Andrew Sullivan is in top form today. Have a look.

Why don't I hear even-handed, reasoned positions like this coming from the anti-war crowd?

Neither option is without risks. The calm today is deceptive. The risk tomorrow is greater than most of us can imagine. If we do nothing - or worse, we do nothing that looks like something, i.e. fruitless U.N. inspections ad infinitum - then the worst could happen. If we do something, the worst could also happen - the use of such weapons in Iraq, a growing conflict in the Middle East. But by going in, we also stand a chance of seizing our own destiny and changing the equation in the Middle East toward values we actually believe in: the rule of law, the absence of wanton cruelty, the dignity of women, the right to self-determination for Arabs and Jews. We also have a chance to end an evil in its own right: the barbarous regime in Baghdad. We choose Iraq not just because it is uniquely dangerous but because the world has already decided that its weapons must be destroyed. We go in to defend ourselves and our freedoms but also the integrity of the countless U.N. resolutions that mandate Saddam's disarmament.

Protestors need to seriously and specifically rebut this position if they want to be taken seriously.

Sullivan also quotes the British Daily Telegraph:


What the German Chancellor and the French President cannot plausibly argue is that their approach works as a means of keeping the peace, or forcing the hand of dictators such as Saddam. It was not the UN's deliberations, German pacifism or French diplomacy which forced the Iraqi dictator to re-admit the UN weapons inspectors: it was the threat of US military action. If the European approach to international relations had been observed in the present campaign to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Saddam would have done precisely nothing.

This is a point I've been making repeatedly. The anti-war crowd seems incapable of making the connection between the threat of force and the resumption of the inspections. "Let the inspections work!" they cry, seeming to forget that the only reason they're there is because of American military threat.