowd, they can have the effect of 50. The press will seek you out (a protest rally is a "dog bites man" story -- whereas pro-Iraq protesters in the midst of an anti-war protest is a "man bites dog" story). Of course, we have to factor in the liberal biases of the journalists themselves . . . .

I would focus on several themes:

- The very first "purpose" set forth in Art. I (1) of the UN Charter is to take "effective collective action" for the "REMOVAL" of "threats to the peace." The UN is not a traditional mutual security treaty, in which States agree to come to the aid of others if they are attacked. It is a PREEMPTION commitment to try to PREVENT aggression and war by identifying "threats to the peace" and taking "collective action" to prevent or remove them. That Saddam's regime was a "threat to the peace" was affirmed by more than a dozen Security Council resolutions over a dozen years acting pursuant to Chapter VII of the Charter-- the part that gives the Security Council the power to deal with "threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression." The United States, Great Britain, and more than two dozen other UN members carried out that pledge, but they had to do it outside the UN framework because France and Russia (who were making big bucks by illegal transactions under the Food-for-Oil program and had been promised billions if they could get the UN sanctions lifted) blocked action.

- The American commitment to help remove Saddam and promote human freedom and democracy in Iraq was declared to be U.S. policy by a unanimous Senate and an almost unanimous House in 1998 by LAW (the Iraq Liberation Act), more than 2 years before George Bush or Dick Cheney became seriously engaged in the issue.

- Saddam's ruthlessness (in murdering anyone suspected of disloyalty) made it very difficult for our intelligence services to get reliable information on his WMD programs. (This was made worse by the attacks on the CIA and FBI following Vietnam, which led to tremendous cutbacks in HUMINT (spies) during the Carter Administration, and by the refusal of many in Congress to support adequate funding for the Intelligence Community after the end of the Cold War. But there is ZERO doubt that Saddam previously had active WMD programs involving unlawful chemical warfare agents (he USED poison gas against Iran repeatedly and also against his own Kurds, slaughtering tens of thousands at minimum by a horribly painful death), biological, and nuclear programs. It was the uniform judgment of the world's intelligence services that he was continuing to secretly develop chemical and biological weapons and there was evidence he was pursuing nuclear technology as well.

- The Security Council had repeatedly declared Saddam to be in "material breach" of the disarmament obligations he had accepted in 1991 and clearly believed he was continuing to develop WMDs. EVERY senior official in the Clinton Administration dealing with these issues, from the President and Vice President to the National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, and DCI, said publicly that Saddam had WMDs. Even after the invasion President Clinton said that he still believed Iraq had WMDs.

- When American troops were sent to war (and since there is no draft, every single casualty was a volunteer), public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the commitment -- some polls registering more than 80% approval. Congress by overwhelming votes formally authorized Operation Iraqi Freedom. The partisan allegation that President Bush "lied" and tricked the country into going to war to help his oil buddies is a total LIE -- just like the charge that he STOLE the 2000 election. (Every serious investigation into the Florida ballots after the election, including those sponsored by CNN, the New York Times, USA Today, and other groups concluded that Bush would have won even if they had only counted the votes that Gore wanted recounted.)

- Saddam was one of the modern world's worst tyrants (albeit not as bad at Kim Jong Il of North Korea). To compel individuals suspected of disloyalty to confess, their mothers, wives, and daughters would be brought to the prisons and gang-raped in front of the prisoners. Torture was widespread, and this has been thoroughly documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN, and other groups that could not be called "pro-Bush." Because Saddam would not permit the food and medicine provided under the Oil for Food program to be distributed, the UN said that the mortality rate of children under 5 in Iraq more than doubled during the 1990s. Amnesty International estimated that this involved the deaths of more than HALF A MILLION children under 5. UN human rights reports say there have been few parallels to the human rights horror of Iraq under Saddam since WW II (Hitler). During his period in office, Saddam was responsible for well over 1 million human deaths (counting the victims of his wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait and the slaughter of his own people over the decades).

- The people we are now fighting in Iraq are a mixture of Saddam's thugs and radical Islamists who want in principle to kill Americans. They intentionally murder women and children, decapitate innocent kidnap victims by sawing their heads off with small knives, and violate the most basic principles of international humanitarian law.

- The issue is not whether we should have intervened in Iraq. In retrospect, honest people can disagree about that. But we cannot undo that decision, which we made as a nation with overwhelming accord. The issue now is should we "cut and run" because the war has taken the lives of a couple of thousand American troops and perhaps 25,000 Iraqis. If we were to withdraw now, the slaughter that would take place in Iraq would in a matter of weeks dwarf what has taken place in the past two years. Syria and Iran would quickly conclude that America lacks the WILL to help keep peace in the world, and al Qaeda would have to deal with a flood of volunteers who wanted to join the winning side and finish off the Americas. How many of our allies would stand with us in Afghanistan once we had betrayed our promise and abandoned our commitment to the people of Iraq?

And do we REALLY think that by breaking more commitments and showing the world that we are weak and lack the will to defend ourselves and our commitments, al Qaeda with decide to leave us alone? The biggest differences is they will have far more volunteers and the battlefield will not be in the Middle East but here in America.

- REMEMBER INDOCHINA. Those over 50 will recall the protesters who flooded into our streets and demanded that we cut aid and withdraw our troops from South Vietnam in the mid-1970s. And they prevailed, persuading Congress to make it unlawful for the President to spend money protecting those people who John F. Kennedy had pledged we would "pay any price, bear any burden" to help. We were told by the Jane Fondas of the "peace" movement that we had to "stop the killing" and end "human rights" violations. Soon after Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (and since the war not only have numerous American scholars recognized that we had the war essentially won by 1972, but North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders have made the same observation), North Vietnam sent virtually its entire Army to conquer its neighbors in flagrant violation of the UN Charter. We did nothing. In the next 3 years, an estimated THREE MILLION human beings in Indochina were killed by the Communists. In tiny Cambodia alone, the Yale Cambodia Genocide Project estimates that 1.7 million people -- more than 20 percent of the entire population -- were killed. Small children were often simply picked up by their legs and smashed against trees to save bullets. And in terms of human rights, Vietnam today is ranked among the most repressive countries in the entire world -- FAR worse than the governments we tried to protect in the 1960s and early '70s.

We need to challenge the anti-war movement or it will continue to grow. War is by its nature a horrible thing. But as John Stuart Mill reminded us:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."