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Posted on 10/05/2001 11:56:59 AM PDT by dirtboy

According to The New York Times estimate, "several thousand" demonstrators for peace showed up in Washington, D.C., over the weekend to protest a U.S. military response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on America. The number was impressive for its insignificance.

In this nation of 280 million, the meager turnout was reassuring as a stark contrast to the overwhelming support declared by Americans for President Bush's call to arms in the war against international terrorism. Not all the demonstrators in Washington were pacifists. The usual brigade of anti-capitalists, racism-baiters and America-lasters were there as well, doing what they do for sport. But let's zero in on the pacifists.

As a theme, pacifism is a natural for leftists and liberals. It promises a superficially desirable outcome; never mind that's its vision is unachievable. In this tolerant society we indulge conscientious objectors and exempt them from combat even when our nation, at war, is forced to conscript others to military service. But as theologian Michael Novak explains: "We sharply distinguish between pacifism as a personal commitment, implicating only a person who is not a public figure responsible for the lives of others, and pacifism as a public policy, compromising many who are not pacifists and endangering the very possibility of pacifism itself. George Orwell noted that: "To abjure violence is a luxury which a delicate few enjoy only because others stand ready to do violence in their behalf." So, U.S. Marines in World War II died on Iwo Jima so that pacifists could sing Kumbaya in safety.

Almost 2,500 years ago, Plato predicted that "only the dead have seen the end of war." Sadly, there's no rational cause to alter that pronouncement. Terrible as it is, war is reality. But reason and reality have never deterred pacifists. Winston Churchill once observed that "the only thing worse than war is losing one." Chinese philosopher-general Sun Tzu, two millennia earlier, instructed us that the object of war is peace -- on the victor's terms. Peace is not an outcome or an objective. It's just a state or condition, and a temporary one at that. A quarter-century ago, historian Will Durant calculated that the world had known the absence of war in only 268 of the last 3,421 years. That ratio has declined even further since. Moreover, peace, in and of itself, is an insufficient condition. A goldfish in a bowl knows peace. Defeated and enslaved peoples may know peace. Americans, going back to our birth as a nation in the caldron of the Revolutionary War, desire peace but require freedom and justice. We do not worship peace at any price.

Henry Kissinger put it profoundly and succinctly: "If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, if the yearning for peace is not allied with a sense of justice, it can become an abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless." On Sept. 11, we saw the brand of ruthlessness that our attackers are capable of. Only witless pacifists would turn the other cheek and rely on the good faith and mercy of such demons.

Unlike the repressive homelands of the terrorists that attack us, and the medieval, theocratic police state envisioned by the likes of Osama bin Laden, we are a pluralistic society. We protect the right of pacifists and other anti-war militants to assemble and advance their cause. But I don't respect such people and I don't shrink from exposing their ideas as destructive and suicidal. Pacifists are my enemy because wittingly or not, they serve the purposes of my enemy and jeopardize my freedom. I believe in deterrence and peace through strength. I believe in punishing those who attack us as retributive justice and as a lesson to others. And I take to heart the advice of the Roman general Vegetius, that he who desires peace should prepare for war.

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